While high-quality products/services at affordable prices are undoubtedly crucial to today’s consumers, that’s not the only thing that your prospects are going to consider necessary. They don’t want to do business with companies that are solely interested in improving their profit margins and boosting their sales.
They want to do business with companies that put their customers first and offer more than simple transactions. They want businesses that deliver a full brand experience.
Fortunately, there are many ways that you can build up your brand and make your company more appealing to current and prospective buyers. But the most effective way might just be through content marketing.
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How do you Use Content Marketing to Your Advantage?
Content is king in digital marketing, and it will take your lead generation to a whole new level. Let’s take a look at how content marketing can help you reach the stars.
- Do an Extensive Market Research
- Start By Optimizing Landing Pages
- Analyze Your Sales Funnel
- Create a Lead Generation Funnel
- Best Types of Content to Use
- Promote Content
- Set a Conversion Plan in Place
Do an Extensive Market Research
Content marketing can take many shapes and forms. You can create blog posts, explainer videos, infographics, Facebook and Instagram stories, and more. However, regardless of your content’s quality or how interesting and engaging it is, it won’t help you achieve much unless it’s customized to suit your target market.
So, before you can generate leads, start requesting invoice payments, and cash in on content marketing, you need to do some market research.
Primarily, it will help you find out who your target customers are, what they’re interested in, and what kind of content is most likely to engage them. Secondly, it will help you narrow down your targeted keywords that’ll boost your SEO efforts and increase your website traffic.
Start By Optimizing Landing Pages
Just like you’d create a designated landing page for your PPC campaigns and paid ads, you’ll need to create landing pages for your content marketing campaigns. After all, you need to know where you want to take your leads after they're engaged with your content if you’re going to improve your conversion rates.
Your landing page can be your sales page, contact form, a specific product page, a lead generation form, or anything in between. Wherever it is, it needs to be fully optimized so as not to scare any potential customers away.
Design of landing pages
The first, most important thing you need to consider when creating your landing page is its design. If your landing page looks crowded and bombards the visitors with information, CTAs, random ads, videos, and more, it will be overwhelming. More importantly, it will appear spammy, and none of your visitors will trust the page enough to fill in your lead generation form and leave their personal information.
On the other hand, if your landing page is nothing but white space, your visitors won’t know whether they’re on the right page, and they won’t know what you’re expecting them to do.
So, strike a balance with a streamlined, minimalist design that contains only relevant information and has clear CTAs. And ensure that your landing pages are mobile-friendly! Only half of all landing pages are optimized for mobile viewing, even though well over half of all web traffic comes from mobile devices.
Coherent structure
To improve the user experience and boost lead generation and conversion, you’ll need to pay very close attention to your landing pages’ structure and layout. As a general rule of thumb, you’ll want your landing pages to have:
- A headline
- Brief offer
- Relevant visual content
- Lead capture form
- A CTA
Stay concise and keep your content copy relevant. Avoid technical jargon and terminology as it can confuse some of your visitors. Keep the language plain and straightforward and briefly explain how your company and the specific offer you have can be useful.
You can always go into more detail below the fold, but you’ll want to grab your visitors’ attention as soon as they come to the landing page by offering clear, coherent information first.
Analyze Your Sales Funnel
You’ll need to learn how your audiences find out about your brand, in which ways they engage with it, and how they go from merely being interested in your offers to committing to a purchase.
Every step of your sales funnel needs to be fully streamlined and optimized to ensure that every lead seamlessly transitions to a satisfied customer.
Once you’ve analyzed the sales funnel, you can start creating a content marketing strategy that can help each prospect move through it.
Create a Lead Generation Funnel
Every business has its own unique lead generation funnel that’s designed to boost conversions. Still, there are only so many ways you can go about creating such a funnel, and here are the most important steps.
1. Build awareness
Building awareness is the first step of creating your lead generation funnel. Make sure that your brand leaves an excellent and consistent first impression. All of your SEO efforts, paid advertising, and content marketing campaigns should present a unified brand approach that leaves a lasting impression.
2. Filter out most valuable prospects
Not every lead you generated will be the same. Some leads are just displaying an interest in your industry; others are looking into your products/services but aren’t ready to commit just yet. Others still are in the market for precisely the thing that you have on offer, and you’ll want to focus most of your efforts on converting them.
3. Engage most valuable prospects
The best content types for engaging valuable prospects are webinars, ebooks, educational videos, and insightful blog posts. Share insightful content on social media and send out personalized email campaigns that offer more industry news and information.
Engage with valuable prospects in your comment sections, address their unique problems or concerns, and be responsive.
4. Market to engaged prospects
Finally, you can start marketing specific products or services to your valuable, engaged prospects. Content best suited for these leads are live demos and ebooks, case studies, testimonials, and more.
Get your sales teams involved and have them check in with the most engaged prospects every other month. Track all conversations and discussions, and develop a personalized approach for each prospect. You’ll start receiving invoice payments sooner than you know it.
Best Types of Content to Use
We’ve mentioned a few types of content you could use for different prospects at different stages of your lead generation funnel. But if you’re just getting started with content marketing, the following are the most effective types you should focus on as they bring the best results.
Online surveys
Online surveys are excellent for gathering data and finding out about your target market. They can help you gather feedback, find out your prospects’ most pressing problems, learn more about your brand awareness campaigns’ effectiveness, and more.
Surveys can be easily shared on social media, via email, or you can even upload them to your website. As they’re usually short and interactive, they’ll help keep your audiences engaged.
Case studies
Case studies are ideal for the most valuable prospects as they can help you show just how beneficial your products/services are. 54% of B2B purchasers engage with case studies the most, so it’s evident just how useful they are.
Keep your case studies clear and concise, and make sure that you get consent from your clients before you publish them.
Extensive guides
Extensive guides are a great type of content to introduce your products/services and inspire your audiences’ trust. By explaining exactly how your products/services work and how they can be used, you’ll show your audiences how you can help them and how you can solve their most pressing problems.
Videos
Over 54% of consumers want to see more video content from brands they support, so it’s critical that you take advantage of it. Videos can be used for guides and tutorials, explanations, and demos. However, they can also help humanize your brand and allow you to create emotional connections with your leads.
By sharing behind-the-scenes videos or using Facebook stories to introduce your team members, you’ll connect with your audiences in new ways and inspire trust and loyalty.
Promote Content
Of course, you cannot expect your website traffic to go through the roof and your lead generation to break all records if you don’t promote your content. Get your social media accounts to work and share your content on all channels.
Upload frequent blog posts, send emails to your leads, notify them of new content, and include share buttons on every video, infographic, or survey.
And don’t forget to engage with your audiences in the comment sections, forums, discussion groups, and your inbox!
Set a Conversion Plan in Place
Finally, to make the most out of content marketing and start boosting your invoice payments, you’ll need to set up a conversion plan. Traditionally, that involves nurturing your leads and continuing to reach out to them until they convert and well afterward.
Continue providing relevant content, offering valuable products and services, and nurturing your relationship with every lead and return customer alike.
Final Note
Content marketing can help you boost brand awareness, expand your audiences, improve lead generation and conversion, and set your company on a path to success. If you want to remain competitive and become a leader in your niche, you need a bulletproof content marketing strategy that drives results. So, don’t wait around! Start developing your strategy now.
