Using Content Marketing to Generate Leads
Lilach Bullock of Convince and Convert recently wrote that Demand Metric noted that content marketing generates three times as many leads as traditional marketing and costs 62 percent less. Demand Metric also found that 70 percent of people would rather learn about a company through articles rather than advertisements, 78 percent perceive a relationship between themselves and a company using custom content, and 90 percent of consumers found custom content useful.
Bullock also noted that a study by the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) found that only 30 percent of business-to-business (B2B) marketers say their organizations are effective at content marketing. Bullock then went on to describe six effective ways to start implementing to generate leads with content marketing.
Step 1: Create a buyer persona
The wrong leads can be as bad as no leads, according to Bullock. She described a buyer persona as a”fictional document that contains the details of your ideal customer.”
Some of these details could include a customer’s:
- Name
- Age
- Income
- Gender
- Location
- Ambition
- Solutions they’re looking for
- Decision-making ability
A buyer persona should contain as many details as possible, as having buyer personas make content focused on attracting the right type of people. There may be multiple buyer personas depending on the products a person sells or the services they offer, and the Facebook Audience Insights tool in the Facebook Ads Manager can be used to find more details about an ideal audience.
Step 2: Leverage content syndication
Bullock described having valuable content on a company blog as possibly bringing in many leads for a business, but an obscure blog that nobody reads could mean great content that involved a lot of effort would massively underperform. One possible solution could be content syndication.
Content syndication was described as the process of having content on third-party sites that are more popular and reach a much bigger audience. A person can get exposure for content and the third-party website gets free content they can use to satisfy their audience.
When a person syndicates content aimed at capturing leads to a website with an ideal audience, it can be a massive opportunity to capture many more leads. Netline was the service highlighted by Bullock, as she said they syndicate content in their B2B lead generation networks to improve lead acquisition by targeting potential leads.
Better yet, Bullock said Netline was performance-based, meaning you only pay for the leads you acquire. As it concerns duplicate content, Bullock said most syndication networks use canonical tags to tell search engines that website content is the preferred version and should get the SEO equity, which eliminates the possibility of attracting a penalty.
Step 3: Provide lead magnets and content upgrades
Bullock noted that many people are reluctant to share their contact information because their inboxes are already full of junk. She said that to capture a lead, a person will have to first provide value, or lead magnets, which help to solve a problem for an audience and serve as an incentive for visitors to release personal details.
Some types of content that can serve as lead magnets for your content marketing campaigns include:
- Ebooks
- Reports
- Webinars
- Quizzes
- Courses
- Videos
Bullock said that characteristics of effective lead magnets include solving an immediate problem for an audience, being short enough to be used immediately, being accessible immediately to a lead, and solving a specific problem. The example cited as OptinMonster, which aims to solve a specific problem of converting abandoning visitors.
Bullock then went on to write that another similar concept is a content upgrade. Content upgrades are pieces of the content offered to a page visitor that are relevant to the page content.
She wrote that these are also lead magnets, but generate even higher conversions because they are related to what the visitor is presently reading. According to Bullock, blogger Brian Dean implemented a content upgrade and achieved a 785.01 percent increase in conversions within a month.
Step 4: Improve your landing pages
Bullock wrote that because most single landing pages are built specifically to capture leads, creating them without thought means a person is essentially throwing leads away. The best practices to follow to ensure optimizing landing pages for high conversion include removing the navigation bar.
Bullock said that one of the major mistakes marketers make is that they distract their landing page visitors from converting, and present many opportunities for visitors to click away from their landing page without converting. A landing page visitor should only have two options, which are either to close the page or convert.
Bullock said that the website Yuppiechef increased signups by 100 percent by removing the navigation bar from its landing page. She also recommended making a call-to-action (CTA) button visible so the color of a CTA button stands out on the landing page.
Another tip was to run A/B tests, a method of comparing two versions of a webpage or app against each other to determine which one performs better. Bullock said a person needs to constantly test to improve conversions, and testing different elements on a page, and track the effects on conversions.
Some page elements to test are:
- Page copy
- Call to action
- Images
- Background
- Number of form fields
Bullock noted that it is important that while testing, a person only tests a single element at a time to track the changes affecting conversions. One example of optimized content generated a 1,250 percent increase in conversion rates for the landing page.
Step 5: Use guest blogging to capture leads
Guest blogging is described by Bullock as “a valuable activity to improve brand awareness and gain quality backlinks.” She noted that most websites allow a person to leave a link in their author bio after a guest post that can link to a landing page by promising a lead magnet to guest post readers rather than a link to your home page.
She noted that the key was to make a lead magnet relevant to a guest post. It may be possible to get multiple links in a single bio for a guest post.
Step 6: Target long-tail keywords with the right intent
Bullock wrote that anybody running a small to mid-size business should know that targeting long-tail keywords is the way to go. She said it was easy to detect these keywords’ intent and there was also low competition for them.
Bullock recommended using a tool like SEMrush to carry out keyword research to help find the long-tail keywords a potential lead might use in search engines. After finding long-tail keywords, a person should create content to target these keywords and optimize a page for this keyword.
This will involve adding the keyword to parts of your page like:
- Headline
- URL
- First few paragraphs
- Subheadings
- Image alt text
- Image name
Bullock said to create long-form content that provides the solution a visitor is looking for. When bringing in visitors from search engines, you can then use lead magnets, exit-intent pop-ups, or other lead capture tactics to capture their details.
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SERP Matrix will be willing to sit down with you and discuss all of your content marketing goals. Our team will have the knowledge and ability to take all of the steps you want to see taken care of in the distribution of your online content.
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