Yes! Of course, you can become so good at creating good content but then fail to generate leads when it comes to content marketing. In that case, how do you convert your target audience into potential subscribers, buyers, or even consumers? We can all agree that digital marketing has revolutionized the traditional concept of advertisement.
But, the content marketing strategy dates back to the Age of Enlightenment. People in business are used to spreading commercial information and promoting their brand to gain more customers. In this era of social media and video-sharing platforms, people still like to read. For instance, a company can generate great leads just by one blog a day.
However, the content has transcended textual boundaries in the 21st century. That’s why the visual component is integral for effective content marketing. In reality, you can’t just engage people merely with readable material now. There is more to that that needs your input and understanding.
In order to increase your blog readers’ capacity, consumer engagement, and buyers’ interest, you’ll need to capitalize on a good lead generation strategic plan through content marketing. Follow our leads to the end of this article and learn a few tips to start in a more simple and easy way.
What Is Content Marketing?
Before you even dive into the affairs of how you can generate leads through content marketing, it’s important that you know that, by itself, content creation is one of the uttermost skeletons. Especially when it comes to the completeness of its online web presence.
And if you’ve known jmexclusives for any length of time, you’ll know that content creation is one of our best characteristics. And your guess is as good as mine — Google alone (the most preferred search engine), answers over four billion search queries every day.
Content Marketing is a form of marketing technique used to consistently create and distribute valuable and relevant web content. More so, in order to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action. You can read and learn more about that in this article.
Why Is Content Marketing Important?
First of all, content marketing can be a useful tool for general brand recognition. More so, it helps you increase your business presence awareness and brand reputation.
But, consistency is the key item to the list of a successful content advertisement campaign. Bearing in mind, there are some companies out there who fail to direct content marketing to their commercial advantage. Simply, because they lack proper understanding.
Related Topic: How Is Content Marketing Done? A Free Ultimate Guide
Such companies do make a big mistake of hiring unqualified, unprofessional, or inexperienced writers to produce their content. In the end, these writers’ results are analytically not impressive at all. Since whatever they produce does not hit well in the minds of the target consumers.
Still, a few companies will definitely ignore email marketing as one of their strategy to win more leads (potential buyers, customers, and clients). Not knowing that this is a significant part of the content advertisement. Among many others, content marketing offers the following benefits:
1. Presence Awareness
On top of the list are reputation and presence awareness. Whereby, having a great website, for example, is one of the main goals when it comes to searchability. And awareness is a result of the content you create and share online. By searchability, I mean that you’re found easily online by your key prospects.
May it be people who know you by your brand or business or product name or just those looking for information. A good example of increasing this presence is when you customize your social media profiles. May it be Facebook Page, Twitter Profile, Pinterest Business, LinkedIn Page, Instagram Profile, etc.
You may not get known right away, but if a target lead is able to see more from you, possibilities are that they will add you as their reference. Meaning, that a few days down the line, they can engage with you further after making the right decisions.
2. Products Visibility
Your product remains visible not only to your audience but also to potential customers. Your present customers renew their bond with your company when you engage them. They grow to trust you more, and you strengthen this commercial relationship.
3. Better Indexing
Having more content ensures better indexing by Google. It helps search engines place you higher in search engine ranking. Quality with quantity makes your website trustworthy, relevant, and authoritative. You can get a higher domain authority just via content.
4. It’s Inexpensive
Meaning that it only requires your time, effort, and dedication. All you need to do is confirm that your website gets regular content. You can use a blog post ideas generator to learn how to gain more traffic on your website economically.
5. Consumer Trust
Your content – if appropriately written – will receive people’s approval. They will share it on social media. It will give knowledge of your brand to more people. And it opens a channel of communication that makes your brand authority for people. This trust and strong customer-supplier bond is an effective method of lead generation. Your content and CTAs placed within it encourage people to buy more from you.
What Does It Mean To Generate Leads?
When you generate leads, it means you’re attracting and converting strangers and potential prospects into someone who indicates interest in your company, business, brand, product, or services.
In general, lead generation falls within the second stage of the inbound marketing methodology. It occurs after you’ve attracted an audience. And then, are ready to convert those visitors into leads for your sales team. Namely, sales-qualified leads. Some examples of lead generators are job applications, blog posts, coupons, live events, and online content.
A productive lead generation strategy can increase your sales profit, increase your web visitors, and traffic, and even create a long-term customer relationship. During lead generation, leads are part of the broader lifecycle that consumers follow when they transition from visitor to customer. So, what is a lead? Let’s define that below.
What Is A Lead?
A lead is any person who indicates interest in a company’s product or service in some way, shape, or form. Leads typically hear from a business or organization after opening communication.
For example, by submitting personal information for an offer, trial, subscription, etc. Instead of getting a random cold call from someone who purchased their contact information. From a business perspective, the information the auto company collects about you from your survey responses helps them personalize the opening communication.
In order to address your existing problems — and not waste time calling leads who aren’t at all interested in auto services. Not all leads are created equal (nor are they qualified the same). There are different types of leads based on how they are qualified and what lifecycle stage they’re in.
How To Generate Leads Through Content Marketing
Now that you have an idea of why content marketing is important and what leads are, below we’ll discuss some good suggestions to generate a leads database through content marketing.
Then thereafter, whichever plan you’ll start with, you will start seeing a difference in no time. And this will greatly help your business or brand or products to be more successful than before. Some tips for benefiting from content marketing are apparent. You should use images in your posts because they appear more attractive to readers.
