7 Content Marketing Tips That Will Help You Boost Leads
The decision to start a business blog is often fueled by the idea that to generate leads, you need to create valuable content that is worth reading. While this is a given in today’s competitive marketing landscape, where seemingly every business is publishing blog posts on a regular basis, the impact of such a blog is ultimately determined by its ability to engage and capture leads.
Therefore, even if you have a team of truly creative and efficient writers capable of releasing a number of posts every week, the challenge lies in finding those additional tools and tactics that will potentially position your blog as an optimized, lead-generation platform. Elena Dobre explains it perfectly: “Blogging is not just about content, publishing posts and hoping for the best. Done well with the right structure it can be a powerful portal for revenue.”
So let’s dive right in! The 4 lead-generation tactics and tools below are ways for you to set your blog up in order to attract leads, increase conversions, and add to your brand’s or company’s online following.
(1) Incorporate visuals into each blog post
Though seemingly obvious, this has been forgotten or at least somewhat overlooked by many blog managers. Adding visuals with either attractive offers or engaging content can be a great way to encourage visitors and multi-channel shares, thus enticing potential leads. A recent post on wordstream.com share this great tip: “For content marketers thinking of incorporating visuals, a good starting point is a pinnable header on each blog post.”
Additionally, tools such as Visual.ly and Canva allow brand marketers to more easily and cost-effectively creative infographics and/or images to support the already existing blog content. Don’t forget to give the image a name and add an alt text, to make it SEO friendly.
(2) Include CTAs that will link existing content with additional downloadable, gated content
As experience marketers, we already understand the value of call-to-actions in terms of their ability to incentivize visitors to convert. However, this often requires a long process in order to nurture the potential lead to the point of sale. In order to help facilitate this customer experience, marketers need to put more effort in engaging leads with highly relevant content. To this effort, we recommend using CTAs not just as pop-ups to encourage direct revenue-generating actions, but as a way to encourage your readers to crave more industry insights by leaving their email addresses. Personalizing these CTAs based on the user’s interests and past activity, will even further increase the conversion. Boom, lead generation.
(3) Add share buttons and widgets
Once you have valuable content on hand, you want to make sure it is being absorbed by an audience that will then distribute it across social media channels. Essentially, your loyal readership base can become your brand ambassadors and contribute to lead generation efforts. We recommend trying out ShareThis, or simply adding social sharing buttons, to make it super easy for blog visitors to just click on share.
(4) Mention and/or quote influencers when relevant
By mentioning or quoting social media and content influencers in a relevant, specific industry you are discussing in your post, you are setting up your blog for potential success. In other words, if your post is then shared by the influencer him/herself, your content will directly be seen by an extended pool of persons that may have otherwise not been accessed. Add to this the credibility factor, as an influencer will be sharing your own content among many other options to a knowledge-hungry followers – doesn’t sound half bad!
Using these and similar tools are great ways for marketers to generate leads from their blogs. However, perhaps one of the key ingredients to successful blogs lies in the ability of marketers to actually measure and monitor their content across various channels, for instance when measuring conversion rates based on the blog’s ability to engage readers. Analytical tools (among them Trendemon) that can quantify this traction are often great marketing investments.
Our tip: all the tools and tips in the world won’t help if your content won’t be a good one. Invest in creating high quality, educational content.
So what have we learned?
Blogs are an optimal way for marketers to promote their brand, both in terms of establishing an online presence and for optimizing lead generation campaigns. However, the use of various tools and tactics is a must in this domain in order to truly move from being an industry thought leader to a lead-generation machine.