How to Generate Leads Through Content Marketing

Business Wants to Generate Leads

Are you a business struggling to generate leads? Or maybe you are simply looking for a cost-effective multi-channel digital marketing strategy.

If you are nodding in affirmation to any of the above-mentioned questions, then you are in luck. Content marketing is hot these days and can help you turn out your ROI for good. Want to know how? Well, continue to read as we explain how the content market can help you generate leads and boost your conversion rate.

Seventy-two percent of marketers say that content marketing strategy increased their consumer engagement. Not just that, another 72 percent of marketers reported an increase in their lead generation due to content marketing.

This proves the importance of content marketing and how it can significantly impact your company’s ROI. The right content can cause a massive influx of potential customers visiting your company’s website. You just need to know what the right content is and how to make it.

The more visitors land on your website, the higher the probability of lead generation that will translate into higher sales. So, if you are struggling in this arena, here is how content marketing can really work as a springboard for your organization.

Generate Leads with Demand Generation

Demand generation in content marketing allows you to generate leads by creating better brand-to-brand or brand-to-customer relationships. This umbrella term envelopes various digital marketing strategies to drive long-term customer engagement, including demand capture, lead generation, and pipeline acceleration.

Demand generation includes a wide array of touch-points that are vital to raising brand awareness amongst your customers. The strategy helps you answer the questions and solve the problems your customers face proactively.

This way, your brand will position itself as a market leader and trusted advisor. If you nail demand generation, you will be able to generate leads, sell your products and services, generate revenue, and foster genuine consumer loyalty.

Not a Quick Fix

Demand generation is not a one-hit-wonder that you apply once and forget about it. It is a gradual and ongoing approach like a holistic therapy, where you engage in dedicated inbound digital content marketing tactics such as social interactions, weekly newsletters, blogs, vlogs, e-books, webinars, live sessions, and more.

Image Source: RightSourceMarketing

The Three Pillars

Demand generation has three key pillars.

1. Demand Capturing

If there already a demand for your product or service in the market, you must capture it. For this, you will have to guide your customers to your brand. The process involves using lower-funnel content to establish brand propositions such as search engine optimization, pay-per-click (PPC) advertisement, etc.

2. Lead Generation

Before capturing the market demand, you will need a lead generation strategy to deliver your marketing strategy. This involves enticing the target audience, gaining their trust, and add them to your content marketing database. Once you generate leads, you can guide them into the sales funnel.

3. Pipeline Acceleration

So, you have successfully managed to generate leads and capture demand. Now you can speed up your ROI generation process by guiding the target customers through your sales funnel. This is where you use the pipeline acceleration technique to engage in conversation with your potential customers.

For this, you will need highly targeted content that can appeal to the customer, address their pain points, and strike an emotional chord with them. If they buy into it, you are in a strong position.

Stages of demand generations

There are five stages of demand generation, or you can say they are five components, which are,

  •   Goals – identifying what you want out of a demand generation campaign whether establishing a brand, gaining a certain number of leads, etc. 
  •   Know Your Audience – You must identify your target audience as well their needs and wants
  •   Content Marketing – Creating content to entice the target audience by addressing their pain points.
  •   Distribution – Content is only as effective as your distribution strategy. Therefore, you must find the right platforms to distribute your content.
  • Measurement – As demand capturing is an ongoing process, you must learn from your implemented content marketing strategy. Therefore, you must determine and track your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to gauge the effectiveness of your demand generation strategy.

6 Effective Techniques to Generate Leads with Content Marketing

While there are many options you can use for lead generation via content marketing, here are six of the most effective ones.

1. Customer’s Persona

Did you know that some businesses generate tons of leads without making a single sale? That is because they are generating the wrong leads, and the reason is they do not know who their ideal customer is.

Therefore, you must remember the fundamental strategy to create a customer’s persona. This will help you understand your target audience, what they do, their interests, wants, and needs, etc. Failing to do this can really hamper your lead generation campaign, no matter how great your content might be.

