It could be a blog, company news, how-to guides for lead generation or posting advice on Twitter. They are producing content for the purposes of promoting their business, but a lot of them are missing out by not building a strategy to guide and structure the content they are producing. Content marketing done correctly should meet two requirements:

• Meet the needs of your target customer(s)
• Have a place in the sales funnel with the objective of moving the user to the next stage

By conducting keyword research and mapping the most relevant terms as well as your associated content against your sales funnel, you can understand its purpose and meet the intent of the user.

A 5-step process

Applying our AIM framework against your sales funnel can be done by following a 5 step process:

1. Understanding the funnel stages: What are the stages of a typical online sales process?
2. Understanding the requirements at each stage: What are users looking for at each stage of the sales funnel and how can you help them?
3. Defining their intent: What is their intent at each stage? In other words, what are they looking to do?
4. Matching their intent: What content can you produce that will match their intent and help them on to the next stage of their journey?
5. Measuring our success: What are the measures of success at each stage and how will we know whether we have been successful?

Having such a framework will help you ensure that you are producing the right type of content and targeting the right keywords for each stage of the decision-making process. Once built, you can devise your monthly and quarterly content calendars around addressing gaps in your content structure or any areas you are under-performing.

And if you need help in building out an intent marketing model for your business, drop us a line and we can help you out.