Here's How Content Marketing will Power your Lead Generation Engine

Here's How Content Marketing will Power Lead Generation Engine

We are not going to start with the phrase “Content is king” because you know the drill. This has been the mantra of the marketers for the past few years, and in 2020, content is still relevant. The best part is that powerful content helps you generate potential and quality leads.

Telling genuine stories with lots of useful information helps you gain traction online. In the modern SEO world, users look for great value content. In a recent study, it found that 88 percent of B2B marketers are practicing content marketing.

The study also suggests "a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action."

While we dig further, different types of content can help generate different numbers of leads for you, along with attracting millions of visitors to your website.

The marketing gurus suggest that if you have based on a specific type of content, it will guide you to find the right promotion for social media, thus, targeting the necessary potential clients.

So, Why Content Marketing is necessary for Leads generation? We’ll cover that in this article for you!

The truth is there’s no magic spell for a successful content marketing, so you should have a well-designed content blueprint filled with valuable content that speaks to your prospects.

Building Value Content

In almost every marketing organization, a single push for content and the content strategist goes on creating blog posts, hosting webinars, engaging social media posts and putting everything into the mixing pot! Then stir and wait for the magic to happen. But it’s not the right way to do it.

The Queen of Content marketing Ann Handley said about the magic of content – “Good content is more about brains than budget. A bigger story puts your company in the larger context of what people care about. A bolder marketer upends the status quo, telling a story that hits on specific challenges your audience has (but no one else is talking about in the right way for a certain audience). Gutsier, braver voice is a differentiator in a sea of mediocre content. You can use your bigger, bolder, braver content to convert more people into your squad, to align them with your company on a level that's bigger than what you sell or what you do. And not everybody is going to want to be part of your squad. Which is exactly the point.”

Using Social Media to Boost Your Content

Having a platform where everyone can read, watch or listen to what you have to say is a dream of every marketer. Social media helps to provide a platform to a marketer. It allows marketers to express what they have to say. That’s not it. Social media enables you to usher to the places where your prospects hang out. Once you have found these groups, you cordially present your content. In simpler words, you find that particular nook which will help you foster deep relationships with your prospects.

 

 
Jason Miller, the senior manager of Content Marketing in LinkedIn, quotes “Content Marketing will not replace social media by any means; they are and will continue to be two very different things with two very different functions. Social media channels are the tentacles from which your content extends its reach while opening up a direct line of communication with your customers and prospects.”

But first and foremost, we have to create an effective Content Strategy for Lead Generation:

As we mentioned earlier, for a successful content marketing, content strategy is a must requirement. There is no way you can skip it. Also, it is a tough job, but you will have to roll up your sleeves and get the work done. Once you’ve created an effective strategy and work towards it, it rewards you with a worthy lead generation engine!

Step One: Know your Audience

I know! You must have read these lines on every content marketing article you read. But it is that important. Selecting the right audience fuel the right lead generation campaign, which in fact begins with identifying your prospects. The initial step of identifying the right prospects is researching about your audience and building a buyer persona.

• Market Research:

Conducting Market Research (internally with the stakeholders and externally too, if possible) based on the basic demographics and other factors benefit you gain commercial keywords, which later on you put to your contents to unravel your leads deepest pain points.
This is a significant step for creating any marketing strategy. The research team should not overlook the importance of knowing and segregating their audience.
 
Thus you can narrow-cast your campaign and target the concerned TG effectively. The market research team should focus on examining the following categories:

1. Basic Demographics

2. Occupation

3. Main source of Media Exposure

4. Pain points

5. Role in purchasing decisions

6. Common objections

7. Common requirements

• Developing Buyer Persona:

A well-crafted buyer persona helps you develop a bond with customers along with boosting sales, creating brand loyalty and many other benefits. Developing buyer persona will pinpoint the type, style and tone of the content you’d create. It will also be contributing to specifying the delivery channels for the campaign.
To get started with the buyer persona development one should outline the essential details of a buyer acquired via your market research done earlier. This point is quite similar to the earlier one is more concentrated on the buyers’ perspective.

1. Demographics

2. Professional information such as occupation, company name, aims in life.

3. Media Usage

4. Psychological and Behavioral interests- such as hobbies, passion, etc.

5. Purchase power

6. Pain points

With proper market research and buyer persona development, focus on creating a story around it and tell it to your marketing team. The marketing strategist should review the persona and be able to map the customer journey, which will help them develop the content, thus ended up in good leads.

 

Step Two: Deciding the Content you need to create

There are many types of content in various forms. Picking up the right content is very crucial for creating a successful content marketing campaign. So how do you create appropriate content for your target persona?

If lead generation is the primary goal of your Content Marketing, then the below type of content forms will do well for you: 

1. Customer Testimonials

2. Case Studies

3. White Papers

4. Email Marketing

For better customer retention, consider creating Lead bait. Your leads are craving for that enticement. You as a marketer should understand what resources your target audience is looking for. Once you become that ‘hub of resource’, you’ll never face the scarcity of leads again!

But no matter which type of content you choose to carry on, make sure that your content creators emphasize the value of its contents.

Step Three: Creating a well-optimized landing page

The landing page is very important for building relationships with your prospects. A landing page helps the customers decide whether they consider reading or looking at the contents. So, what is required to make a high-converting landing page:

1. A compelling headline, clearly talking about the solution to the problem statement

2. Content that directly talks about the value that users will get from your offering

3. A clear indication of what action do they need to take (Call to Actions)

4. Engaging illustrations and videos to support your content

5. Social proofs such as testimonials, numbers subscribers, etc.

If you want your conversion rate to be high, you’ll probably need a landing page that performs swiftly. A well-performed landing page is the key aspect of lead generation. A perfect landing page includes a captivating headline that helps to build interest, strong and compelling content that builds trust. It is very vital to keep in mind that your landing page should focus on usability rather than visibility. Which denotes it should be fast, readable and visually comprehensive.

Step Four: Distributing and promoting your content

This should be the last step of your content marketing strategy. Scattering and channelizing the contents you’ve created on the right platform. Once you have content that is loaded with value and you have a well-optimized landing page, it is the best time to introduce your content to the world.

Particularly for Lead Generation, content promotion and distribution can be categorized into the following points:

1. Getting traffic through organic search is the best way to generate leads. That can be possible through niche keyword analysis, influencer links, creating thought leadership articles.

2. Identify the influencers of your nook. Build a relationship with them and get into a dialogue.

3. Syndication is an excellent way to get traffic in the early stages of your campaign. Posting your content links in Medium, LinkedIn SlideShare, Quora, etc or uploading videos on YouTube is a great way to promote your content. Such content channels will initiate dialogues with prospect leads.

4. Last but not least, paid promotion. It takes time, but with the right platform and good content, you can guide your users to become your direct prospects.

Ultimately, Content is necessary for Lead Generation

Ultimately, content is the lead magnet that attracts traffic to your website. Content helps in creating and nurturing the leads and that helps to turn a customer into brand promoters. And with time, this all goes into a cycle.

For generating leads, create content worth reading. This helps the visitor to know your brand more and develop trust. If you continue to post optimized content more and more, this will usher a large number of visitors with high engagement rates, therefore creating your website a lead magnet.

With an impressive landing page and powerful lead, magnets grab the attention of your leads. Start creating informative and engaging content for a month and see what magic happens with your lead generation rates.

Lead nurturing campaigns are another prospect, where you can enlighten and educate your leads with content that helps them make informed purchase decisions.
With an impressive landing page and powerful lead, magnets grab the attention of your leads. Start creating informative and engaging content for a month and see what magic happens with your lead generation rates.