How do I use Content Marketing to generate leads?
Content marketing is a fundamental part of online lead generation. Whether you are trying to obtain leads through social media, emails, blogging or YouTube. You need to have great content to start with. People are spending more time researching online before making a purchasing decision, to keep these people engaged with your business you need to be able to demonstrate expertise in your field.
Many companies tend to use their online platform to simply advertise their products and services but that is not content marketing.
The Content Marketing Institute defines content marketing as:
“Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience— and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”
So how do you use content marketing for online lead generation?
According to Pam Didier in her book, ‘Global Content Marketing’,there are four key stages in a successful content marketing campaign. They are Plan, Produce, Promote and Perfect. The four P’s of content marketing.
Plan
When planning a content marketing campaign, you need to keep in mind your target audience. If we go back to the definition above – the aim of content marketing is to attract a “clearly defined audience”. This stage is all about trying to understand your target audience and finding out what their interests are and what topics will generate their curiosity.
Knowing this sort of information enables you to decide which type of content you should produce and in which medium you should present your content (i.e. in a video, podcast or blog). The next step is to think about when to publish your content, it’s a really good idea to have an editorial calendar. This will help you set targets and encourage you to be consistent in the delivery of your content, whilst keeping your publishing aligned with your overall objectives.
Good content marketing is about being able to deliver good quality content consistently. This way, your business can establish strong relations with your reader/customer. In fact, some would argue that although we use the word content a lot, you shouldn’t really view it as simply content. It should mean something to your business, you should be proud of it. The idea is not to churn out endless blog posts with little value.
Content Production
After successfully completing the planning stage, you can now produce the content.
When producing the content, make sure you invest a good amount of time and effort in creating the best content possible. Don’t stick to one medium for your content; produce content for variety of different mediums which relate to the topic e.g. create YouTube videos and blog posts which discusses the same topic. This allows you to test which get the best response so that you can do more of what works and less of what doesn’t work!
Promote
Once your content has been produced, it is time to promote it to your target audience. During this stage, you will need to investigate where your target market likes to spend their time online. Thankfully, there are many forums and discussion boards that take place online on places like Reddit and Facebook. Your target market are likely to be active on at least one social platform (80% of internet users are active on social media) All you have to do is find a relevant topic discussion and then approach, interact and then share your content.
Spend as much time on promotion as you do on creation, if a small audience is interested in what you have to say, then chances are there are lots more people out there that would also get value from it. Try and reach as many of these people as possible to get the very best from each piece you produce.
Perfect
When your content has been read (or watched) online, you may start to gain comments and feedback. This is a great way of working out the subjects that people find most engaging, make sure you respond to any comments quickly.
Conclusion
Producing value to potential customers will help to build relationships with them, by having a strong relationship you have a far better chance of turning traffic to your website into future customers. If you want to find out more about lead generation, then please click on the button below for our Free e-book on the best methods of generating leads online.
