Whether you are a marketing professional, a web developer, or an entrepreneur, content creation is an issue that affects all businesses equally. Whether it is through an email newsletter, a social media campaign , or a blog post, most companies today have turned to content-led marketing as an efficient strategy for growing their businesses.
But is the content you’re sharing actually having a direct impact on business success? Is it actually helping you meet the business goals you’ve set for this quarter?
While PR and business campaigns are important, most small businesses and entrepreneurs focus primarily on sales and scaling their businesses; therefore, content created to generate leads is the most impactful marketing tactic they can invest in.
By creating content that generates leads, you can easily measure the success and direct impact of your marketing efforts. All the while, you create a steady flow of business, which is something all business owners can agree is valuable. With all of this in mind, read on for three tips on how to create lead-generating content to keep your business growing.
How to generate leads: 3 tips that your business will appreciate
1.- Develop valuable and targeted content.
Sharing information and knowledge is a great way to generate leads. Investing in creating and distributing high-quality, informative content will help demonstrate your knowledge and skill set as a business. This, in turn, will help position the business as an expert in its field.
People naturally turn to a subject matter expert when they're looking to learn about a specific topic. And when it comes to product or service recommendations, that expert appears to be more trustworthy than average. People want to do business with experts.
How do you develop high-quality, informative, and leading content? First, there are a few key things to consider: audience, SEO, and content format. To develop valuable, targeted content, you need to have a very specific audience in mind. Defining your audience sets the tone for the content you'll create, the keywords you'll optimize for, and the format or medium in which that content is delivered.
To define your audience, you'll need to create gambling data singapore a buyer persona . Reviewing past clients and contacts in your database will help you better understand who you're writing for and what you're selling your services for. Answering questions about their background, demographics, and personality identifiers will help fill out the picture of who your target audience is. Here's a good guide to creating that buyer persona.
Once you've defined your target audience, figuring out which keywords to optimize for is a much simpler task. Keep both your target audience and your business goals in mind when generating a list of keywords. This will help you create a list that's broad enough to attract a significant audience, while also ensuring that the audience you attract fits your sales goals.
Lastly, educational content that generates leads goes beyond a typical blog post — it’s more along the lines of white papers, infographics, eBooks, or online courses. This type of content is typically gated or requires a download, so people must provide their email in exchange for access. Sharing content in this format provides the contact information of all the leads who followed your call to action , making them highly qualified leads .
2.- Maintain a solid content strategy across all channels
Content plays a huge role in generating online leads for a business. Consumers are mostly rejecting traditional forms of advertising, and businesses are finding that traditional marketing is becoming less effective with each passing year.
Content is king when it comes to digital marketing. It’s all about engaging your target audience by developing and distributing messages that are relevant and valuable to them.
To achieve this goal, you must first develop a content strategy to ensure that the messages you share with your audience link to business objectives and reinforce the company's overall mission.
Why? Well, without a strategy to back up the content you’re sharing, you’re likely to fall into the trap of focusing on short-term, sporadic tactics. Instead of aligning with your core business goal. Messaging across your marketing channels becomes disjointed and your audience becomes less focused and therefore confused. With a poorly defined audience and inconsistent messaging, your calls to action will fall on deaf ears and fewer readers will convert into leads and subsequently customers.
The solution: a solid content strategy.
To develop a content strategy, you'll need to define your business goals to set the stage for the rest of the strategy development. By basing your content strategy on business goals, you'll ensure that your content is always serving the company's most important needs and focused on helping you achieve success.
After defining your audience and target keyword list, it's time to test which content format works best for that audience.
3.- Implement clear Call To Actions throughout the content
If your goal is to generate leads, you need to make sure that the content you're sharing is action-oriented. No matter what format you choose, whether it's a blog post, email newsletter, or video, you need to let your readers know what you want them to do next.
The valuable content you’ve created and shared is the persuasive setup for your call to action. Your audience will already be primed for your message and goals, so you can show them an offer they can’t refuse. Some key things to keep in mind when creating a call to action are:
Make your Calls To Action (CTA) obvious and easy to find – you don’t want your audience to do research to take the next step. Make the response to your request as simple as possible by placing them in clear places.
Create a sense of urgency: Remind your readers to follow up immediately, rather than delaying them and letting them eventually forget to respond to your CTA.
Make sure your CTA is action- and benefit-oriented. Too often, basic calls to action like “click here” or “download now” sound like work and often create a mental block to moving forward. Make sure your CTA reflects the benefit your audience will receive by responding to that call to action. This will make it much more appealing to your potential customers. Something more along the lines of “Tell me more information” or “Get the eBook now” will be much more appealing.
Limit it to one CTA – The more options your audience has to deliberate on, the more confused and undecided they will be and the less likely they will be to respond to your request. Have fewer options and your audience will be less confused and therefore more likely to follow the call to action.
Calls to action are essential to the lead generation process. Without them, your audience will not engage with your content and then leave. It is imperative to include CTAs; without them, all the time and money spent on creating a content strategy and distributing it will go down the drain.
Create content that helps you grow your business
Time is money for small business owners, entrepreneurs and marketing professionals.
When business owners make decisions, they usually do so based on what can have the biggest impact with the least amount of effort. When you make sure your marketing strategy goes beyond PR campaigns, and focuses on attracting potential customers to become new customers, you are making those decisions.
