How to Generate Leads with Content Marketing

Are you struggling to generate leads for your business? If you’re looking for one of the best and most effective ways to generate leads for your organization, then content marketing is the right choice. Demand Metric revealed that content marketing alone could generate three times as many leads as traditional marketing and costs 62% less.

However, executing content marketing the wrong way can lead to poor results and frustration. In a recent study by CMI, only 30% of B2B marketers said organizations achieved successful results after implementing content marketing.

In terms of SEO, there is a massive demand from users/customers for high-value content for lead generation. If you meet that need and answer their questions, your users will trust you with whatever social media marketing you throw their way.

Aside from traditional advertising, blogging is the primary avenue through which both B2C and B2B marketers today generate leads in different social media marketing channels like blogs, videos, podcasts and social media sites.

Here are six practical ways you can start implementing to generate leads with content marketing.

Step 1: Create a buyer persona

Capturing the wrong leads is equivalent to capturing no leads. In fact, it’s worse because you’ll end up wasting your resources on a lead that’s unlikely to be your customer. When it comes to lead generation, it typically means generating the right leads. And to do this, you need to specify the type of people or audience you want as your leads.

A buyer persona is a fictional document that contains the details of your ideal customer or end-user. Some of these details are their: name, age, income group, gender, location, ambition and solutions they’re looking for. Your buyer personas should be as detailed as possible. You can have a few buyer personas depending on the product or services you provide. Your buyer persona can help attract the right type of people. You can preferably use the Facebook Audience Insights tool available through the Facebook Ads Manager to find more details about your ideal buyer persona or audience.

Step 2: Leverage content syndication

Having valuable and relevant content on your company blog or website can automatically bring in many leads for your business. But what if you have an obscure blog that nobody reads? The content you’ve invested a lot in would underperform and all your efforts would be wasted. A way out of this challenge is content syndication or content re-publishing.

What is content syndication?

Content syndication is the process of re-publishing your content on third-party websites that are more popular or have a higher domain authority than yours, in an effort to reach a much bigger audience. Syndication in the social media industry is nothing new. Before the internet, newspapers and magazines with large circulation and readership often published syndicated content provided by freelance writers and smaller publication house. Both benefited in the process. The smaller player gets a greater audience and exposure, whereas the large publication house gets good content, they can use to satisfy their audience, without having to invest resources in creating it.

In the age of the internet, it’s the same story. You can ‘recycle’ or ‘reuse your online content by syndicating it. And if it performs well, syndication can go a long way to promoting your content online, reaching a wider audience, driving traffic to your website and hopefully turning some of them into conversions. When you syndicate your content with the sole purpose of capturing leads to a website with your ideal audience - it’s a massive opportunity to capture many more leads. Companies like Netline offer such content syndication services. They syndicate your content in their B2B lead generation networks, helping to improve your lead acquisition efforts.

What about the big issue of duplicate content or plagiarism though? Syndicated content, as we know is duplicated content, and it can wreak havoc with your SEO. When ranking for SEO, Google is smart enough and will not rank multiple versions of the same content. According to Google's algorithm, it will only index one, and it is more likely to choose the version that appears on a high-traffic website. But most syndication companies use canonical tags to tell the search engines that your website content is the preferred version. This automatically eliminates the possibility of attracting a penalty.

Step 3: Provide lead magnets and content upgrades

Every business needs a lead magnet. Nowadays, you might have noticed people being too reluctant to share their contact information because their mailboxes are already full of junk. In order to capture that lead, you have to first provide value and lead magnets that can achieve that.

In simple terms, a lead magnet is an incentive that marketers offer to potential buyers in exchange for their mobile number, email address or other contacts. Lead magnets help to solve a problem for your buyers and serve as a reason for visitors to release their personal details. Lead magnets usually offer a small piece of digital, downloadable content, such as a free PDF checklist, ebook, report, whitepaper, video, course, quiz, webinars etc.

What makes a good lead magnet?

