Fill your lead funnel through content marketing!Content is a critical component of great B2B marketing today. Content can help position your organization as thought leaders, nurture prospects over time, and best of all, it can generate high-quality leads, too. Without any further adieu, here are 7 ways to generate high-quality leads with content marketing.
1. Create content that attracts your best prospects
If you’re like most B2B marketers, you’ve identified a few sweet spots—those prospects that are most likely to close and become your most profitable, best customers. While you may already focus your PPC, search and banner efforts on attracting them, you can do the same with your content marketing. Make sure a portion of your content focuses on the pain points and interests of your most valuable and important segments.
2. Help solve problems and address pain points
All good content, whether white papers, blogs, webinars, or slides, addresses pain points and solves problems. Create Guides, Top 10 Lists, How-Tos etc. This is a critical step in attracting your best prospects, because when they are searching for you, they may not use words to describe your company or product—they’ll use words that focus on solving problems and improving their results. It’s your job to educate them that the way to solve their problem is with your solution.
3. Go beyond your specific offering
Sure, while you should always create content about your organization’s specific area of focus, you’ll attract a bigger audience if your content addresses other topics that are interesting and important to your best prospects. For instance, let’s say you market social media solutions to senior-level marketers. While I recommend becoming a trusted source of information and advice on social media marketing and creating content about it, you should also create content that focuses on marketing ROI, public relations, industry news, and SEO, because most senior marketers that are interested in social media, are also interested in those topics, too.
4. Become a trusted resource
Every marketer is now a publisher. It’s important for your content to be helpful and useful. Give away some secrets to the magic behind your company—really. Don’t shill. Don’t sell. And when your prospects are ready to evaluate solutions, they’ll go to you, not your competitors.
5. Delight and engage—let your prospects to get to know you
Don’t discount the importance of delighting your visitors and letting them get to know you and your brand via your content marketing. After all, buyers don’t buy from companies—they buy from people. And every touch point of your marketing, whether that’s content, social media, search, or email, is an opportunity for your prospects to get to know your organization and what you stand for. So delight them, engage them, and deliver awesome. The more you do, the more likely they will be to raise their hand, become a lead, and hopefully, a customer.
6. Include conversion points within your content
Think you can’t generate leads from blog posts? Think again. Every blog post is an opportunity to convert a visitor into a lead. For example, if you’re promoting a webinar on email marketing, you can generate interest in the webinar by writing a blog on the “Top 10 Ways to Improve Email Open Rates”, and then cross promote a call-to-action at the end of the blog to sign up for the webinar. You can also link to a landing page with gated content (ex: a white paper), which will allow visitors to learn more about the topic. (ion does that at the end of this blog post! See below.) You can also include banner ad on your blog, or a call-to-action within any white papers that get passed around. (Me? I use LiveBall to create landing pages that I link to from blogs and white papers.)
7. Make it easy to share
This may seem obvious, but the easier you make it for your visitors to share your content with their networks, the more likely they’ll be to do it. So, include share buttons for LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and any other network that your prospects use. Don’t only use these buttons on your website, but also include them in any PDF content as well.
Want to learn more about generating leads from content marketing? Check out ion’s FREE guide, Conversion Content Marketing.