For instance, if you are a real estate investor promoting content on a teenage social media group or a dating app, of course, you are not going to get any leads. Even if you do, they will be accidental visitors landing on your website out of curiosity or boredom.

So, define your target audience in order to determine where to look for them. You can even specify the persona of your ideal customer based on demographics such as age, gender, profession, location, interests, hobbies, likes, dislikes, status, earnings, etc.

2. Using the Appropriate Content

The effectiveness of your content depends on how appealing it is to your ideal customers. The more accurate you are at this, the more profitable your ROI is going to be. So, create the content that suits your audience.

There are two reasons why you should do this. First, you would be able to generate leads by attracting visitors to your website. Secondly, the right content will help you create brand awareness in the market. Moreover, you must also focus on what format might work best for your business.

You can use blogs, video content, social media posts, podcasts, infographics to generate leads through content marketing.

3. Using Content Syndication

You can create amazing content in order to generate leads for small businesses or large corporations. However, if you are new in the industry and do not have enough experience or contacts to make a buzz in the market, you can leverage content syndication.

In this process, you can upload your content on a third-party website with a broader outreach. This will help attract traffic to your website through their existing customer engagement. This is a great way to generate potentially potent leads.

As the third party enjoys an established rapport with their customers and any recommendation coming from them, it is definitely worth looking for their clients.

A more modern way of doing it these days is hiring a social media influencer. These influencers are the celebrities of social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Snapchat, etc. These influencers have a huge number of followers, from thousands to millions, so you can ask them to promote your content.

They might charge you something for it, but social media influencers can be a highly effective method to generate leads through content marketing.

4. Distribution Networks

This is mostly about social media platforms in this day and age. Did you know there are over 2.95 billion social media users in the world? This alone makes them hands down the most lucrative marketplace to deploy your content marketing.

Creating content is one thing but identifying the right channels is the key to how effective your content will be. Moreover, there are two ways you can promote on social media networks.

Organic Content Marketing

You can use the organic distribution channels without investing any money. If you are a small business or a startup on a budget, this is probably the best way. The only drawback is that it will be a slow process and will take you some time to build online credibility and authority in your niche. Investing in social media tools to enhance the promotion of your content can help to speed up this process if needs be. 

Some of the most popular organic content distribution channels are Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, search engines, etc. 

Paid Content Marketing

If you have the budget to spare, you can pay social media platforms and search engines to promote your content and help generate leads. These are known as paid-per-click or PPC campaigns, and you pay for every time a visitor clicks on the link available on your paid ads and lands on your website.

This is very cost-effective because you can not only control how much you spend but also to whom you promote your content. Some of the popular PPC ads options are Facebook ads, Google Ads, Instagram ads, etc. 

5. Creating Enticing Lead Magnets

You can create lead magnets to generate leads via content marketing. Why not offer compelling offers to attract people back to your website. For example, you can offer them a free download of a guide or tutorial in return for their subscription to your free newsletter.

This is a win-win for you and the potential client, they get something for free, and you get their nod to contact them. You can offer tutorials, guides, free e-books, etc. However, these must contain content that solves the customer’s problem.

6. Investing in a Lead Generating Software

This is by far the most effective strategy to generate leads through content marketing. Lead generating software can convert incoming traffic to your website into leads using your new content marketing strategy.

You can invest and pay for many software solutions with advanced features. However, if you wish to test the waters first, you can try many of  Podium’s essential communication products for free. The software is intelligent enough to know how to use the strong suites of your content marketing to generate potent leads.

Conclusion

Now that you know the importance of content marketing in lead generation, it is time to get started. You can use all of the above-mentioned strategies together or mix and match them as they fit your business and ROI needs.

About the Author:

This is a guest blog post from Podium, the premiere messaging platform that connects businesses with their customers and enhances the marketing process.


Interesting Related Article: “9 Ways You Can Generate More Leads for Your Business



from Business – Market Business News https://ift.tt/3xxJufJ

Post a Comment

Previous Post Next Post