  • They solve a specific problem
  • They’re short enough to be used immediately
  • They’re instantly accessible
  • They solve a real-life problem
  • They promise a quick win

Content Upgrades

Another similar concept in content marketing is the content upgrade. Content upgrades are pieces of content offered to a page visitor that are relevant to the page content. Or a bonus content matched with the topic of a particular article on the blog the visitor is reading. Technically, they’re a type of lead magnet, but they have proved to generate higher conversions because they’re closely related to what the visitor is currently reading.

In some cases, this could just be a PDF copy of the present page the visitor is reading or another format of the page content that readers may need for future reference.

What type of results can you expect from content upgrades? Blogger Brian Dean implemented a content upgrade and achieved a remarkable 785.01% increase in conversions just within a month. Yes, the figures are true; you get more subscribers by using the content upgrade technique.

 

Step 4: Creating high-converting landing pages

Most landing pages on the internet do not perform well and they may only occasionally get a few opt-ins. There are a lot of underperforming landing pages that aren’t maximizing leads and converting them into customers, which is essentially just a waste of resources.

The first thing that you need to understand is the anatomy of a perfect landing page. The page should begin with a compelling headline, have a captivating opening and then build interest as readers scrolls down through the copy. This format will help you create more compelling content for any social media channel you choose to release on. What you need to take note of is that the focus should be on the usability, not the aesthetics. When people click from social media channels, such as Intagam or Facebook, you want them to have a pleasant user experience. The landing page should therefore be designed to ensure the page is strong, persuasive and professional for all visitors opening the website page.

Moreover, your landing page also has to be super fast. In fact, recent statistics provided by KISSmetrics show that a one second delay in landing page load time will most likely reduce conversion rate by 7%. So, ensure that your landing page is super fast.

Here are some of the best practices when designing a landing page.

Remove the navigation bar

One of the major mistakes marketers make is that they distract their landing page visitors from converting. The visitors should not be provided any opportunity to click away from the landing page. In fact they should only have the option to click away from the landing page without converting.

A landing page visitor should only have two options: either to close the page or convert.

The navigation bar from the landing page should be removed. By adding this feature, Yuppiechef increased signups by 100%.

Make the CTA button visible.

The color and position of your CTA button needs to stand out on the landing page. You want your visitors to click it, and so it should grab their attention in order for them to do so.

Run A/B tests

Landing pages are never perfect. Therefore, you need to keep testing to improve your conversions constantly. Using the A/B test, you can test different elements on your web page and track their effects on conversions. Some page elements you can test are page copy, call to action, images and number of form fields. Here, it’s important to note that while testing, you should only test one element at a time. This will help you to track the changes, actually affecting your conversions.

Step 5: Use guest blogging to capture leads

Guest blogging is a valuable activity to improve brand awareness and gain good quality backlinks. Guest blogging is a great way to reach out to other blogs and steal some of their loyal members to your blog, so leverage it. However, one advantage that most marketers fail to make use of is capturing leads through guest posts. How can that be done?

Most websites allow you to leave a link in the author bio section after a guest post. Taking advantage of this option, you can leave a link to the landing page by providing a lead magnet to your guest post readers rather than a normal link to your home page. The key here is to make your lead magnet relevant to your guest post. You can also share the link in the body of your post where it is relevant.

Step 6: Target long-tail keywords with the right intent

If you run a mid-size business, then targeting long-tail keywords is the way to go. Firstly, it’s easy to detect these long-tail keywords. Secondly, there’s low competition for these keywords. To win the SEO game, targeting long-tail keywords is a good option as they tend to rank higher in Google’s search results. It’s all about targeting keywords that your competitors have either neglected or don’t know how to discover and use themselves. Tools like SEMrush can be used to carry out keyword research, and can effectively help you find the long-tail keywords a potential lead might use in search engines.

Once you have shortlisted long-tail keywords, you should create your content to target these keywords. Furthermore, you should also try to optimize your website page for these keywords. This includes adding the keyword to the headlines, url, first few paras, subheadings, image alt text, and image name.

Words by Brett Bell

Brett is the VP of Customer Success here at ContentSquire. He brings over a decade of digital experience to help business owners, entrepreneurs, and leaders like you break through the clutter with their content marketing efforts.

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