"I know what this looks like. You are in effect not in ecology class in high school right now. You are at the YouMoz blog. This might look like something that you would typically find in high school in ecology but this is actually inbound marketing related; so just bear with me and it will all make sense in a second.

My name is Luke Summerfield and I'm the Director of Inbound Marketing at Savvy Panda . We're a Hubspot, inbound marketing agency here in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I also teach a lot of classes on Master Inbound, which is an online inbound marketing course. I got this idea a number of months back and it's something that I really think helps visualize the way you can use content in your marketing strategy and how that flow works. You being fresh back from MozCon and all energized by awesome events. If you've ever thought about going, make sure you plan on going. Everyone there did a great job, speaking of great people, awesome.

One of things that I think that was not talked enough about was this idea of, as we're making this shift from an SEO industry to inbound marketing, there's a lot more involved of all things that you have to do in inbound marketing. One of them, one of the keys things is content. I don't think there's enough talk about how to create successful content strategy. How do you get the user in with your content and flow them through your system and so today, that's exactly what we're going to talk about or at least touch on. This is all conceptual, these aren't going to be tactics. If you're looking for tactics I would love to help you out, comment down there with what you're looking for and I will give you my input.

What we're going to talk about today is flow. It all starts with one thing. If we think about when you plant a tree, okay, I'm not talking about going to a greenhouse and buying pre-done tree. If you plant it from scratch, what do you start with? You start with a seed. Everything that you do when you build your forest starts with planting those seeds. I want you to think of those seeds in your marketing sense as your personas. Everything you do in your contents strategy and your marketing strategy in general should all start with the personas. Everything should be stemmed off of that. You're going to look at things like your objections, you're going to look at things as kind of a place of pain, you know, who they are in their business cycle and all these different things that make up a persona which is a totally different conversation. Everything that you create is going to come off of that persona just like everything when you start a forest all starts by planting that one seed.

As the persona grows, as that seed grows, it's starts by growing a trunk, a trunk of a tree, and I want you to think of your trunk as is your premium content. So this would be something like an e-book, it could be a webinar, white paper, for the sake of argument I'm going to write e-book down here, that's going to be your main meat and potatoes, your bread and butter, the stuff that you love to show and share and teach about. It relates back to that persona, to the common objections found to have. This person wants to read this e-book and learn how to solve some of that stuff. Now, okay, great, we've created our e-book. Is it just going to magically start having people download it? Well, yeah, there might be some people that are going to download but we as inbound marketers can do more.

The way we support our e-book downloads is by creating supportive contents in the form of blogs. What I like to do is for every e-book that we create or every piece of premium content that we create, we have these supporting things. Think, just like a tree has supporting branches so this will be a blog, right, of similar topics, this will be a blog, I don't know how to spell, a blog, all these blogs that are helping support and drive back down to the original e-book.

Now, how do we get those blogs out there? There's a whole bunch of things and that's what I want you to think of as these leaves. Right? It could be an RSS feed, it could be social, could be long tailed key words. Right? So when someone searching online and they happen to find that blog. It could be telling a friend. Outside of digital world, believe it or not there is a world outside of the digital world that people could say, "Hey, go check out this blog I read on the Moz blog, it was great". Right? So this is, I guess, just referrals. All these things help drive people back to the blog. The blog helps drive people back to this e-book. Now when someone converts on this e-book here's what happens. They get put into your inbound marketing files. A customer drives down here, you end of converting on an e-book, now they're in your inbound marketing funnel.

This process is where the lead nurturing comes in. Where you're going to take them from the top level, to the middle to the bottom and nurture them all the way along the way with great content with more blogs with more e-books and lead nurture is a whole separate conversation we're not going to talk about today but that's what's going on right here, just like the roots of a tree are driving down into the earth. Eventually, you hit this water basin in the earth. Right? In this water basin, I want you to think about it as, this is your customer base.

When they get to this water basin that's when they become a customer and just like your customers help feed your business with money, with support, with this and that, water feeds the tree. We have this customer, your customers have their customer life cycle, you have this big lake here of customers. Now here's where the interesting part goes. We know as inbound marketers that you cannot stop once someone just simply becomes a customer. If you do that, your business is going to fail in the future. Our goal is to create advocates. So, what happens in ecology, okay, and I'm not an ecology person so this is just what I remember reading about in my books in high school, is as this water comes out into the lake it actually is brought up back into the atmosphere. Right back into the clouds.

This process that happens is exactly what happens when you turn customers into advocates. So, I want you to think of this as advocates. These are the people that are going to go above and beyond what a customer does because you're doing things like building a community, you're doing great cultural values and core beliefs. They share what you believe in and they want to go the extra mile so they rise above and really help make it rain. You know? Literally make it rain. Make it rain.

Now, here's where the magic happens and this is where it all gets tied back together. So you have all these advocates coming up there that are really championing behind your business. Now, the cool part is in ecology, in the real world, that rain that comes up, then comes down and gets absorbed back by the tree. Right? I mean it hits the ground and then goes back up, so I understand that but stay with me. It goes down and it feeds the tree and helps things grow and helps things get bigger. This is exactly where advocates come into play. Advocates come up here and then they're going to rain down on top of everything that you're doing.

They're going to grow your RSS feeds, they're going to help promote your content over the social networks, they're going to help word of mouth and referring people to your blog. So all of these leaves get built up in grow as advocates come down. From there, they send more people to your blog, you get more people reading your e-books, you get more customers in the funnel, more customers and the whole cycle repeats itself just like the circle of life. Right? In ecology terms.

Okay, so that's my presentation on that. It's still a concept I'm working around in my head. If you have ideas or something you want to contribute or things you've done that are similar to this, go down in the comments section and leave a comment or if you're looking for tactical ways to put this all together, go down there and leave a comment. Thank you and I'll talk to you soon at another white board at YouMoz."