For most businesses, the typical mantra goes like this: content is king, but context is queen. But what’s the point of having riveting content if it doesn’t add value to a company’s growth? Lead generation, in terms of audience building and lead building, is a prime focus and challenge for many B2B players. Powerful optimization tools like Google Panda and Google Penguin have made thousands of websites redundant, weeding out low-quality content and forced SEO tactics.
If you have insufficient lead generation, then your business is bound to crumble because it simply won’t hold value in the eyes of online consumers and search engines like Google. LinkedIn’s Technology Marketing Community also shows that lead generation is the top objective of good content marketing, followed by thought leadership and brand awareness. If you want your website to stay afloat in the chaotic one billion websites circling the web, then you need to produce fresh content on a regular basis. Here are four ways to produce 30 lead generating articles every month:
Compelling Content
The importance of creating brilliant content can never be emphasized enough. Ultimately, what you write is what you sell. If you don’t have new, insightful, and thought-provoking content to write about, then people won’t bother coming to your website anymore and you’ll lose out on both hot leads and cold leads. The kind of articles you write shouldn’t just answer specific problems or provide generic solutions, but make people want to subscribe to your email listing and come back again. The key here is to habituate potential readers and turn them into leads from the sheer ingenuity of your content.
Good writing takes skill and practice that can only be built over time with experience. In addition to seamless content, it’s important to stay up-to-date with current trends in the particular industry you are in. Make your articles dynamic and add new perspectives every time you begin a new piece. That way, you’ll be able to retain your hot leads who keep coming to your website and be able to nurture cold leads that may consider your calls-to-action. It goes without saying that you should always keep the basics of content writing in mind, from crafting a gripping title to stellar formatting.
Know Your Audience
Oreo has had an uncanny history of successes and failure in countries around the world. Back in 2005 when Kraftz Food launched its trademark Oreo biscuit in China, it faced a dismal response and controlled just 3% of the Chinese cookies market. This was the same biscuit that sold over 25 million packets in North America. Where had Kraftz gone wrong? It didn’t take long for the conglomerate to realise that what worked in one market wouldn’t necessarily work in another; Chinese consumers weren’t buying Oreos because they found it too sweet. After creating customized biscuits, Oreo grew to control 15% of China’s market: the highest market share it had anywhere in the world.
Likewise, a fatal mistake B2B companies unknowingly commit in lead generation is to market their product or service without considering its implications from a consumer’s point of view. The whole point of a website is to cater to a demand in the market, so if you don’t understand your target audience’s needs and preferences, then your website will find little progress in audience building much like Oreo’s initial performance in China. Before you set out to write, conduct some market research to know what’s trending, and try to talk with potential leads directly to find out what they want.
Case Studies
If there’s one universal narrative mode, it’s story-telling. People are no longer convinced by hard-and-fast statements but want to see real evidence of the claims they read. And there’s no better way to do that than through case studies. Research has shown that case studies are the third most effective content marketing tactic for B2B businesses.
Case studies can be highly engaging ways to attract new audiences and boost lead generation. You can write about the success stories some of your consumers have had with you in a methodological manner and add creative videos and PowerPoints to support them. Using case studies not only adds credibility to your brand, but also a personalized, human touch which can effectively stimulate your cold leads to take action and convert.
The Final Touches
Say you’ve diligently worked over the summer and produced 30 amazing articles which have had enormous traffic. Yet, you find that you haven’t procured as many leads as you expected to. Where should you look to find out your strategy’s loophole?
The cliché saying of the sum of the parts being bigger than the whole is as true for running a business as it is for life. You can produce the best content with the best of writers, but if you don’t get the finishing touches right, then chances are your lead generation won’t grow much. The smaller details should complement your work to make the difference, such as your landing pages, formatting, and affirmative calls-for-action. Generating leads is not a direct one-way route for your visitors- they will first read your articles and explore your website several times before converting. All the smaller stops along the way shape that journey, not just the main bulk your website.
The way people read and absorb information has rapidly evolved over the decade. First, content marketers grappled with the constraints of space to attracts leads, such as trade booths and commercial lengths. But the advent of the internet providing infinite space means that companies no longer need to worry about that- now the shift is towards maximizing attention and climbing the rankings, and as Rebecca Lieb from Altimeter Group puts it, content is the atomic particle of all digital marketing.
ThunderQuote is the most comprehensive business services portal in Singapore, Australia and ASEAN , where hundreds of thousands of dollars of procurement contracts are sourced every month by major companies like Singapore Press Holdings, National Trade Union Congress and more.