In these times, lead generation is crucial to the survival of a business. A report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows the failure of many businesses, with only about 25% of them making it through the first 15 years. Among the top reasons for this massive failure is poor marketing.
Marketing has always been an important part of a business’s growth, but it is now tilted mainly towards digital marketing since it addresses the shortcomings of traditional marketing. Digital marketing involves using digital channels to market your product and services to consumers. It includes marketing strategies on devices, including affiliate marketing, ads, and content marketing.
Content marketing, a subset of digital marketing, is a great way to generate leads because it focuses on establishing consumer relationships. It is a subtle creation of brand awareness that rides on providing customers with relevant and valuable information using articles, blogs, and social media posts, among other media forms.
Content marketing is effective for drawing, engaging, and retaining customers. To utilize content marketing, a business must tailor its content to suit its audience. If not, such a business is bound to fail. On that note, here is how to generate leads through content marketing.
Conduct a Thorough Market Research
A business can come to understand a lot about its audience through research. By combining your extensive research with other marketers’, you can identify your audience and understand their behavior and what they want.
Creating an idea and building a profile of your ideal customers don’t cut it anymore. In this data-driven era, many tools are at your disposal to know who your actual audience is and what problems they are trying to solve.
Depending on your content marketing medium, there are many ways to gather information on your audience. You can collect valuable information using Google Analytics, social media insights, email feedback, and monitoring how a similar audience interacts with your competitors’ websites. Utilizing these, you can learn about your customer’s pain points, intent, and the type of content that resonates with them.
For instance, to see a post’s performance on Instagram, you have to use a creator or business account. You’ll see your Insights by tapping on the menu button in the right-hand corner. It shows people’s interactions with your posts.
Decide on Your Type of Content
You probably know this, but blogging isn’t the only way you can market content. Also, based on your business and what you want to achieve, it might not be the appropriate tool. It is best to consider the various types of content to make the right choice. Types of content include articles, case studies, white papers, podcasts, videos, e-books, infographics, and blog posts.
The list isn’t exhaustive, and each form of content has the people they appeal to and the manner. So, after identifying your target audience, the next thing to do is decide on the content that will appeal to them the most. Also, you could use multiple channels; all you have to do is position them at the right place in the lead generation funnel.
Craft Solid Landing Pages
Landing pages are independent web pages that exist to achieve a particular goal. A company must understand why they need a landing page, whether to offer a discount or grow their email list, and link it to a clear and concise CTA.
Landing pages are essential for lead generation and conversion, but many marketers are displeased with their conversion rate, and this is because of poor and underwhelming landing pages. A lot of thought has to go into creating an effective landing page that will keep visitors going even after clicking on the web page. Also, one thing an effective landing page shouldn’t have is a navigation bar, as it poses as a distraction.
A good landing page should focus on user experience, making it easily navigable, but should not sacrifice the user interface. Making your website aesthetically pleasing is sure to play its part in capturing the attention of a reader.
Other characteristics of an effective landing page include a captivating headline, strong CTAs, short loading time, and visual representations. You must create compelling content that will keep the people reading through to the end.
The ways to drive traffic to your landing page include paid and organic search, social media, and email marketing. Also, with information collected, make adjustments to the landing pages to suit your potential customers.
Create High-Quality Content
You must create high-quality content to make your business stand out in about 5.53 billion indexed web pages. When creating a website, the most crucial factor you must consider is the users. Before thinking of how to get conversions and rank on Google, you must think about creating top-notch content that provides valuable information and answers to users’ queries.
It will be disappointing to develop several content marketing strategies, and attract or generate leads for them to visit your site and find poor or mediocre content. Following your research and understanding of your user’s intent, you must tailor your content to suit their needs.
You should also learn to write powerful, persuasive headlines that catch people’s attention and keep them reading. You can learn this by typing a query and noting the titles of the top-ranking results. Make sure to write correctly formatted, edited, proofread, and optimized content. Also, articles that rank well on Google and generate leads are usually lengthy and data-driven.
