Sadly, for content marketing lead generation 30% of new businesses fail in their first two years, 50% in the first five years, and 66% in the first ten.
Why do so many businesses fail?
There are plenty of potential pitfalls:
- Poor market research
- Insufficient financing
- Poor business planning
- Bad marketing
- Poor choice of location
- Limited online presence
Poor content marketing can have a huge impact on your business. Many business owners and marketers fail because they approach marketing incorrectly.
They do not frequently optimize their marketing campaigns to increase conversions, gather leads, and drive sales.
There is no doubt that marketing is one of the most effective methods to boost lead generation for business development. In fact, content marketing produces 3 times as many leads as other traditional marketing techniques, according to a DemandMetric report.
So how do you create excellent content that generates leads for your company?
This guide explores six effective ways to generate leads using content marketing.
1. Create a Buyer Persona
Did you know that you can generate a thousand leads and still not make a single sale?
Your content must be tailored to suit your target audience if you want it to be effective. If you create content that isn’t compatible with your audience, you risk wasting time and money on leads that won’t convert.
Before starting with content marketing, you must first identify your target audience and develop a persona for them.
What Is a Buyer Persona?
A buyer persona is a research-based profile that describes the sort of person that would purchase a particular product or brand. A buyer persona provides information on the prospective buyer—their characteristics, preferences, and types of touchpoints that lead people to buy your product (or your competitor’s).
If you know who your prospective customers are and what questions they need to be answered, you will be able to create informative, valuable content that addresses their pain points and answers their questions. The process of turning visitors into leads begins with producing content that provides immense value.
You must know the customer’s needs in order to deliver value.
The following are some of the specifics that must be included in your buyer persona:
- Biographical details: Name, age, gender, location, profession, family size, and so on.
- Values: What are the values, hopes, and ambitions that the customer has, or goals they are striving for?
- Pain points: What are the issues that they need to solve? What problems are they struggling with and what questions are they asking?
Knowing who your target audience is can help you create content that meets their demands and boosts conversions.
There are a number of tools available to help you build your buyer persona if you are unfamiliar with the process.
- Facebook Audience Insights
The Facebook Audience Insights tool is located inside the Facebook Ad Manager. Using this tool, you can discover a lot of information about your audience and use it to build a persona. You can also add interests that you want to research to get more information about your customers.
- Quantcast
There are over 200 billion global internet searches each month, and Quantcast delivers real-time data on over 100 million of those. Using artificial intelligence, Quantcast helps you better understand your target audience. They help you accurately track and measure your audience using artificial intelligence.
- Survey Gizmo
Survey Gizmo is a terrific tool for conducting surveys on your audience so that you can construct your own buyer persona based on real audience responses. If you already have an email list, you can use Survey Gizmo to examine data on your current customers.
2. Use the Content-Type Best Suited for Your Audience
There are hundreds of content types available, and in order for your content marketing efforts to have a profitable ROI, you will need to create content that suits your audience.
Creating content for your marketing strategy is the key to generating either traffic or leads. You need both to turn a profit— before you can generate any leads, you must bring visitors to your site.
Some examples of content you can use to generate traffic are:
- Blog posts
Blog posts can be a valuable resource for generating traffic to your website. They provide value for your readers and increase the number of indexable pages in your domain. They are also excellent at directing people to your landing or sales page.
- Video content
Videos are another terrific way of driving traffic to your site. Make engaging, audience-focused videos to boost the number of times they are shared. Also, focus your efforts on YouTube. YouTube is the world’s second-largest search engine. Creating videos that are appropriate for the platform can boost traffic to your website.
- Social media posts
There are currently 2.95 billion social media users in the world. You should take advantage of this and publish posts on social media to drive visitors to your website. This means optimizing your social profiles, interacting with other users, and using targeted social media advertisements.
- Podcasts
Production of podcasts has been on the rise in recent years, as indicated by a 2019 report on podcast statistics. As of now, there have been more than 700,000 podcasts created, with 29 million podcast episodes produced. You can communicate with your customers more intimately using podcasts, hopefully resulting in a bump in traffic to your site.
- Infographics
The Demand Gen Report stated that infographics can increase your web traffic by 12% and receive 650% more engagement than normal guest posts. Visual marketing is very much in vogue, so you should seize the opportunity by increasing your visual marketing efforts.
