Regardless of what line of business you are in, content-based marketing provides businesses with an effective way to engage audiences while also generating new leads that translate to revenue growth.
The prerequisite to driving high-quality leads into the hands of the people who can capitalize on them is to discover what content your target audience actually wants to see. Creating content that provides value follows a methodical process with a few key steps. Here’s how to get started.
Step 1: Know Your Customer
The first rule of creating great sales content is understanding your ideal customer. As Oracle CEO Mark Hurd advised, “When you’re dealing with customer relationships, you have a limited number of times to make a true impact.” So make your content count!
Building out your ideal buyer persona provides a close look at who you need to be creating content for. Answering basic questions can help you start this process:
- Demographics: What is their age, gender, income, location, profession?
- Interests: What do they value and enjoy?
- Challenges: What are their pain points? What needs do they have?
Having a firm grasp on these qualifiers will help you create content that attracts your preferred persona.
Step 2: Develop Your Content Strategy
Your content strategy will ensure you are reaching the right people, with the right content, at the right time. Various channels, formats, and design should all play a part in your strategy. Depending on your audience’s preferences, you need to leverage multiple ways to present the content. Whether you choose a blog post, email newsletter, or social post, your best approach is to reach your audience on the channels they’re already using and entice them with a benefit they can realize right away.
Here are various content types that successfully drive site traffic or generate leads:
- Blog posts
- Social media posts
- Webinars
- Whitepapers
- Guides
- eBooks
- Videos
- Infographics
- Interactive tools
- Podcasts
Step 3: Create Your Call-to-Action (CTA)
Ensuring that your content is action-oriented is crucial for generating leads. In addition to providing viewers informative content, you need to give your audience a clear understanding of what you want them to do next. Without a strong CTA, you risk audiences engaging with your sales collateral as a mere blip in their timeline, and then leaving without taking action. Here are several best practices for keeping people engaged with a strong CTA:
- Create a sense of urgency: This tried-and-true tactic provides a reason for people to take action immediately.
- Make your CTA notably beneficial: Ensuring your content highlights the benefits that come with following your CTA make it that much more inviting.
- Be strategic with the number of CTAs: Multiple CTAs can be overwhelming or off-putting. Be strategic about how often (and where) you include your CTA.
Step 4: Optimize Your Content
To generate quality leads, your site needs to provide high-quality content that is routinely A/B tested to determine what’s resonating and what’s not. Content can also be improved by optimizing it to perform strongly from the get-go. Here are some initial optimization strategies:
- Incorporate keywords: Incorporate keywords that are important in your industry to give your content the best chance of ranking high in search engines for relevant topics.
- Reference high-quality resources: Citing other quality posts increases the usefulness of your content while enhancing credibility.
- Include internal blog links: Interlinking to past blog posts helps keep people on your site and improves search results.
There you have it — your personal guide to creating content that generates the quality leads that fuel revenue growth. If you follow these steps, your team should be on their way to a great year!
