Content marketing is one of the most widely used and trusted ways to generate leads for your organization. A survey by SEMRush shows 97% of organizations use content as a vital element of their marketing strategies. According to a study by Gartner, marketing organizations spend nearly 30% of their budgets on content creation to execute a wide variety of customer engagement programs; however, less than 40% of marketers are only able to develop a well-defined content strategy.
The inability to come up with a robust content marketing strategy has a profound impact on their ability to generate leads. Today, we’ll look at 5 proven tips to use content marketing with high efficacy and get the desired number of leads.
1. Create a Buyer Persona
Your content marketing efforts must begin with the development of a properly defined buyer persona. A buyer persona is a fictional document containing your ideal customer's details. This is very important to capture the right leads. And to develop a good buyer persona, you need to specify the type of people you want as leads. The persona must include as many details as possible, such as age, income, gender, location, challenges faced, solutions sought and ability to make decisions. Having a good buyer persona helps you create content that addresses the specific needs of your target audiences, thereby making it appealing to them.
2. Provide Lead Magnets and Content Upgrades
These days, people are reluctant to share their contact information because their inboxes are already full of junk. To capture a lead, you must first provide value. And lead magnets enable you to do that. They help you solve a problem for your audience and serve as an incentive for visitors to share their information. Your lead magnets for content marketing campaigns could be e-books, reports, webinars, quizzes, courses and videos. Remember, they must be short enough to be accessed and used immediately to solve a specific problem.
Another useful technique similar to lead magnets is the content upgrade. A content upgrade is a piece of the content that is relevant to the content of a webpage and offered to a person visiting the webpage. Technically, content upgrades are lead magnets but usually generate even higher conversions because they relate to what the visitor is reading.
3. Improve Your Landing Pages
We believe that most landing pages are built specifically to capture leads. Creating landing pages without much thought does not augur well for your business as it means that you are primarily throwing away leads. You need to follow proven best practices to ensure you optimize your landing pages for high levels of conversion.
Remember, a landing page visitor must only have two options - close the page or convert; make the 'call to action button' visible. The color of your call to action button needs to be highlighted on the landing page. It is advisable to remove navigation buttons from the landing page, as they distract visitors from converting by allowing them to move way from the page. Since you want visitors to click it, let it grab their attention.
You must also carry out A/B tests regularly on your landing pages to improve your conversions. It is important to note you should only try a single element at a time, when you test a landing page. This helps you track the changes affecting your conversions.
4. Leverage Content Syndication
Having valuable content on your website/blog can bring in leads for your company. But what if you have a blog that has low levels of traffic? All the efforts you put in to create content for garnering the attention of your target audience would go waste. A good solution for this problem is content syndication. What is content syndication? Content syndication is having your content on third-party sites that are more popular than yours and reach a much bigger audience. You get exposure for your content.
5. Target Longtail Keywords With a Clear Purpose
For small to mid-size businesses, targeting longtail keywords is very beneficial. The biggest advantage of using these keywords is that it's easy to detect their intent. Secondly, there is low competition for longtail keywords. You can use a tool like SEMRush to carry out keyword research. This will help you find the longtail keywords a potential lead might use in search engines. After identifying these keywords, you should create content to target the keywords.
Subsequently, you must optimize a page for a particular keyword. This includes adding the keyword to parts of the page like headline, Uniform Resource Locator (URL), first few paragraphs, sub-headings, alt-text, and labels of images. After this, create long-form content that provides the solution your visitor is looking for.
In conclusion, the first significant step to gaining a customer is to capture a qualified lead with a few intelligent tweaks to your content marketing strategy using the tactics discussed above. You are well on your way to turning your content marketing into a lead generation machine.
At SunYello, we help you develop a highly productive content marketing strategy that will empower your business to engage your audiences effectively. Our strong focus on understanding your unique business needs allows you to craft the ideal content strategy that helps you generate leads with minimal effort and expenditure.
I hope you liked the post. How do you develop a content marketing strategy for lead generation? We'd love to know.
