Within any effective marketing campaign, content is always the main ingredient that drives success and acts as the glue of every strategy that accompanies it. As long as your content is high quality and relevant to your target audience and niche, it is bound to generate leads. Finally, those leads will enable you to market your products and services in order to generate sales, as long as you have a great lead-nurturing strategy that follows.
One can easily conclude that content marketing is of the utmost importance for a brand to survive and thrive. So, what is it exactly that makes content great? How do you actually generate leads with it? In this article, we will go over the basics of crafting great content and having it work for you by attracting organic traffic.
Blogging as the pillar of great content
The importance of blogging for any business shouldn’t be underestimated, even with the recent surge of new content formats. If done right, it can be used to inform your audience of any news or events related to your company and brand. It can also solidify your role as the authority in the industry and complement your SEO campaign. Blogs and posts that are meant to educate customers on the products or services you are offering will position your business as the go-to destination for that specific niche.
As for SEO, the more posts you publish, the more favourable your rating with the search engines becomes. You could define it as the snowball effect, the better your ranking, the greater the number of the visitors who land on your page through a search query, the better your ranking gets, and so forth. Companies are recognizing this already established trend to bring many more links to their site.
Considering your target audience needs
Now that we have established the reasons why content creation is so important, it is equally imperative to identify who you are marketing to. To help with this, you can create a buyer persona, that ideal reflection of your target audience.
A buyer persona is a model or a representation that is based on careful market and customer research. These models are used to help you focus on the business challenges of your particular target audience. If you know who you are marketing to, it becomes that much easier to hit that home run in terms of delivering brilliant content.
Taking diversification into account
Traffic is one of the most important conditions for attracting more eyes to your website. Leads cannot be generated without proper traffic and your visitor numbers will stay at a persistent standstill. There are content types meant primarily for generating traffic. To name a few, we’ve already mentioned blog posts, social media posts, videos, podcasts, rich imagery, educational e-books, and many more.
While blogs are the most essential type of content required for any online marketing campaign, ideally, it should act as a hub of sorts, as all other types of content should funnel traffic towards it. Social media platforms are an incredible source of exposure and posting memorable snippets on these networks speaks volumes of your business.
Photos and videos are another type of multimedia content that should always be incorporated into a marketing campaign. On their own, they do not mean much, but with context, visuals can significantly complement your overall content quality. Diversified, high-quality content boosts SEO lead generation with incredible success, through everything from guest posting, creating infographics, all the way to publishing webinars. Ultimately, versatility and quality will not only generate more leads in the competitive world of SEO, but also help nurture them to fruition, and hopefully a long-term collaboration.
As for videos alone, as the biggest repository online, YouTube is the second biggest search engine in existence. What gets posted will remain there indefinitely. This is important as it can continue to drive organic traffic towards your site for years to come. Podcasts are becoming increasingly popular as they can be consumed passively while doing something else. No longer are consumers constrained by the pressure of time and they can share these episodes with anyone they think would find them appealing.
Keeping up with the trends
These campaigns require constant effort and continuous learning and adapting. You need to be on top of what is relevant locally, nationally and even globally. In the age of information and the internet, important news practically come to you daily and are easy to follow. What are the weekly or even daily news and trends relevant to your industry and niche?
Analyse your competition and try to be ahead whenever possible. Of course, that will not always be the case and failing to do so can present an opportunity to learn from your own errors and improve. If your competitors are successful with a strategy, why not see if you can learn from their approach?
Everything is a learning opportunity if you are inclined to look deep enough. There are plenty of trend research sources online, therefore, you need to sift through and find the most reputable and credible ones. Subscribing to industry and niche newsletters can keep you up to date automatically. Attending events can also let you gain wonderful insights into what is going on in the industry. You never know where your next SEO business partner awaits, unless you network as often as possible!
A carefully thought-out marketing strategy is bound to generate leads online. Content marketing is one of the most effective segments of your overall marketing strategy, hence the need to always focus on producing quality, relevant content. With these principles in mind, you can start creating content that is relevant to your industry and that will keep your audience engaged and generate more leads.