Introduction
To understand how to generate leads with content marketing, we need to focus on the methods by which leads are generated.
In this article, we look at the five effective and universal ways that can help achieve this aim.
Lead generation is an essential aspect of content marketing. Without it, you’re publishing and promoting content, hoping that people will buy or sign up for your products! While this sometimes happens in real life, that is, some people will buy things on the spot, the truth is the majority won’t.
You need to have a lead capture system in place so you can continue reminding your target audience that your brand exists. Later, you can contact them to share your news and updates and persuade them to move down your content marketing funnel.
Lead generation through content marketing involves creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and engage potential customers, ultimately driving them toward a desired action, such as making a purchase or subscribing to a service.
Understanding Target Audience:
Before creating content, it’s essential to understand the target audience’s demographics, interests, pain points, and preferences. It helps in crafting content that resonates with their needs and preferences. And is one of the most significan ways to generate leads with content marketing.
Creating High-Quality Content:
Content can take various forms, including blog posts, articles, videos, infographics, eBooks, whitepapers, podcasts, and webinars. The key is to create content that is informative, valuable, and engaging and addresses the audience’s questions, concerns, and interests.
High-quality content establishes credibility, builds trust, and positions the brand as an authority in its industry or niche.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO):
Optimizing content for search engines increases visibility and organic traffic. It involves incorporating relevant keywords, optimizing meta tags, improving page load speed, enhancing user experience, and earning backlinks from authoritative sources.
Content Distribution:
Distributing content across various channels maximizes its reach and impact. It includes sharing content on social media platforms, email newsletters, industry forums, online communities, and content syndication networks.
Repurposing content into different formats and distributing it through multiple channels ensures broader exposure and engagement.
Lead Magnets:
Lead magnets are valuable resources offered to prospects in exchange for their contact information, such as email addresses. Common lead magnets include eBooks, whitepapers, case studies, templates, checklists, and free trials.
Promoting lead magnets within content encourages audience engagement and facilitates lead capture, allowing businesses to nurture relationships and move prospects through the sales funnel.
Email Marketing:
Email remains a powerful tool for lead generation and nurturing. Content marketing complements email marketing by providing valuable content that engages subscribers and keeps them interested.
Email newsletters, drip campaigns, personalized content recommendations, and promotional offers are effective strategies for leveraging content to generate leads and drive conversions.
Content Upgrades:
Content upgrades are additional resources or bonuses offered within specific pieces of content to enhance value and encourage action. For example, they are offering a downloadable PDF version of a blog post or access to exclusive content in exchange for an email subscription.
Content upgrades incentivize engagement and lead capture, increasing the effectiveness of content marketing efforts.
Analytics and Optimization:
Monitoring key performance metrics, such as website traffic, engagement metrics, conversion rates, and lead generation metrics, provides valuable insights into the effectiveness of content marketing initiatives.
Analyzing data allows businesses to identify strengths and weaknesses, optimize content strategy, refine targeting, and improve overall lead generation performance over time.
Three Stages of the Content funnel
The Content Marketing Funnel
The content marketing funnel is significant in the overall scheme of your content marketing strategy.
It has three broad levels:
Awareness stage: This is when your target audience first becomes aware of your brand and becomes your lead.
Evaluation stage: This is where your lead evaluates whether your product or service is good for them or not. At this point, your lead turns into a prospect.
Conversion stage: It is when your prospect decides to subscribe to your service or product. Your prospect finally becomes a customer.
When you plan your content marketing strategy, your end goal is to introduce your brand to people who have yet to learn who you are and turn them into customers.
Content marketing is fundamentally a numbers game. You want to get your brand in front of as many people as possible (belonging to your target audience, of course). This is because only a tiny percentage of your leads will turn into prospects, and an even smaller number of prospects will turn into customers.
Top 5 Ways To Generate Leads
The 5 top techniques that will help you generate leads with content marketing.
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Offer lead magnets
Lead magnets are one of the best ways to get people to sign up for your mailing list. You’ll often hear this mentioned in the online marketing community, “The money is in the list.” So, if you want people to subscribe to your list, you’re going to learn how to use lead magnets. The lead magnet is an essential method to help generate leads with content marketing.
Now, technically, lead magnets are ‘ethical bribes.’ It is because you’re essentially ‘bribing’ people to give up their contact details, such as their email addresses or phone numbers, in exchange for your lead magnet.
Of course, you can put up a sign on your website asking people to enter their name and email address or any other information you want. However, people will ask, “Why should I give you my details?” or “What’s in it for me?“
When you offer people a ‘bribe’ they can’t resist, something so valuable and helpful to them, they’ll be much more willing to give up their contact information. People are more easily convinced to follow your call to action if you give them what they want!
There are many kinds of lead magnets you can use. The most common ones you’d see on the Internet are downloadable PDF eBooks, reports, white papers, checklists, etc. Some brands also offer email courses or video courses in exchange for people’s email addresses!
To find out what the best lead magnet is for your brand, you should do some split testing. The critical thing to note is that the best lead magnets answer people’s pain points. Ideally, it should be something other than something they can easily Google the answer to.
