When you have a content marketing strategy that doesn’t match up with the needs of consumers in any way then it doesn’t really matter what marketing technologies you have. It won’t be effective. Simple as that.
Because creating a content marketing strategy isn’t just about creating good content that ranks high on search engine results pages. It’s about giving your audience value, giving them something that’s relevant, maybe even educational, so that they’ll rely on the information you source them with.
Read more: How to Generate Leads with Content Marketing
And that’s your in for generating leads with content marketing.
What Is Lead-Generating Content Marketing?
Lead generating content marketing is a marketing effort, a strategic one, focusing on the creation and the distribution of relevant, engaging thought-pieces or educational and informative posts that provide useful information to a viewer. It’s basically what any business does when generating content and then promoting said content.
Typically, the rule of thumb is that the better and more thought-out your content marketing strategy is, the better chance you have at generating some real quality leads.
How To Generate Leads Through Content Marketing
With the digital world we live, speculation is no longer a thing when it comes to what people do and don’t like. Not when we have resources like Google Analytics and other tools that help us understand what is and isn’t working.
We have plenty of data to make educated guesses about the things that will be ranking in the coming months and what we should be particular about when creating content.
Know Your Audience
Before you do anything, you need to know your audience, need to understand their needs. It’s one of the fundamentals, really. Think of it this way, how do you buy a birthday gift for someone you don’t know? It’s challenging because you don’t know whether they’ll appreciate the gift you do buy or if they wanted cold, hard cash.
Creating content on a whim is pretty much the same. Your audience has needs and you need to define your target audience so you know who your content is being aimed toward. There’s no shortcut, really, but you can do some things to help you out. Such as interviewing consumers, checking out the audience of your competitors, or even posting a survey for them to complete.
Keyword Research
If you’ve been around long enough to see many a blog posted by us, then you’ve probably seen this little two word phrase enough times to last you. I know I’ve typed it a lot. But it’s so essential to practically anything content-related.
Keyword research is incredibly beneficial to you because once you know what your audience wants, you can target questions specifically. Content you produce with the right targeted keywords is relevant to your audience and what they’re searching for.
Focus keywords are key when it comes to generating leads through content marketing. You’re targeting specifically what people are searching for and with easily read and relevant content, yours will easily become a trusted source among audiences.
There are tools that can help you, like Google’s Keyword Planner.
Creating and Promoting Content
Creating your relevant, targeted, and keyword focused piece of content is great – you’ll do well. But you need to promote it, it won’t promote itself. You need to be the one to distribute it across multiple content channels for audiences and potential customers to read, feel something towards it, and then share it on.
So that means you have to create it and promote it, but you also have to make sure it’s shareable. Otherwise it’s only you that is promoting it when really, you want the audience to be promoting it, too.
Choosing the Right Content Channels
There’s something to be said about all the different content channels available to us today. All you have to know is that choosing the right content for the right channel can be very helpful to you.
Different content channels often require different formats for how the content is delivered to an audience. On Instagram, for instance, you wouldn’t post a 500-word think-piece. It just doesn’t fit. Instead, it would make more sense to create multiple infographics or to use pictures in place of the 500-word mini essay.
Infographics will be much more favoured on Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter, too, where word count is low rather than on blogs. That’s not to say they’re bad with text. Nope. They’re great on blogs. However, when your aim is to do a well thought-out textual piece, it’s better to focus on having this as the blog. Perhaps you could make an accompaniment infographic to go with the blog post and also helps in promoting it.
Optimise Landing Pages
If you’re promoting your content, the last thing you want is a poorly optimised landing page. When they’re not optimised to convert, then it doesn’t matter how much traffic you’ve driven to your site. Lead generation will be lower than what you want it to be.
So optimise your landing pages! Pages that are tidy, easy to read, have visuals, load fast, simple to navigate, uncluttered – these make landing pages great. The whole point of your landing page is to keep consumers on it, not send them away by faulty links and poor designs.
The majority of visitors to your site don’t have the patience to read paragraph after paragraph after paragraph. Neither do they want to sit and wait for the page to load. Which is why you need to provide visitors with something clear and concise. A page with great copy, visual elements and, if it’s a product or service, customer reviews and testimonials!
And make sure your landing pages are optimised for mobile users! Especially considering they make up the majority of internet users these days.
Personalisation
I’ve talked before about personalised content and how it can be beneficial to a business. It’s an old-school approach but it still works like a charm! Personalisation boosts effectiveness of marketing tactics because appeals directly to individuals – makes them feel singled out (in a good way!) and unique. Cared for. Important. Understood. You get the point.
When we feel like this, we’re more likely to engage with whatever it was that brought this feeling forward. The personalisation itself can be simple – a nice, personalised email, welcoming the customer to the website by name – or it can be complex – personalising an entire online experience. It really is up to you depending on the success of it generating leads.
Contact GrowTraffic Today!
Hopefully, this post has given you insight in how you can generate leads through content marketing. If you’ve been struggling with this exact thing, try some of the suggestions mentioned here! If not, why not reach out to GrowTraffic? We can help you with your content marketing strategies, coming up with tactics and strategies that will be best suited to your business.
Over the past 10 years and more, GrowTraffic has been delivering SEO strategies and digital marketing service to clients. And we’ve done a pretty good job of it, too.
Send us an email at info@growtraffic.co.uk or give us a phone on 01706 706 0012 for a more direct conversation with one of the team!
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