Effective Content Marketing brings you leads and conversions.
It’s not about writing something just to spread your voice online, but it’s all about crating a strong strategy and writing with purpose, having clearly in mind which are your goals: what do you want to achieve with your content?
- an established powerful brand awareness?
- a new brand positioning?
- finding a new audience?
- getting leads and quote requests?
How can you use your Content Marketing for Lead Generation? I’ll explain you how to do it in a very easy and practical way in this article, that is a sum up of my podcast for Cracking Copy, a marketing and copywriting podcast by Ella Hoyos and Minnie McBride. You can listen to the full podcast episode here.
Lead Generation Content: what does it mean
Your content should always bring leads and conversions. Otherwise why are you creating content?
Thousands of sessions to your website are not enough to increase sales: only high-conversion copy and content could do it. Creating Lead Generation Content means creating content that is high-engaging and answers to your audience needs. It’s often a content based on user intents (keywords and user researches), but it also come from online listening in social media groups discussions or micro data analysis.
There is no difference between creating content for branding and lead generation and SEO. In both cases, you’ve to care about your target and users researches: even if your content is just for branding, it has to be found on Google, otherwise you put a lot of effort in creating a piece of content that nobody will find.
2 most common errors that people make when creating content for lead generation
The first big error is not considering and understanding your target: it’s not enough to know demographics and so on. You have to deeply understand your audience, it’s journey, its pains&gains.
The second error is publishing only promotional content: people don’t care about how much your brand amazing is, but how they can solve a problem with your product or service.
How to get leads from social media and email list
The best way os running ads because advertising brings you leads in less time than organic activities but, when you stop it, every lead won’t arrive anymore.
You can also rely on organic content that must be extremely helpful for your audience: you could also build authority and trust and a strong brand awareness that will be strong forever. Think about blogs, podcasts, videos.
2 Content Strategies that work best for organic lead generation on different social media platforms
1 | Helpful content.
Creating content that solves a problem to your target. For example, when doing a keyword research, you discover that people search for a specific intent on Google: start writing a piece of content about that, answering to your target questions.
You can use several tools, such as Semrush, Ubersugget, AnwerThePublic.
This is a research I did for a client in the air conditioning: AnswerThePublic got me many questions and intents users search for on Google. These are all ideas for pieces of content: blogposts, podcasts, videos, infographics, maps, social media posts.
2 | Content that engages with the community and creates empathy:
- behind the scenes
- brand values
- storytelling
- showing people at work
How to measure the success of a content strategy in terms of lead generation and conversions
You can track KPIs you identified when creating the strategy. Some examples:
- new leads/new quote requests
- questions about your product or service
- website sessions
- time spent on your website/on specific pages
- bounce rate (<60% is generally good)
