Looking for lead generating ideas and amplifying your sales without knocking on doors or doing endless cold calls? You have landed at the right place. This post will navigate you to the top lead generating ideas for content marketing that would churn out the best results from your promotion campaigns.
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Let’s roll up our sleeves and get to work!
Blind cold calls, knocking on doors, and other traditional sales methods are unreasonable. Because these techniques not only require many resources but also take longer to show results. And losing a single prospect is an expensive mistake in this fast pace world.
Poorly crafted and non-targeted content marketing plans aggressively drop your conversion rates. If this phenomenon continues, you will damage your brand and even lose your existing clientele.
So, how can you set your company apart from the competition?
The answer is lead generation with content marketing. Let’s get into the details!
How does content marketing help in lead generation?
If you want to generate leads for free, you should start utilizing content marketing. It may sound basic but it really works.
Content marketing is an authoritative and long-term strategy that helps businesses convert leads into paying customers. This marketing strategy drives more than 54% results than other traditional methods. This technique really works for marketers looking for solar lead generation as well.
Content marketing strategy includes producing and publishing relevant content in the form of blogs, social media posts, infographics, etc. Posting high-quality and informative content on your site enables search engines to discover the keywords you have targeted in the post. This increases your brand visibility among people who are searching for similar products/services that you offer.
For instance, you have published a blog regarding the cost of breathable mesh running shoes with the title ‘What is the cost of breathable mesh running shoes? If your potential customer is researching the price of mesh running shoes, they will find your content in search results.
Once they click on this post, they will be navigated through your business website. This entire process is called content marketing which educates your potential clients through the content and makes them your customers.
Now you have understood the role of content marketing in lead generation. Let’s quickly understand a few strategies that greatly help in lead generation.
Top content marketing techniques for lead generation
Content marketing does yield results. However, to get the expected outcome, it should be done rightly. Here is a list of lead generation with content marketing techniques to get the most out of your promotion efforts.
1. E-books
Since 2008, e-book sales have augmented by more than 3000% because the number of readers has also ascended in recent years. This figure shows that producing and releasing e-books is an effective way to capture leads.
E-books are offered for free but in exchange, you can collect your reader’s email addresses which puts them into the sales funnel. This content marketing strategy introduces new leads into your sales funnel and increases your brand value.
Whenever you create e-books, its content should educate the leads and show your expertise in the field. Like long-form content, e-books are also produced to give comprehensive information about a particular subject. Consider offering value to the readers, they should consider your e-books a good source of information and more can be expected in the future.
2. Webinar hosting
Hosting a webinar is another powerful lead generation tactic through content marketing. However, the success of a webinar highly depends on the amount of value it provides to the people. If you do meet this goal, your site visitors will readily provide their email addresses and other contact information to you.
You need to offer real expertise and where you applied your experience in real to build trust. Whenever you host a webinar, ask questions to the participants. This will help you evaluate their interest in your offerings. This question and answers session will also help you understand your prospect’s position in the sales cycle.
3. Visual content
High-quality content is a powerful method of lead generation. However, you should never undervalue the impact of pictures and other types of visual content in lead generation. Using images in your content boosts the effectiveness of your overall message. As there are many types of visual content used for marketing, you need to choose the one that conveys your message the right way.
The following is the list of popular visual content to generate leads.
● Educational videos: You can educate your potential customers through educational videos. Teach them how to use a particular product. As many businesses are following this suit, there is massive competition. To stand out, put in extra effort and make your videos more interesting to boost engagement.
● Infographics: Infographics are not only attractive but are highly shareable. Such forms of content are written precisely inside an image which provides value to the readers. Creating high-quality infographics can improve your brand credibility and help you rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs).
● Illustrations: Illustrations are another powerful visual content marketing technique that helps businesses in lead generation. It is a lengthy document or visual summary where the message is conveyed in the form of different impressions.
4. Whitepapers
Whitepapers are a pretty old form of content marketing but they are still used for lead generation because it is highly effective. The only aspect that matters is the efficacy of your whitepaper. To create an effective whitepaper, you need to keep the following pointers in check.
● Title: The title of the whitepaper should be eye-catchy. It should catch readers’ attention.
● Body text: This content should offer value to the readers. Whether a reader buys your offerings or not, the body portion of the whitepaper should be helpful to them.
● Promotion: Whitepaper should be distributed to the sales team for lead generation. Use this in your email marketing campaign, outreach campaign, social media, etc. to promote your brand.
● Lead strategy: The follow-up email should offer more info to the readers. You can ask your readers to enroll for the upcoming webinar or download another whitepaper or e-book.
5. Consumer Case Studies
Case studies are content that tells readers about a particular issue that customers encountered and how a particular product/service helped them to fix it. These are success stories of products and services. Case studies should include the following:
● Summary: The case study should start with a problem and steps taken to fix it.
● Real examples: To set your case studies apart from your competitors, consider including genuine reviews.
● Photos/videos: Videos and photos make case studies more visually engaging. You can also include charts to give more backing to the case study. Providing a comparison of different products through video can also be effective in generating leads.
● Solution: Tell how you fix a particular problem through your product or service while keeping the broader audience in mind.
Many marketers feel case studies are boring but the truth is, they can turn a reader into a buyer. When it comes to B2B marketing, case studies are considered the third most effective marketing tactic to generate leads.
6. Data-driven Content
The core objective of generating content is to gain the trust of your target audience. Once you earn the trust of your prospects, they become your paying and loyal customers. However, to achieve this goal, you need to ensure the credibility of the content you are including in your site.
To make sure the content is absolutely accurate, consider including data and facts. Produce content around trending topics and back your information with data and statistics. This makes your content reliable and 100% accurate.
7. How-tos
How-tos or explainer guides are one of the finest lead generation tactics in content marketing. Just like e-books, it provides ample information about a particular topic along with its benefits and features to the prospects. How-tos can be textual and visual, both forms are effective for lead generation. They are a very engaging and interesting method of creating brand awareness.
Whenever you craft how-to guides, consider the following points:
● Avoid putting a lot of information and data in a single guide. If you provide several services/products, create different guides for each.
● Don’t include ambiguous words or phrases. Use simple language and keep it concise.
● Make it engaging and entertaining.
● Include links to understand more about a particularly complex topic.
End Note
Generating leads is immensely important for your business as you need a constant flow of profits for surviving in this competitive world. If you fail to fetch your prospect’s interest, they will not think twice before reaching out to your competitor. As a result, your conversion rate will drop.
To supplement your conversion rate, you need to generate leads as many as possible. Lead generation with content marketing yields results. It is all about creating valuable, informative, data-driven, and relevant content. Content marketing convinces your target audience that your brand is the right pick for them.
All the aforementioned techniques help you generate leads. Depending on the niche of your business, you can choose any and start the most fruitful content marketing campaign.
No matter what you pick, it should align with your goals and target audience requirements.