Go all out on your lead magnets. Make them valuable and rewarding so that your audience feels they have no choice but to give up their contact details!
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Guest blogging
Guest blogging is a popular way of getting new people to learn more about your brand and your business. You are publishing your content on someone else’s website. You get instant exposure to highly targeted traffic, and you’re able to immediately expand your network (basically widening your content marketing funnel!).
Now, there’s a ton of work that happens behind the scenes before this brings dividends. For instance, not all sites may accept guest posts. It would help if you looked for sites that are highly relevant to your industry. Then, ask if they will allow you to attach your content to their site,
You will need to have a good track record and some authority in your niche. It means you need to know what you’re writing about. You’re not going to get accepted as a guest blogger if no one knows who you are.
So, you need to publish some valuable blog posts on your site (or others) to make other web admins consider your application. If you have a portfolio, they can see for themselves if you have what it takes to contribute to their website.
Firstly, do your research. You should check if they have content guidelines. You also need to know what kind of content your audience likes. Think of yourself as someone who regularly writes for that site and cares for their audience.
The most challenging part is getting your guest post request approved. You probably need to hear back from most of the sites you contact. But once you get over that bump and start working on your content, then that’s when it starts to happen.
Some sites have strict editorial guidelines you need to follow. For instance, you can only use one link throughout the post; it needs to be a certain number of words, or you can only link to your site via the author box.
Consider all these and figure out how to write your content to make people curious enough to want to know more about you. It will make people want to visit your site and become part of your community. in turn helps you generate leads with content marketing.
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Target long-tail keywords
One of the foundations of content marketing strategy is blogging. When it comes to blogging, the longer and more valuable the content, the better its SEO will be. When your content is SEO optimized, you’ve got better chances of ranking high up on search engines.
It’s important to mention that keywords aren’t created equal. There are short keywords and long keywords. Short keywords are 1-2 words in length, while long keywords have 3+ words.
Usually, the sites that appear on the first page of Google search results are well-established sites with hundreds or thousands of other sites linking to them!
When you target long keywords, you’re essentially targeting keywords with lower search volumes but far less competition.
It means you have a better chance of ranking on the first page of search engines and your target audience finding their way to your website!
When choosing which long tail keywords to target, you need to consider the intent behind each keyword.
There are three basic types of search intent:
Navigational keywords – these are searches for a particular brand or website.
Informational keywords – these are searches for a specific type of information (not commercial)
Transactional keywords – these are searches where the user aims to carry out some commercial transactions.
The most profitable types of keywords are, of course, transactional keywords. These are the keywords with buying intent behind them. Ultimately, you want to target these types of keywords because these are the people who are ready to make a buying decision!
However, only some people are just waiting for the opportunity to buy or spend money on some random product. The vast majority of searches are informational.
So before visitors buy, they need some information to back up their decision. No one likes to be taken for a ride, which unfortunately happens all too often online.
For your content marketing strategy, you’ll target both informational and transactional long-tail keywords. It is the best way to get the most search traffic to enter your marketing funnel and become your essential leads!
Compelling call to action
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Customer-centric landing pages
The ultimate tool for lead generation is a landing page. It’s a single page whose primary purpose is to collect a visitor’s email address or other contact details.
Lead magnets and landing pages work great together.
Your landing page would have a lead form where people can enter their name, email address, etc. Once they enter their details, they get access to the promised lead magnet.
It’s effortless and straightforward. But if you want you’re encouraged to have reasonable conversion rates, then you need the tips below.
It should have a compelling call to action (CTA).
Don’t just use a generic CTA button like ‘submit’ or ‘subscribe.’ If you want to convince people to sign up for your list, then you need to make it highly persuasive.
You can even use your lead magnet’s top benefit as your landing page’s CTA. See what works best for your audience.
Tell your leads exactly what they’re going to get.
Your landing page is your “this is it” moment. List down the reasons why they can’t pass up your lead magnet.
Tell them how it will benefit them and how it can change their lives or improve their businesses! Use robust and persuasive words to convince people to follow your CTA.
Use more than just text on your landing page.
Text is powerful, but you may need a visual impact to help influence people over to your side. If you can add a short, personal video to your landing page, do it. It will make it easier for people to relate to you.
Design matters.
If you give your landing page design a thought, then you could be saving your time. A well-designed landing page can turn off visitors quickly, so make sure your landing page is visually appealing.
Only then will people actually read through your landing page copy and decide if it’s right for them.
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Leverage the power of video
Video is far easier to consume than text, and this is why YouTube is so important! With just your smartphone camera, you can start filming yourself and make your brand known to the world.
There are so many places where you can leverage the power of video. To get started, upload your videos to YouTube. Then, you can insert your video link in your blog posts or on your landing pages. You can also link to it on other social media platforms such as Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter.
When you upload to YouTube, make sure you add links to your website or your landing pages on the video’s description. You can also add annotations to the video itself to encourage people to visit your site.
The massive thing about video is that you can get really creative! There are many places online where you can embed and share your videos, which means there are hosts of opportunities for people to learn more about you and your business.
To generate leads with content marketing should be at the top of your marketing goals. Without a system for capturing leads, your entire content marketing campaign could be wasted.