If you want to expand your customer base quickly and maximize your profits, you need to be familiar with as many marketing types as possible. So, let us take a look at how to use content marketing to boost your lead generation!
What is content marketing to begin with?
Content marketing is promoting your brand by using your site or social media platforms to share blog posts, text and video guides, and similar forms of content that engage your target audience and provide interesting and useful information. Now, this means that you cannot directly use content marketing to boost your lead generation. Content is not to be used as just promotional material. Or as a way to push your audience to hire your or purchase from you. But, smartly including links to your services or products makes it very much possible to convert your audience into customers in a subtler and organic way. This will do wonders not just for your lead generation but your customer loyalty too.
Know what appeals to your audience
The first step needed to successfully use content marketing to boost your lead generation is getting to know your audience. Of course, your business should have a target audience from the start. So, learn how to use tech and modern conveniences to benefit your business by researching your audience and finding out what kind of content they prefer! Depending on the age of your target audience, they may choose informative blog posts, guides, video guides, or just short form tips. Younger audiences, for example, prefer their content in more visual forms. So, they would much rather watch a video guide than read a text. The opposite is true for older generations. They prefer having the time to properly chew through and internalize the advice they are getting. By optimizing the form of your content, you can maximize its effectiveness and success in lead generation.
Make sure your content matches your business
Of course, if you want to use content marketing to boost your lead generation, make sure it matches your business. What does this mean, you might wonder? Well, it’s simple, really: do not make the content you cannot tie into your products or services. If you run a painting business, you absolutely have no business writing a moving guide. A renovation guide? Sure! But not one where you have no chance to tie your business into the message you are sending. Otherwise, you are just wasting time producing content that will lead to no lead generation, which is obviously a waste of your resources!
Produce quality content
For your content to generate leads, it needs to be appealing. This means that people actually need to want to read or watch it. If whatever content you produce is of low quality, for example, a blog post that is riddled with grammatical and semantic errors, then the reader would feel frustrated and leave your site instead. Such shoddy quality content can even reflect badly on your brand’s reputation. After all, if you can’t even ensure the quality of your blog posts, who would want to do serious business with you? So, bad quality content actually does more harm for you than good and should be avoided at all costs.
Make sure your content is SEO friendly
If you want your content to organically generate leads, meaning people will come across it naturally without much marketing effort on your part, then it needs to be SEO friendly. If your content has high-quality SEO, the Google rating of your site will rise. This, in turn, means that your site and content will be recommended to people when they do random Google searches. If someone looks up a guide on something and your site has one, then they will be offered your text to read first. Since you are focusing on content, you definitely want to use what is called ‘White Hat SEO.’ The difference between ‘Black Hat SEO’ vs. ‘White Hat SEO‘ is that the former tries to take advantage of Google algorithms and is practically unreadable. The latter, on the other hand, organically incorporates SEO elements and is what you need.
Ride the hype but do not plagiarize
While this guideline sounds complicated, it is actually really simple. If you want to connect to lead generation through emotions, you need to write about popular topics relevant to your business to create such a connection with your content readers. However, while researching what is currently popular is fine, copying the content of other sites isn’t. If you do this, you may have the following troubles:
- It will make it difficult to stand out.
- You could get accused of and get marked for plagiarism by Google, hurting your ranking.
- People will lose interest, and your reputation will suffer.
Know how to optimize your content for conversion
We’ve touched on this before. To use content marketing to boost your lead generation, you need to leave subtle hints and, well, ‘leads’ to your products and services. If you are talking about painting and selling paint, include a line such as ‘best paints available’ and hyperlink it to your products. This doesn’t force people to visit the link. And if you include the phrase organically, such as in ‘most people want to use the best paints available, but they are sometimes expensive,’ you do not even seem pushy, or like you are trying to promote your goods.
Use all available marketing channels
Of course, you need to promote your content to reach as broad an audience as possible. Thankfully, there are many ways to do this. You can run a social media account, hire affiliate marketers, or even use PPC. Admittedly, the everyday use of PPC is for maximum sales in e-commerce, but you can still make it work if you want to grow as quickly as possible. With many advertisement channels, your content marketing will quickly bear fruit.
Final comment
Now that you know how to use content marketing to boost your lead generation, you should be able to decide whether you want to make use of it. It is a rather nice marketing method since you can incorporate it into your other marketing schemes even if you do not focus expressly on it.