8 Steps to a Lead-Generating Content Marketing Strategy

Steps to a Lead-Generating Content Marketing Strategy 

Content marketing for lead generation is a strategic marketing effort geared towards the creation and distribution of content that will be attractive to visitors with specific profiles so that they can be converted to the audience for the brand.  Content can either pull people towards a brand or vice-versa.  Content can also generate leads for businesses. So, the content strategy needs to be very well planned. You can visit TextMercato for such a well-planned lead-generating content marketing strategy.

Lead-generating content marketing strategy

The first thing that you need to know is that every aspect of this exercise is essential for creating your documented content marketing strategy.  There are various aids available that you can use to document your strategy, such as a content marketing strategy template. You can also check out content strategy examples and content marketing strategy examples before you embark on the journey.

Parts of the strategy will be specific to your business.  For example, when you talk about using the strategy to grow your audience, you must be able to clearly define what you mean by growing your audience.  Let us look at the various steps you can follow to create a lead-generating content marketing strategy that will work for you.

1. Know your target audience

The very first step in creating a content marketing strategy framework is being well aware of the profile, needs, requirements, age group, etc., of the audience you are targeting, which will provide you with information to create content that will be relevant to them.   This is also true if you are targeting businesses or others.  Some ways of gathering this information are by studying your current buyers, doing online research, talking with customers, online surveys, and checking what the competition is doing to keep its customers satisfied. You must check various aspects of your target audience:

• What they watch, read, buy, want to know about and learn, have concern for, and stand up for, in other words, get to know the various aspects of their personality.  Answers to these will give you good topics for the content you can create and also for the keywords you can use. This part of the planning is of utmost importance and must be given enough time.  Understand that the entire strategy that you create will be made with this key input.  A change in this will hugely impact the strategy.  So, if you get this right, you will be on the right path to creating a great lead-generating content marketing strategy.

2. Specify the goals

This stage requires you to provide answers to such questions as what is it that you want to achieve from the content you create? For every question that you answer and every goal that you create, you should be able to measure and assess its implementation and whether or not you have been successful. So, set goals using the SMART concept and ensure each of your goals is: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound.

Here is a lead generation campaign example for setting a goal: 

The company will achieve the following - 

• Specific: Leads
• Measurable: 10% more over the next 3 months
• Achievable: 10% is achievable, while 50% could just hope
• Relevant: The purpose is lead generation
• Time-bound: over the next 3 months 

3. Keyword research

If your content is to generate leads for you, it must reach people.  You cannot rely on organic traffic, which will be a bad strategy. One right way to go is to keep all of your content SEOed, no matter what format it is in.  

4. Understand the intent of a search

You need to show up in the search organically, so you must understand the intent of searches, as it is one of the drivers for your lead-generating content marketing strategy.  The most common 4 types of search intents are:

There are four common types of search intent:

• Commercial: These searchers are solution aware and are gathering information and preparing. 
• Informational: These searchers are problem aware and are looking for a solution to the problem.
• Navigational: These searchers are brand aware and are looking to get to, for example, the specific web page that they want.
• Transactional: These searchers are solution aware and will take action based on information. 

5. Keep content high quality

The content should be of high quality, crisp, engaging, and feel-free so that the audience gets the best from it quickly and easily. 

Here are four phases of the content marketing funnel:

1. Awareness – Content is created with a focus on educating the audience.
2. Evaluation – Using the content, customers make up their minds to go in for the product or not.
3. Conversion - Reasons why your product should be purchased.
4. Delight – ensuring that your audience remains engaged with you.

These four phases are an important key to your success since each one of them plays a specific role in the journey of the customer.   And the content delivered during each of these phases must be geared towards fulfilling that role.

6. Content optimisation for making conversions

One good way to achieve optimised content for making conversions is by ensuring that your content and CTAs are aligned.

You can also use the option of gated content, where content can be accessed only after, for example, providing your e-mail or some other detail.

Furthermore, you could use the videos you have created based on your content marketing strategy in digital marketing to pull out content that you can reuse in some other format, for example, in your content marketing strategy ppt. TextMercato assists in creating such creative content for you.

7. Narrow down your distribution channels

The content must be repurposed across multiple mediums so that it gets distributed as widely as possible. Used it in various ways - webinars, posting it on various relevant threads (Quora, etc.), sharing via social media, using it in conferences, and so on.  Document all the channels you will target and how in your lead-generating content marketing strategy.

8. Update your content

Trends in content marketing change all the time, and you need to keep up by having a plan in place for updating the content.  Here is an example, for an organisation selling zinc tablets, research during the start of Covid-19 regarding the impact of zinc warrants an update of its content.  

Tips for executing your content marketing strategy

Before we conclude, here are some content marketing strategy execution tips.

• Get and remain organised, such as by using an editorial calendar. 
• Automate as many tasks as possible. Remember that some content, too, can be automated. For example, you can automate some actions like sending out e-mails and making social media posts.
• Ensure content is optimised for conversion so that your leads get converted to clients.  One way is to strategically place CTAs, telling the leads what they should do and what awaits them.
• Encourage engagement by using SEO, updating your metadata, using infographics, and keyword tools, to name a few.
• Make measurements and evaluate them to know if you are succeeding and how to tweak your lead-generating content marketing strategy to better the results.

Conclusion

In your lead-generating content marketing strategy, it is essential that you align your content strategy with the final goals as well as the needs of your target audience. This will ensure that whatever content you create will add value to the business, finally getting the leads you aimed at. Also, ensure that you revisit and modify your strategy to stay with the trends and align with your new research, requirements, understanding, and goals. Visit TextMercato for any further assistance in this regard.