Expanding Lead Generation through Content Marketing

Content is anything that adds spice to a reader’s life. Today market researchers highly recommend content marketing as a basic lead generation technique. Content has evolved as marketing from just being numbers to relevance. What sets content marketing apart from other styles of content creation is that every piece of content you present needs to serve a business objective. For every content marketer, that goal is lead generation.

<h2Introduction

What is Lead Generation?

Lead generation describes the process of marketing that stimulates and captures of buyers interest in a product or service for the point of developing sales pipeline.

Lead generation has frequently used digital channels and has undergone momentous changes in recent years from the rise of new online and social techniques. In particular, the plenty of information easily available online has led to the rise of the “self-directed buyer” and the emergence of new techniques to expand and qualify probable leads before passing them to sales.

Why is it Important?

The buying process has changed radically, and marketers necessitate finding new ways to reach buyers and get heard through the noise. Instead of finding clientele with mass marketing and email blasts, marketers must now focus on being found and learn to build continuous relationships with buyers.

Take a glimpse of the Transformation that Marketing has been drawn upon:

Steps to Increase Lead Generation

Create Higher-Conversion Landing Pages

According to conversion rate optimization, it’s well known that not all landing pages are created equal. Most landing pages don’t carry out well and they might only occasionally find a few opt-ins. However, others are capable of much more.

It is always your responsibility to understand the reason why you need to create or use a particular landing page. So, you need to sort out first and then start with perfecting the page.

The first thing that each marketer has to understand is the anatomy of an ideal landing page. It must start with a compelling headline, should have a strong and attractive opening and then should build interest as readers move down through the copy.

Undeniably, a colourful landing page can magnetize people. But, we’re just not looking for any common visitor here – we want qualified leads. That is why it is so crucial to put the interests of the targeted users first for generating more qualified leads.

Widespread Market Research

Expanding Lead Generation through Content Marketing
When something is not fully known, the first step to understanding is to research and study it. Smart decisions are often based on an in-depth market analysis.

Conducting exclusive and extensive market research is not an option – it’s a necessity and it should be the early stage of product creation. Market research centres your business on your consumers.

You need to make sure that there are enough potential customers for the products you’re creating. You also wish to leverage the existing research that other marketers have performed, to turbo-charge your marketing strategies.

So now the question is how do you know that people will buy your product? The solution is- Find commercial keywords.

Keywords are a powerful tool to analyze what your target audience wants to learn more about. Commercial keywords, in particular, tell you what your prospects intend to buy. By targeting a specific forte with your prime tool – using content intended at answering the aimed audience’s questions about that niche – you can develop each individual member of the audience as a lead for your business.

It won’t happen overnight, but when you stick to and keep marketing with this strategy, you’ll succeed like others do

Market research hasn’t really changed. It has boiled down to know what your target audiences’ want and where they frequently go to glance for answers to their problems.

Content Creation

Content marketing campaigns achieve best results when they’re put upon a solid foundation of data-driven and high-quality content. You can follow these simple steps to gain potential leads through quality content:

  • Recognize the content that user’s desire: None marketer can assert with absolute certainty that what their users want, but what can be done is to evaluate certain metrics to avoid wasting time on generic or irrelevant content. In other words, target your already-published content which would likely generate the most page views, enjoy a lower bounce rate and trigger more comments.
  • Study Successful Content headlines: Study says that headlines which are appealing attract 8 out of 10 persons to click on and read your content. This means you need to break your mind tweaking headlines which are too engaging. Powerful headlines with quality content will differentiate you from the crowd and attract the audience.
  • Authenticate your Statistics and Data: Validate your data count before you include them in your content. Data-driven content generated most qualified leads. So where to get all these data?? Check your Google Analytics account to extract the number of page views and users for a period on your website. Look out for keywords that rank, the bounce & exit rate and percentage of new and existing visitors.
  • Procure Profound Content: After you finish up collecting headlines, facts, and figures, it is time to write the main content. Google tends to rank content with more than 2000 words or long content over shorter ones. So whatever content you draft it needs to be extensive with in-depth data and statistics. Put adequate charts, tables or graphs to make your content a detailed one.

