When the current business landscape is filled with fellow competitors offering similar services as you, attracting potential customers and clients can become a tall order. In today’s work landscape, there’s no doubt that using traditional marketing methods will no longer cut it.
So what can you do to generate leads? The secret lies in connecting with your clients! It’ll convince people to choose you over anyone else in your industry. This can be done through utilizing newer strategies such as Content Marketing. Let’s dive in!
Understanding Concepts
Along with the continuous evolution of industries, many concepts and terminologies also gain traction and importance. Before you can start generating leads using content marketing, you need to first understand their basic meaning.
Lead Generation
This term is synonymous with finding potential customers. With customers being referred to as ‘leads’, lead generation is the process of attracting and securing clients who may be interested in the products or services you offer. To separate normal viewers from actual leads, the latter would usually express their interest and willingly provide their contact information for future engagement.
The main purpose of lead generation is to accurately identify people who may be interested in purchasing your offers. After identifying them, the process of lead generation would also call for establishing a clear means of communication so that your employees would be able to convert interested people into actual clients.
Content Marketing
Although lead generation is a vital factor for your business’ success, it can be a hard process especially when you’re unsure of how to generate leads. This is where strategies like content marketing come into play.
This type of marketing is a strategic approach that focuses on creation and distribution of relevant content that aims to engage your target audience. Unlike advertisements that focus entirely on selling, content marketing uses valuable information and interesting topics to tickle people’s interests. It doesn’t directly promote your products or services.
The Content Marketing Framework that Generates Substantial Leads
You need to use a well-structured approach that can generate good results if you want to successfully utilize content and digital marketing,. No matter the industries you focus on, you can find significant leads by following the framework below:
Understand Your Target Audience
Since content marketing focuses on material to connect with potential customers, the first step you need to do is to get to know your audience. It’s going to be difficult and ineffective your content isn’t relevant to your target audience. It’d be like selling ice cream in the winter!
Remember that content marketing is meant to catch people’s and hopefully translate them into purchases.
When conducting thorough research, try to find the answers to the following questions:
- What are the needs of my target consumers that I can meet?
- What are their interests related to the industry or to the product?
- What my potential customers’ pain points?
- Do they have certain purchasing behavior I need to be aware of?
- What type of content usually catches their attention?
Read More: Everything You Need to Know About Tailored Solutions and Productized Services
Produce Valuable Content
Of course, content marketing shouldn’t stop at conducting research and surveys. Once you’ve collected precious background information about your target clients, you need to produce valuable content that grabs their attention. This means avoiding general topics. Focus on industry-related material or blog posts that address the results of the questions stated above.
Let’s use Information Technology (IT) as an example. Imagine you’re looking for clients needing contractual IT professionals. You need to get to know their needs if you want to create effective content that resonates with them
Ask yourself. Are most companies looking for software developers? Do they have any similarities in the requirements they state? Are there specific pain points that your services can solve? Once you have those answers, you can incorporate them in making content related to their industry and topics they’re interested in.
Whether it’s ‘The benefits of contractual employees to an IT company’ or ‘The best way to bridge the talent gap in your business’, you have to make sure the materials are targeting the qualified leads you want to reach.
Read More: 3 Tips on How to Sustain Your Website’s Impact
Write Effective Call-to-Actions
Good content can only result in lead generation when you can prompt your viewers to act on their interest in your products or services. Want to know the secret? A compelling call-to-action (CTA) is key in every piece of content you publish!
It’s not enough for people to know your offered services. You need to give them a gentle nudge to get them to take action. Still don’t believe us? According to Google, posts that have personalized CTAs perform 2 times better than those without.¹ This shows that CTAs are truly the secret sauce for marketing and lead generation.
For example, you published an interesting piece about the great opportunities an immigrant nurse can have in America. You made sure to include factual evidence and parts that appealed to your readers’ emotions. Even if the piece was well-written, you won’t convince nurses to grab available opportunities if you don’t tell them what action to take.
Should they reach out to your company to start their journey? Should they download an e-book you made about migrating to America? Or maybe they should fill in a form with their name and contact details if they’re interested? Be clear and deliberate when calling for action. Also be strategic about how you insert it in the materials you post.
But take care not to oversell your CTAS. You might risk turning them off. After all, no one wants to sound like an overeager salesman.
Optimize Landing Pages and Gated Content
Convincing people with your call-to-action needs to be followed by providing working landing pages for your potential clients. To create lead generation, you need to design landing pages that are easy to navigate. Prioritize good user experience by ensuring that everything is simple and pleasing to the eye. For example, there’s no need to insert unnecessary ads or content on landing pages.
Keep your layout simple and clean so that clients can focus on what they came there for. The same goes for gated content. When your CTA calls for people to download files like whitepapers, case studies, or manuals, maximize the opportunity in order to get their contact details. Usually, people who are interested in gated content are those who are most likely to become actual customers or clients.
So if you can optimize the way you gather data before providing access to important files, then you’re performing good lead generation.
Analyze and Refine Materials
A marketing strategy can only be effective if it is continuously improved by the companies that use them. So for content marketing to be effective, it is your duty to regularly analyze data and decide whether the strategies are still effective or not.
But what should you do with tactics that were once effective? Instead of scraping them completely or replacing them with other strategies, you can simply refine them based on the data you’ve gathered from observations, research, and surveys.
Track key metrics like website traffic and click rates to identify which content is still effective and which should be refined. During this step of marketing and lead generation, every decision should be data-driven in order to produce high-quality leads.
Read More: 11 Marketing Strategic Staging Techniques to Maintain Momentum All Year
SEAL THE DEAL AND CONVERT LEADS WITH ALLIED INSIGHT
Ready to take your business to the next level? Look no further than Allied Insight! We’re all about making your marketing shine. Our team crafts valuable content to supercharge your lead generation efforts.
As a full stack marketing agency, can ramp up your campaigns and lead generation strategy to convert potential clients into loyal customers. Let’s make success happen – get in touch now!
Reference
1 “Lead with a clear call-to-action (CTA).” Think with Google, March 2022, https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/intl/en-gb/future-of-marketing/creativity/strong-call-to-action/.