Once you’ve begun seeing traffic from your content efforts, the next step is to create content that can be used for lead generation.
A new blog that hasn’t started generating any traffic yet can still generate leads through great content, but what happens then?
3. Use Content Syndication
People seeing your content is one way to leverage content syndication.
What is Content Syndication?
When you post your content on a high-traffic third-party site, you immediately have the potential to generate a lot of leads. Syndicating your content means uploading it to sites that are larger than you to generate more traffic and increase engagement.
Netline is a B2B lead generation network that allows you to syndicate your content so that you can build traffic and generate leads faster. The best thing about this platform is that it is performance-based, meaning you only pay for the leads that are generated.
Make sure to use canonical tags to tell search engines which content is the primary one that should be given SEO value, to avoid having duplicate content issues or getting a penalty from the Google algorithm.
Medium, Slideshare, Quora, Outbrain, Taboola, Scoop.it, Facebook Business, LinkedIn, Reddit, and Tumblr are some of the best platforms for content syndication.
4. Pick Your Content Distribution Network
Creating content is one thing, getting people to see it is another. You must decide on a marketing channel mix to distribute your content.
There are two main ways to distribute content—organic and paid channels.
You don’t need money to get started with organic distribution channels. Organic channels are the best option if you are on a budget. The only drawback with organic channels is that it takes time to build online authority and credibility. Organic channels grow over time, and it may take a few months before you notice a significant improvement in your audience size or site traffic.
Here are some of the most commonly used organic distribution channels:
Concentrate on spending your budget on the channels where your buyer personas spend most of their time. If you’ve done adequate research on your ideal customers, you’ll know which channels they spend most of their time on. You don’t need to distribute your content across all of these channels at once.
Paid channels generate results immediately but require money to get started. If your PPC (pay-per-click) campaigns are optimally configured, all you have to do is buy some ads and you will start seeing traffic right away.
Here are some of the most commonly used paid distribution channels:
- Social media ads
- Display ads
- Search ads
- Content delivery networks
- Native ads
Using both organic and paid distribution can make give you more comprehensive lead generation for your site in the long run.
5. Use Compelling Lead Magnets
An ineffective lead magnet is detrimental to lead generation, even if you have a lot of traffic.
What is Lead Generation (Lead Gen) Content?
Lead generation content is also referred to as a lead magnet. A lead magnet is a valuable resource that you offer to a prospect in exchange for information (typically an email address). You can also refer to these as gated content.
People are extremely protective when it comes to their email addresses. You must offer something valuable in exchange for an email address in order to convince a prospect to hand one over.
You can use the following types of content to generate leads:
- Case Studies
- eBooks/How-to guides
- Checklists
- Whitepapers
- Recipes
- Free reports
- Webinars
- Mini-courses
- Quizzes
- Free trials or demos of a product
- Templates
- Cheatsheets
An effective lead magnet should possess the following attributes:
- It should provide a solution for your target audience’s needs.
- It should be specific, as it’s targeted to a specific user. Generalized content does not translate to high conversion rates.
- It should be easy to access. The user doesn’t need to follow a long process to get it.
- It should not only be easy to digest/consume but also engaging to the reader.
6. Create Optimized Landing Pages
You may be squandering a lot of potentials if your website receives a lot of traffic but your landing page is not optimized to generate leads. Here are some strategies you can utilize to improve the conversion rate of your landing pages:
Delete the navigation bar
An opt-in or close button should be the only option at the top of your landing pages. Having a navigation bar up there can be a distraction and prevent visitors from converting.
An increase of 100% in conversions was recorded on the Yuppiechef case study by deleting the navigation bar from the landing page.
Make sure your call-to-action (CTA) button is clear
The purpose of a great CTA button is to persuade users to take action. A CTA button should be simple and visible. The colors red, green, orange, and yellow work best for CTA buttons. Make sure your button attracts the visitor’s attention.
Wrapping It Up
For a business plan and marketing strategy to generate maximum return on investment, you need to follow the right steps. By applying these six strategies your lead generation goals are met, that increase your conversion rates, and ultimately drive more sales for your product.
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