Create Lead Appeal

Email marketing is best for customer retention. An email is a formidable inbound strategy for generating leads. It’s not that we ignore social media marketing, but email marketing is more crucial for better marketing plans. But before you add up more email database, create a lead appeal which can be resourceful enough to attract a targeted visitor. An effective lead appeal can resonate with the needs of your audience. Email marketing has shifted from being desktop targeted to mobile taking over. Mobile marketing has shown a drastic increase of around 500%. Encourage your subscriber’s list by optimizing mobile-friendly features. Businesses that nurture their leads through email generate 50% more sales-ready leads and they do it at a lower cost of 33%. On an average, nurtured leads generate a 20% rise in sales opportunities, compared to leads that are not nurtured. Lead appeal varies depending on your intended audience and if their response is positive or not. When creating lead magnets, make sure that you focus on what your target audience is looking for.

Focus on Content Promotion Skills

Working with a variety of content helps you with an easy promotion. It avails you multiple platforms unlike a single platform to reach out to your viewers. For many marketers, it is always a challenge to get a variety of content.

So if you’ve caught hold of a variety of content forms, such as articles, blog posts, whitepapers, videos, online courses, e-books, infographics, etc- you need to check the best ways to promote them too. Without effective promotion, your content pieces are as good as dead.

Look out for various strategies to gain visibility for your content. Promote blog posts, a right technique to convert customers into leads. Here are some of the best ways to promote your content and generate quality leads:

  • Get your content upgraded with targeted opt-in forms: You can start by creating lead magnets for blog posts. You can have multiple reports or ebooks offering bonus through a blog post. These giveaway bonus or reports are termed as “content upgrade.” You can get instant customers who can turn into subscribers through this trick. The other giveaways could be in the form of videos, hardcover book, discount code, plugins, membership access, etc.
  • Target long-tail keywords: The other way of maximizing headline’s reach and improve the conversion rate, is too well target long-tail keywords.The headlines featuring long-tail keywords tend to rank higher in Google’s results.
  • Guest blogging- a great way to reach out to other blogs and hijack some of their loyal audience members to your blog, so leverage it.

Social Media Outreach

The CMOS use at least one social media channel to engage and collaborate with customers. That’s something called a chain reaction that can be triggered by a  social media marketing campaign.  If you reach 3 social media influencers, that can lead to 10 new connections within 24 hours, because the people that you connected with also belong to a network and have followers on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and so on.

Don’t be ever tempted to evaluate potential contacts solely by the number of followers that they have. It’s better to follow a blog with 1000 potential followers than following a blog with million followers. The sole objective of conducting a social media analysis is enabling a better connection with social media influencers and offer a helping hand.

You could comment on blogs, share it, recommend or notify them with your readers.

The more you give in any one social media channel, the more they feel connected to you.

Nurture the Customers through Emails

The fact is nurturing a lead is much more important than acquiring it. It can turn out to be a big obstacle in increasing sales. The core reason is that initial contact with a potential buyer usually doesn’t lead to sales. These people need to be educated and informed.

Follow these steps to nurture your customer connections through emails

  • Create follow-up emails: When a prospect signs up to your email list, send them a confirmation email, which qualifies them as subscribers.
  • Start cultivating by segmenting your email lists: Master the flair of writing productive email subject lines that attract clicks and develop a relationship culture that would help you build a loyal list of potential customers who will not be difficult to persuade.

Its way far to generate content but what’s difficult is gathering a loyal audience. To cut through the noise of social media marketing and blogging and generate more leads, you have to focus more on your target audience’s needs. When worked consistently, ultimately you can generate leads with valuable custom content. Keep optimizing for users, because search engines follow the activities of users at your site.

Author - Rachel Radmond
Rachel Radmond Author at Fortune Reuters Rachel Radmond, Sr. Business Development Manager, Fortune Reuters is driven by the passion to offer customer value beyond all. With her invaluable managerial experience of working for multinational companies she has gathered comprehensive knowledge and understanding of Enterprise-level companies that’s been instrumental in our growth as a global B2B contact data brand. Her market insights and how she beautifully correlates it with the need for fortune companies to procure data for multichannel campaigns has been the secret to her success.