How to Generate Qualified Leads with Content Marketing
You’ve probably heard the words “Content sells” and “Content is king” numerous times. These phrases did not become a staple in branding and marketing overnight.
They’ve become widely used because more people are starting to accept that content marketing is a proven strategy for gaining traction in the online world.
Whether you’re a B2B or B2C business, content is the quickest way to get discovered and provide value to prospective customers.
Content marketing generates three times as many leads as traditional marketing and costs 62% less.
The leads generated by content marketing are of higher quality and are more likely to convert. For your business to produce this kind of result, you have to execute your content marketing strategy correctly.
According to Hubspot’s State of Inbound report, 70% of marketing teams claim that converting leads into customers is their top priority, and 63% of them admit that generating leads is one of their biggest challenges.
If you’re also experiencing some trouble generating qualified leads for your organization and you’re looking for a solution, then you’ve come to the right place.
In this article, I’ll show you three practical ways you can leverage your content to get as many leads as possible.
- Know your audience: Capturing the wrong leads is even worse than getting no leads because you’ll end up wasting resources on a prospect that’s unlikely to become your customer. The best way to create compelling content is to figure out who you’re trying to reach and learn as much as you can about them.
- Offer high-value lead magnets and content upgrades: People are more reluctant than ever to share their contact information, so to capture a lead, you need to make them an offer that’s hard to refuse. You can give visitors free videos, courses, reports, or ebooks loaded with valuable information in exchange for their details.
- Optimize your landing pages to encourage conversions: When your landing page sucks, visitors won’t convert because they don’t know how your offer is going to help them. You can avoid this by creating clear and compelling landing pages that entice visitors to take the desired action.
Marketers who are consistent with their content marketing efforts generate 67% more leads than marketers who are not. Don’t assume that people will buy from you just because you ask them to.
You have to provide something beneficial that draws them in and convinces them to hand over their money to you. That’s where content marketing comes in.
1. Know your audience
Conducting market research
Carrying out in-depth marketing research is not an option; it’s a necessity. You need to learn what your competitors are doing on the content front, figure out what they’re missing and how you can improve upon their strategy to create better content. You can start by speaking to your existing customers to find what problems they’re facing and how your business can provide a solution. When surveying or interviewing customers and prospects, ensure that your questions cover the following areas:- Basic demographic details (age, gender, location, income, family makeup)
- Challenges and pain points
- Values
- Common goals
- Decision-making abilities
- Interests (hobbies, entertainment, etc.)
- Objections they’re likely to have
- Job roles and responsibilities
- Main source of getting information
Other ways to determine your prospects’ needs and most pressing problems are to look at the commercial keywords that they enter into search engines when looking for solutions to their issues.
Use the Google Planner Tool, and the search suggest feature on search engines to find what your prospects search for and how often they search for those words or phrases each month.
Once you identify these keywords, you can then create fantastic content around those keywords that can drive excellent results and ultimately increase your sales.
Building buyer personas.
Even if you have the most fantastic content in the world, it’s still unlikely to generate qualified leads or convert them if it’s not aimed at the right audience.
A buyer persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer or client. The goal behind creating a buyer persona is to determine the format, tone, and style of content that you’ll create to capture your target audience effectively.
The information you gathered from your market research will come in handy here. Buyer personas help you create a picture of your typical customer, so you can create content around topics that are most likely interesting to them.
For example, if your buyer persona shows that ideal customers are teens and young adults, they’re going to prefer a different type of content than high-level company professionals in their 30s to mid-60s.
Your buyer persona should have as many details as possible about your ideal customers. Although, it’s possible to have multiple buyer personas for your product or service, it’s better to focus on one persona—the persona that’ll be most interested in your brand and its offerings— at a time if you’re new to content marketing.
2. Offer high-value lead magnets and content upgrades
One of the most effective ways to generate qualified leads from content marketing is by offering valuable information through leads magnets and content upgrades in exchange for a prospect’s data.
Think of leads magnets as a giveaway that incentivizes people to give you their content information. For instance, you can offer a case study that explores some of the challenges related to your target market and provides solutions to the problem.
For visitors to get this case study for free, all they have to do is give you their name and email address.
An effective lead magnet must possess the following characteristics:
- Be chock full of value—it must solve an immediate and specific problem for your audience.
- Be easily accessible to your lead once they’ve fulfilled the giveaway criteria.
- Be short enough to be used immediately.
The best lead magnets offer exclusive insights or original search in a way that’s easy for the audience to understand. Some of the types of content you can use as lead magnets are:
- Case studies/Reports
- Quizzes
- Templates/Worksheets/Checklists
- Ebooks
- Whitepapers
- Courses
- Videos
- Webinars
- Step-by-step guides
Another content marketing approach you can use to set yourself apart from the competition and generate quality leads is content upgrades.
For this tactic to be successful, you need an existing library of valuable content that benefits your target audience.
Content upgrades are pieces of content that you offer to someone who visits a specific page. This content is usually related to what the visitor is currently reading.
It could be a checklist of the key points in your article, an in-depth guide based on a blog post, PDF version of a webinar, or another format of the page content that visitors can keep for future use. To get the upgrade, your visitor has to provide their contact information.
The secret to a great lead magnet or content upgrade is to make sure the content you’re offering is strikingly useful and beneficial to anyone who reads it.
You want people to go through your content upgrade or lead magnet and think, “This is so good. I can’t believe they’re giving it away for free.”
Eventually, they’ll start imagining how fantastic your actual products or paid services must be if your free content provides so much value.
3. Optimize your landing pages to encourage conversions
After creating content to share with your prospects, the next step is to design a landing page to present that content. It helps to increase your lead generation and conversion rates.
Think of your leads magnets and content upgrades as being in a locked room and your landing page as the door. For visitors to gain access to the room, they have to unlock the door by submitting their contact information via a form on your landing page.
Landing pages are important because they allow you to demonstrate the value of your offerings and tell prospects exactly what to expect if they accept your offer.
If you don’t optimize your landing page for conversions, you’re going to keep on failing to maximize the leads you generate and convert them into customers.
To ensure that you have a high-converting landing page to crown your content marketing efforts, adhere to the following guidelines:
- Remove the navigation bar, so visitors aren’t distracted and tempted to click away from the page without converting.
- Use a compelling headline that grabs attention.
- The landing page should load quickly and be aesthetically pleasing.
- Write a strong and persuasive copy.
- Share key takeaways of the benefits they stand to gain from your offer.
- Incorporate a smart form with 3-7 relevant fields to capture lead information in exchange for your valuable content.
- Have a clear call-to-action and make sure your CTA button stands out on the page.
- Include social proof such as testimonials, number of subscribers, and media mentions to cultivate trust.
The only way to improve the effectiveness of your landing page is to keep testing different elements on the page and measuring their effects on conversions.
Things like page copy, headlines, images, background, color schemes, call to action, and the number of form fields can be tested to see what works best.
When optimizing your landing page, remember only to change and test one element at a time so you can accurately track how each affects your conversion rate.
Conclusion
The key to a successful content marketing campaign is understanding that 96% of first-time visitors are not ready to make a purchase. They just want to get to know your company better, compare you to your competitors, and figure out which brand is the better choice for them.
Once you know this, you can put away the overt sales pitches and focus on creating and sharing content that provides real value to your prospects.
Content is a powerful tool for driving traffic to your website, nurturing leads, and turning them into customers. If you want your business to become a lead generation machine, you have to start producing content that is useful to your target audience.
By tweaking your content marketing plan using the tactics I’ve laid out in this article, you can increase the number of leads that come your way and successfully capture them.
