10 Ways to Boost Content Marketing Lead Generation

What’s content for?

A whole lot of us are producing content because… well, we’ve been told our customers like it. And it’s true that both B2C and B2B buyers are consuming it at record rates. Engaging, shareable content boosts your site’s performance in organic search results, builds awareness of your brand, and establishes your credibility as a thought leader.

But content marketing is also a powerful way to generate leads, and that could be the missing piece that helps you fill your funnel and accomplish your business objectives.

10 tips to generate leads through your content marketing

1. Know your target audience

Learn as much as you can about your customer — their needs, demographics, psychographics, and habits. Creating a buyer persona, a fictional profile of your ideal customer, is a useful way to humanize your audience and increase the effectiveness of your content marketing lead generation.

2. Center your audience in the conversation

Don’t be the person at the party who hogs the conversation. Yes, your features and benefits are important — but show them you understand their problem first. The formula is pretty simple:

1. Relate to your audience through their challenges and their needs.
2. Provide evidence that you have the tools to solve them.
3. Give them enough information to want to learn more.
4. Point them to the next piece of content that helps them on their customer journey.

3. Show impact to make your content marketing stand out

People value content that provides clear value, usually by answering their questions or solving their problems. Give your audience facts and data that can help them make a decision or gain a competitive edge. Support your content with credible sources — or better yet, statistics you gather yourself. High-value, fact-packed content pieces like infographics, how-to videos, and case studies help position you as an expert and trusted resource.

People seek out content because they want to solve a problem or answer a question. Remember that buyer persona? What information does that person want or need?

4. Don’t overestimate traffic, views, and impressions

While we would never recommend you neglect your KPIs, it’s important not to so overestimate traffic, views, and impressions that you forgot to create content that showcases your skills, expertise, or pain points. Relatable, niche, unique, high-value content should be part of your strategy, regardless of whether each piece performs optimally. The value of maintaining a relatable, rounded digital brand persona is greater than any one piece of content.

Just make sure you promote your content on your website and/or the right social channels. Most importantly — only gate it where it makes sense. Structured distribution of your content through targeted email, relevant social media, and other channels can help you get your messages out to the right prospects.

5. Personalize your content

Personalizing content can be an effective tool for connecting with your audience. Product recommendations, offers based on geographic location, and CTAs tailored to a visitor’s stage in the buyer’s journey are a few of the ways to add a personal element to your content marketing.

But don’t be creepy — we’ve all had the experience of feeling like our tech is tracking everything about us. Too much personalization can be off-putting to a marketing prospect, especially if you deliver it somewhere they’re not expecting to see it.

6. Become a jack-of-all-media-trades

The more you diversify your media offerings, the more types of audiences you’ll come into contact with. We’ve already talked about the power of video, but there are other ways to engage. Calculators, interactive infographics, online polls, automated chat — anything that provides an interactive experience — will keep your audience on your content longer and increase their interest in your products and solutions.

7. Produce different types of content for different learning styles

If you’re trying to educate your audience you need to understand how they learn. Some people process information visually, through means like video, images, and infographics. Some are auditory learners who might find a podcast or recorded webinar a more effective way to learn. And some are kinesthetic, preferring engagement through a hands-on experience like an interactive web tool.

Ideally, you’ll have content that meets the needs of each of these learning styles to maximize customer experience. And like most content production, choosing a style starts with knowing your buyer’s persona and how they like to access and absorb information.

8. Always strategize about your call to action

A call to action (CTA) is literally that — a suggested next action for your reader. It’s an invitation to engage with the next step of your user journey or sales funnel.

CTAs are an important component of your content marketing, and they need to be thought about at the onset of a project. Don’t go into a piece of content without a clear plan for where you want to direct users next. Also, don’t fall into the trap that educational content shouldn’t have a CTA — it absolutely should, but that doesn’t mean it has to be a sales message. A CTA can be anything from “read more” to “get a sample” to “request a consultation” — just make sure you’re delivering the right next step for the reader at the right time, and that it’s appropriate for the content.

9. Use A/B testing and experiment with formats

If you aren’t sure what your audience is going to respond to, try some things out — and keep track of the results. Techniques like A/B testing can help you fine-tune your tone of voice, benefit statements, design elements, and more — all with an eye to continually improving your content and engagement. If the results feel uncertain, test again.

Some of the items on the exhaustive list of things you can test:

• Email subject lines
• Button colors
• Calls to action
• Offers
• Price promotion
• Different image styles

10. Monitor your metrics

All of them, continually. Every piece of data is information that can help you fine tune your content marketing strategy, increase customer engagement, and evaluate leads.

Some key measurements:

• For email, measure open rate, click-through rate (CTR), conversion, and bounces and unsubscribes.
• For social media, monitor the size and growth of your community, and measure follower engagement, CTR and conversion rate.
• For content on your website, like your blog posts, measure engagement metrics like page views and social shares, time on page, conversion rate, and bounce rate.

Why is content marketing important in lead generation?

Content marketing increases the visibility — and credibility — of your brand, products, and services. By positioning yourself as an expert and responding to the needs of your audience, you open up a natural channel for further engagement.

Does content marketing generate leads?

Yes. Generating leads through content marketing is a critical element of customer acquisition. According to HubSpot, a leading provider of customer relationship management (CRM) solutions, content marketing drives 3X more leads than traditional marketing.

Which type of content is most effective in lead generation?

Video — hands down. Video accounted for  82% of all consumer internet traffic in 2022. HubSpot reports that video is the most popular and effective media format for the fourth year in a row — and that nine out of 10 people report wanting to see more videos from brands. 53% of marketers said webinars in particular are the top-of-the-funnel video format that generates the most high quality leads.

And if you want to reach younger audiences, video’s a requirement. Today’s younger consumers grew up on phones and tablets, with a steady diet of video consumption. 56.66% of YouTube’s audience are millennials or Gen Z.

What is the typical cost of lead generation?

The average cost to generate a lead varies widely from industry to industry – and channel to channel — and can top out at $500 or more in industries like technology, and professional and financial services. You can measure your cost per lead with a simple calculation and use that measurement to assess the effectiveness of your campaigns and channels.

Create lead generation content that will power your business

Content is still king. But producing it is a lot of work. And making sure it’s effective is even harder.

At Big Sea, we can help you align your content marketing lead generation with your business objectives — and identify the topics, formats, and distribution channels that generate the most leads for your organization. Contact us today to schedule a consultation and learn how content marketing can boost your lead gen and customer acquisition.