Be consistent regarding both the quantity and the quality of the content you’re displaying. Don’t worry if you’re unsure what kind of content is more engaging for your audience. You can experience your luck with visual, textual, or any other type of content marketing. Below are a few tips for you to improve your marketing strategy and generate leads:
1. Create Content
As I mentioned earlier, content creation is one of the survival tools when it comes to content marketing. When you enter a question or query into its search bar— those links that appear in your search results are content. This means that someone wrote the content and the search engines were able to output the requested query in their results bar.
Well-optimized content is easily found on the topmost results in the search engines based on the Keywords Search by the browser user. More often, these engines are always hungry for the freshly posted content. So, you being part of their content provider can be a great way to increase your lead conversion.
2. Lead Magnets
You need people’s email addresses to market to them. People would like something in exchange for this information. As such, try and offer them some incentive. This incentive is what we call a lead magnet. Tutorials, checklists, and guides are a few examples. We’ll be talking about specific lead magnets later on. There are dozens of lead magnets you can offer, even quotes, audiobooks, and comic strips.
3. Social Proof
People are prone to trust an “advertisement,” accompanied by some social proof. We’ve observed how folks are reluctant to visit an empty restaurant. Or how they avoid seeing a doctor who doesn’t receive many patients. Similarly, people are more accepting to buy products that have been reviewed by customers. So, it would help if you gathered reviews and testimonials in your content. Also, it’s essential to avoid bad reviews.
4. Channel Specification
Doubtlessly, social media is an effective platform for content marketing. But, an advertisement campaign works best when placed before the right audience. You have to write content keeping your audience’s behavior in mind. LinkedIn is best-suited for professional content. On the other hand, Facebook should be the platform for your images and videos. Manage each social media profile according to the channel’s mood.
5. Landing Page
Your brand represents your company, and your landing page attraction is what describes your product. The content on your landing page must be convincing enough for the customer. Its layout needs to match the color scheme and design of your advertisement, do not let visitors leave your page easily. Try showing them pop-ups ads or offering free e-books. Request them to subscribe to your newsletter if they’re interested in receiving more of your content.
6. Visual Component
We’ve already described it as an integral component of content promotion. Just as verbal queries replace textual ones, video is becoming the most popular content on the internet. The Guardian calls it “the future of content marketing.” You must produce videos that are relevant to your brand and worth watching for your audience. It would be best to let customers watch the trailer for free, making them interested in the whole video.
7. Utilize eBooks
Let’s talk about the power of having eBook publishing as part of your lead generation plan. Notably, more than 30% of B2B marketers use eBooks for content marketing. And as a matter of fact, eBooks are easily accessible, conveniently portable, and require less storage space. The content of your e-books needs to be of some value to the reader. Give them enough information and make them crave for more. You can get people to download your e-book in exchange for an email address.
8. Live Events & Webinars
Besides video marketing, nothing beats face-to-face interactions with your consumers. First, you can have such an engagement via live events or web seminars called “webinars.” But there are other ways – contests, quiz shows, surveys, etcetera – to engage people. Live events are suitable for larger organizations because they are expensive. Digital seminars are easy to arrange and don’t cost that much.
9. Case Studies
Basically, your customers can write reviews regarding your product. Likewise, you publish case studies about interactions with customers. Unfortunately, some business owners find case studies dull and boring. Who likes to read about how you solved a problem faced by a consumer? But ground realities are different. Case studies are the third-best marketing strategy after live events and webinars. A case study is like an inspirational story of your product’s success and influence.
10. Content Syndication
When we talk of content syndication, if your content wasn’t successful when you first published it, you can try to republish it. But this time, publish it on a third-party website that has a more considerable following than you do. By so doing, you’ll reach a broader audience, and that larger website will get free content. It looks like a win-win situation. Keep in mind, that you can also drive some traffic to the actual article that was unsuccessful during your first publication. All in all, for novice content marketers, the above lead generation strategy is a cheap way to expand your customer circle.
Takeaway,
As I conclude, a 2016 survey revealed that in B2B Marketing, 88% of marketers used content marketing as one of their avenues to generate leads. However, content marketing is subtle and tactful. And as such, you might need to pay someone to provide more reliable and readable content.
Not forgetting, the same study mentioned above claimed that case studies and blogs were the most popular B2B content marketing tactics. On a clear note, infographics and webinars weren’t as popular back in 2016 as they are now. So, whichever technique you’re applying, make it motivated and inspiring.
Related Topic: B2B Marketing | 3 Key Strategies & 5 Benefits to Marketers
Be sure to create content that matters, and keep making more of that. You’ll get an astounding number of leads with the right strategy. And in order to improve your sociability even further, if you’re in a position, you can promote the weblinks and refer your readers to your target pages.
Finally, it’s important that you embrace SEO tactics as part of your content marketing plan. As well as use more Infographics amidst your content to attract more attention too.
About The Author:
The above guide on how to generate leads was done by Ethan Lark who is a very passionate blogger. Ethan is one of the key guest bloggers at the jmexclusives website who adds charms to its blog articles. Below is what he requested us:
“I love to write on Business, Finance, and Technology related topics. I wish to add some value to your readers and I believe it can be useful for your website’s audience.”
After being absolutely motivated by our blog, he followed it, reads its posts every day, and is now part of its revolutionary content writers. It’s our hope that you’ll enjoy reading his content through this blog site now and in the future.
So, don’t forget to subscribe to get a notification whenever this happens. And above all, you can Contact Us if you too wish to join our guest writers. And to help us grow even more, please feel free to donate in support of our research team.
