2.   Perfect Content Marketing Is Intent-Based

Some businesses and marketers get hung up on the wrong metrics, particularly when it comes to their blog.

The key to perfect content marketing is understanding existing intent and anticipating future intent, and then, creating the content “assets” needed to address that intent 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

In our Freshbooks example, a customer who’s deep in the funnel might have the intent to compare Freshbooks to Quickbooks.

This content asset addresses that intent:

To come up with valuable content assets, anticipate current and future needs.

And you’ll have to run paid traffic to your content to maximize your results or you risk leaving money on the table as Molly explains:

The truth is the most lucrative content assets you’ll create (if you have an existing business) are assets that meet intent at the bottom and middle of the funnel. Optimize for this existing bottom and middle of funnel intent before going to work on generating awareness at the top of the funnel with an expensive and time-consuming blog roll out.

That’s not to diminish the power of a business blog. Over the last 24 months, we’ve been adding content assets (articles and podcasts) at the top of the funnel and we’ve increased website traffic (think awareness) by 1053%.

That said, the quick wins in the content marketing game are in the middle and bottom of the funnel.