3 Fresh New Perspectives on Using Content to Beef Up Lead Generation Efforts
Even the most vigorous lead generation strategies can be weakened through the course of time due to bandwidth, company changes, new marketing priorities and more. Many marketers either focus on the amount of leads they are getting at the top of their funnel or focus on obtaining better quality leads for their sales teams. Although many believe that you have to pick one or the other to achieve, marketers can easily focus on both the quantity and quality of leads to get a surplus of Marketing Qualified Leads for their sales team.
But how can marketers shift their priorities and to get a plethora of effective, converting leads?
Leveraging content assets and effective communication efforts through diverse channels can greatly increase a brand’s potential to target and qualify leads. Along with these efforts, we’ve detailed three fresh, new initiatives you can use to both widen your sales funnel as well as target specific, qualified leads.
1. Reuse & Recycle Content
Bring new life into your existing inventory of content by reusing your top performing blog posts and content. First you’ll want to identify which blogs, white papers, case studies and other forms of content you may have are performing best. Once top content is identified, compile them into your ‘Best of the Lot’ list and bundle the content assets based on topic. From here you can pick out collateral to ‘reuse’ and ‘recycle’ by adding or condensing it into different content types. If you have a blog that performed very well, write more to it and make it a thought leadership piece or even a white paper. Likewise, condense a white paper you wrote to become a quick, high-level blog. Some other ideas for content repurposing include:
- Select a top performing blog to post to a industry-specific LinkedIn group to initiate a discussion. Marketers not only gain credibility for their brand within their industry, but also engage with other thought leaders and possible customers this way further building initial trust brand awareness.
- Combine multiple ‘how-to’ articles and create an e-book that can be obtained by prospects through a form submission. When creating the holistic e-book, make sure you add enticing and relevant images or diagrams to bring more visual elements into the book, making information easier for prospects to comprehend and/or absorb. As stated before, having a gated landing page to host the e-book allows you the chance to collect more email addresses, contact details and other essential information for new leads.
2. Co-Author an E-Book
Another great way to widen your sales funnel is to widen your reach as well – building strategic partnerships with businesses that relate to your brand can help maximize outreach efforts as well as maximize the quality of content going out to your leads. Partnering with a brand similar to yours to create a joint e-book will provide double the content to your audience, and thus double the promotion since both parties will be promoting the e-book when completed. Here are some tips on partnering with another band to co-author an e-book:
- Partner with a company that offers products and solutions which complement that of your brand so that you can each provide something valuable to your potential audience that will need both kinds of solutions.
- Partner with a highly reputed organization that has established and highly popular social channels for promoting the complete e-book.
- Partner with an organization that can help your brand expand the new demographic range whether older or younger, from new regions or other segments.
- Partner with leading industry experts who can enhance credibility and refer your solutions.
3. Focus on Blogging
Due to the popular belief that ‘content is king’, one of the most popular, fail-safe and creative channels for obtaining audience trust and leads these days is blogging. Although most brands are already blogging, it’s important to make sure that you keep a consistent schedule and topic roster with your blog content so that your audience doesn’t get bored and leave to read your competitor’s blog.
It’s important that brands find the right balance between emphasizing SEO keywords within their blog as well as curating content that is helpful and informative to their audience. Likewise, marketers need to maintain a human and personalized tone to the blog so that they connect with their prospects and further enhance their customer relationship. Adding call to actions to your blog posts to direct your readers to the landing pages, contact us pages or microsites (if any) will encourage them to further engage with your brand and take action that can ultimately lead to a conversion.
In Conclusion…
Along with using content brands can leverage free demos, trials or assessments to understand the features and quality provided by your products, services and/or solutions. This will attract your visitors to ‘get a taste’ of what your brand offers before actually making the purchase or investing anything into the product/service, once again building initial trust into your brand and its offerings. And once they sign up for your free goodies, you can convert those leads to customers in five ways – check out 5 Lead Nurturing Essentials to Convert Freemium to Premium Customers
Now that you know how you can both widen you sales funnel as well as get more qualified leads, it’s time to start writing! Reusing and repurposing content as well as co-authoring an e-book or just consistently blogging helps to build trust from your customer, position your brand as the thought leader in your niche as well as make your brand more visible through SEO efforts.
Need more help in generating new leads? Discover more optimized tips & tricks on lead generation strategies by simply chatting with us at (408) 502 6765, contacting us, or reaching out on our Twitter or LinkedIn channels.