Are you struggling to generate leads for your business? If your answer is yes, then you are not alone. According to a survey carried out by Hubspot, 65% of marketers revealed that generating traffic and leads is their top marketing challenges.
Content marketing is actually an effective strategy for generating more leads. This is why 89% of marketers are using content marketing in their organization. A research study also revealed that 70% are creating more content than they did one year ago.
You need something to attract people to buy from you. You can use valuable and informative content to attract quality leads.
But how do you create valuable content that will attract leads to your business? I'm about to show you ways to create high-quality content that generates leads continually.
Below are six steps you can follow to generate leads to your business through content marketing.
Conducting a market research before you start a content marketing campaign for lead generation is a must. It helps you to understand and know your market segment. This is because you cannot sell to everyone. You need to focus on your target audience and promote your content to them.
The target audience are people who show interest in your product or service. Once you know them, you will need to research the keywords they use in finding your product or service online. This is called keyword research. You can search for commercial keywords to know what your audience really wants.
For instance, if you are into computer repairs in your city and you want to know what your audience wants, you can start by using Google Adwords Keywords planner tool and put in keywords like "computer repairs in New York” into the search box. Then click on "Get ideas". This will enable you to generate search terms used by your target audience to find your business. The next thing is to search for content ideas for your keywords.
The best content ideas that generate leads are those that provide answers to help your customer overcome a pain point.
Your users will love to read such content because it solves their problems. They will not only read it but also share it with their colleagues. Also, Google will index your content pages and send more traffic your way. This will result in more leads and customers for your business.
Below are two places you can get content ideas:
The first place you need to check for content ideas are question and answer websites like Yahoo Answers or Quora. These are websites where people can go to search for answers for their pressing problems. There are professional experts there to help solve their problem. You can visit these websites to search for the most asked question in your niche and write a post on it on your blog.
2. Steal your competitors’ ideas
You can spy on your competitors to learn from their content strategy. This way, you will be learning what works for them and how to outsmart them by creating better contents. One tool you can use here is the Buzzsumo tool. Type in the name of the competitor website and you will see top ranking content in their archives. You can use this as a source of ideas to develop your own topics and content.
Once you get good ideas you can use for your blog content, it is time to write the post.
Creating quality content is not an easy task. This is why 43% of b2b marketers say that it takes too much time and they struggle with the process.
However, it is something you have to do if you must generate quality and inexpensive leads for your business. Here are the simplified processes you need to follow to create quality content that will generate more leads for your business:
a)Create a catchy, click-worthy and keyword-rich headline:
You need to create an attractive headline for your content because 73% of buying decisions are made when prospects come in contact with the headline. This means that your headline will determine whether prospects will buy from you or not. A research revealed that 80% of people never make it past the headline and only 2 out of 10 people will actually read the rest of your content. The onus lies on you to create click-worthy headlines for your content. When writing your headline, ensure that you integrate your keywords into it. You can also add power words such as "powerful, smart, effective, strong, etc. Add odd numbers to your headline, because it converts more. This was revealed by a study carried out by CMI in which it was found that odd numbers have a 20% higher click-through rate than headlines with even numbers.
b)Write in a friendly tone
When creating your content ensure that you write it in a friendly tone. Write as if you are speaking with a friend. This way, you are able to express yourself better. It also allows your audience to understand your message better. Let your content be focused on providing solutions to your audience pressing problems. As you write, sprinkle your keywords to enable you to attract organic traffic.
c)Add a call to action
Blog posts that does not have a call to action added to it will not generate the desired result. A call to action at the end of your content tells the reader what to do. It helps them to take the action you want them to take. The call to action can be for them to comment on the post, share the post on their social media networks, download a report or an e-book, etc.
Now that you have finished writing your blog post, it is time to publish it. Although it is not about the quantity of your blog posts, you need to write more and publish on your blog so that you can convert more visitors into leads. The Content Marketing Institute research survey revealed that 48% of B2C marketers and 42% of b2b marketers now publish content more frequently than once a week.
If you want to get even more leads, you can retarget those who read your content but did not convert. Retargeting is a process of creating ads that will follow your website visitors wherever they visit on the web.
You can set up a retargeting ad on Facebook, Google Adwords, etc. As they see your ads on their Facebook feeds and other websites they visit, they will be enticed to visit your website again. A study carried out by Quicksprout revealed that when you retarget your blog readers, you can get a click-through rate of 0.2%. Out of these visitors, 3.58% will convert into leads and customers. If you want to know more about this topic here you can discover 5 undervalued benefits to use retargeting for your business.
How will you know if your content marketing efforts are generating leads or not? You can know by tracking your result. Since the objective of this post is for you to use content marketing to generate leads just like 80% of marketers have done.
To track your content marketing effort for lead generation, you have to measure your customer lifetime value, social sharing, newsletter subscribers, email forwards, free content downloads (ebooks, reports), upsells and cross-sells. You can use the Google analytics tool to set up goals that will help you to measure these metrics continually. It will enable you to measure the number of people who read your blog posts, and download your lead magnet, subscribe to your newsletter, etc. Thus, you can view where each piece of content help to convert visitors into leads.
Conclusion
Good content attracts website visitors who can turn into quality leads for your business. Content marketing is an effective strategy you need to add to your lead generation campaign. It is cheap and it works.
If you want to discover more tips to collect new lead through your contents and website check out this list of 101 tactics that we’ve just created.
What other strategies are you using to produce more leads for your business?
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