Does your content marketing strategy inspire, educate, entertain and ultimately convince your customers to buy? Here's a breakdown...

I stumbled on a cool infographic yesterday from smartinsights.com, which highlights the positioning of a good content marketing strategy, and where each piece of the content marketing puzzle fits, relative to the marketing and sales process.

You don't need me to tell you how effective content marketing is, both as a great way to build trust and thought leadership for a brand and also as a great way to reduce costs and effectively improve the bottom line.

The idea of content being the driving force behind buying decisions isn't new, of course, but this infographic does a nice job of identifying where each type of content fits into the buyer's psyche. The inbound marketers mission, if they choose to accept it, is to satisfy all four quadrants of the cycle, and inspire, educate, entertain and ultimately convince their customer to purchase through great content.

Here is how. (SEE IMAGE ABOVE)