Create Lead Magnets and Content Upgrades
A lead magnet is any free product or service users exchange their contact information for access, such as newsletters, free trials, e-books, and samples. It is a means of getting users to sign up for your email list, an effective customer retention method.
Depending on your business type and audience, some content will do better and be better appreciated. For instance, a video would be best if you want to offer a resource discussing braiding a style of hair. You can build ties with the users by constantly providing valuable materials and entertainment using lead magnets.
A compelling lead magnet must solve some problem for its users, and be easily accessible and understood. It is an impressive strategy to generate leads, as long as you do it right.
Content upgrades are similar to lead magnets but are related to a piece of content already being consumed. These upgrades are incentives linked to a blog post, video, or any other form of content to get a person’s contact information.
Showcase Your Product’s Value
People will see it as a marketing strategy no matter how well you talk about your products or services. However, others might be willing to consider if you have data and reviews of these products. Get your existing customers to drop reviews of your product and attest to its value.
You could also create testimonial videos where people talk about the usefulness of your products and services and how it has been of help to them. The testimonial will help convince more people than you think to give your business a try.
Content Syndication
Content syndication is when a person puts up their already published content on third-party sites. It differs from guest blogging because a business reissues the same content on multiple platforms, unlike guest blogging, where they create fresh content. You should take advantage of content syndication to get your content to as many people as possible.
There are several ways to syndicate content, including free and paid means. To syndicate your article, you can pitch your content to websites with a considerably larger audience than you. You can republish your articles on platforms like LinkedIn and Quora or do so on websites with similar audiences to yours. You can also pay popular sites such as Outbrain to post your content.
However, before syndicating your content, you have to understand that it can be tricky. You need to be careful. First, the third-party site must mention the original article and link it to the owner’s site. They should also add a canonical link because it notifies search engines that the URLs are identical. Failure to do so could hurt your SEO, and your content on the third-party site could outrank you.
Utilize Social Media
Social media can play a crucial role in getting your content to the right audience regardless of size or industry. With about 4.7 billion people using social media, it would be a waste not to leverage these channels. Here’s how to generate leads with social media: you can build your social media presence on popular platforms and the ones you can adequately use to show your business’ strength and what it entails. Or, you can choose to get influencers to do the job for you.
To utilize social media, you must build your social media presence on popular and appropriate platforms. Like this, people can easily refer to your social media page to find out more about you. People who enjoy your content will stick and grow with you on social media.
To push your business further, you may need to employ the services of influencers. Influencers are people with many “followers” with whom they have established a relationship and level of trust. To generate leads, you can get an influencer interested in your business’ niche to market your products or services adequately.
Hold Free Virtual Events
Hosting virtual events is an excellent way to attract the right audience and generate leads. You can use the opportunity to educate your audience on skills and information you know they will be interested in, and show your expertise. For instance, if you have a platform where people can take courses and upskill, you can hold a virtual event and invite well-known speakers in that field to discuss an in-demand skill like data analysis.
You can publicize the information about the meeting and the link to register on your social media platforms to get as many interested people to register and attend the event. If possible, offer proof of attendance certificates that the attendees can post on their social media if they want to. It will get more people to know about your company.
Nurture Leads
The most important part is not lead generation but leads nurturing; it is what a business does with the leads they have generated. Only a small percentage of leads readily become purchasing customers. For others, follow-up is essential to turn them into customers.
The most effective way to do this is via email. Once you have added visitors to your email list, make sure not to bombard them with mediocre content daily. Make yourself scarce, but not too scarce. Send good content at least once a week and slowly gain their trust. It’ll be more effective if the emails are personalized. Other ways to nurture or generate leads include engaging them via social media and publishing tailored content.
Conclusion
Opening a website and filling it up with quality content is excellent, but it is just a starting point. You must be intentional about generating leads and getting your business out there. So, set up a plan, implement these tips correctly, keep an eye out for trends, and understand that generating considerable leads doesn’t happen overnight.
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