Marketers look at content marketing as one of the most effective forms of marketing around, according to the 2017 State of the Creator Economy study (SOCE). The main goal of content marketing, at least for B2B marketers, is lead generation, according to LinkedIn’s B2B Content Marketing Report. As Hubspot puts it, a lead is a person who’s interested in your company in some way. Lead generation is how your company goes about turning people into leads. If you’re looking to boost content marketing leads, give one or more of these tactics a try.
1) Let People Share Your Email Newsletter
If you send out an email newsletter (and you should, since email was ranked as the top way to acquire and retain customers in 2016), add sharing buttons to it so that your current readers can easily pass it along to their friends on a social network or by forwarding it. This is a powerful tactic to boost content marketing leads.
Many email newsletter services give you the option of adding buttons. If you make your own newsletter, you can visit the developer’s section of the social media platforms you want to use to generate a link to include in your email.
2) Produce an Ebook or White Paper
If you’re already producing written content, why not go long form and produce a white paper or ebook? If your brand already has a system for creating content in place, adding ebooks or other long-form content shouldn’t be too challenging and is an awesome way to boost content marketing leads. Once you’ve created the ebook, give it a landing page with a compelling call to action, so people feel like they have no other option but to hand over their email address. Here’s a great example of an ebook landing page in action.
3) Invite Guest Bloggers
Guest blogging, or having someone else write a post for your blog, can mean that one blogger’s audience becomes your audience, and in turn, can boost content marketing leads. Choose your guest bloggers wisely. You want to work with people who are somehow connected to your niche, but who don’t have exactly the same readers or customers you do.
4) Write a Guest Blog Post
Guest blogging on another site can redirect traffic to your own website, which can boost content marketing leads. For example, writer Bill Widmer created a guest blog post for Social Media Examiner on repurposing social media posts. That post ended up sending nearly 200 people to his site in just a day, and ended up getting thousands of shares.
5) Make a Quiz
People love quizzes, and quizzes also happen to be a great way to boost content marketing leads. You can use quizzes for lead generation by asking people to put in their email addresses to get access to their results.
While some will click away at that point, most won’t. For example, SkilledUp added a “Test Your Microsoft Excel Knowledge” quiz to its review of a learning library. Before the quiz, the site got about 20 subscribers per month. After the quiz, MarketingProfs reported that the number of new subscribers jumped to 500 per month.
6) Run a Survey and Send the Results to Participants
Not into quizzes? Another quick way to boost content marketing leads is to create a survey. After people complete the survey, ask for their email addresses so that you can send them the results. According to Survey Anyplace, interactive surveys tend to generate 40 percent more leads than other forms of content.
7) Use a Full-Screen Call to Action
Another way to boost your content marketing leads is to have a full-screen call to action pop up when people visit your site or blog. When it’s full-screen, the call to action is difficult for people to miss. One test of the effectiveness of a full-screen or lightbox call to action, from AWeber, found that the lightbox led to 1,375 percent more subscribers than the sidebar.
8) Use an Exit Call to Action
If you don’t get people’s info when they come into your site, you can get it as they leave. The site WPBeginner added an exit call to action and boosted their subscriber rate by 600 percent.
9) Blog and Share More
The more you blog, the more content you have to share, and the more likely people are to be interested in your brand. Also, content “freshness” plays a big role in boosting your site’s ranking in search, which can boost content marketing leads.
10) Create a Landing Page
A landing page is a streamlined, bare-bones page that serves one purpose: to get leads. Whether it’s what greets people who are about to download an ebook or white paper, or is the gate before they get to your site’s homepage, make the landing page welcoming and easy to use.
Only ask for the bare minimum of information on your landing page. If you ask for too much, you’re likely to get nothing.
11) Gate Your Videos
Gating a video simply means asking people to give you their email addresses in exchange for viewing the content. You can put the gate at the beginning of the video, but you might not get any takers.
Instead, it can be better to put the gate about 10 percent of the way through, so that people get a taste of what the video is, and are either interested in viewing the rest of it or are ready to move on if they don’t care for the content.
12) Reassess Your CTAs
If you’re not getting the leads you want, it could be that your calls to action are to blame. One way to see if that’s true is to run a split test or A/B testing of your CTAs. Use two versions and see which one performs better.
13) Distribute Your Content In Person
Taking your content marketing offline can be an ingenious way to boost content marketing leads. Head to a conference in your industry that is in your city (or nearby), and get out and network with people face to face. Collect business cards and ask the people you’ve met if they’d like to be added to your subscriber list.
14) Create Case Studies
According to the Content Marketing Institute’s 2016 B2B report, 82 percent of B2B companies used case studies as a content marketing tactic. A 2013 survey from RSW/US revealed that nearly 63 percent of companies thought case studies were the most effective way to boost content marketing leads.
Case studies let potential customers walk in the shoes of your current customers. They create a picture of what it’s like to work with your brand. When done well, they can make other people want to get on board.
15) Rethink Your SEO
When you focus on optimizing your website and blog to rank well in search engine results, you create a way for people to find your brand organically. If your site is optimized for the keywords people are going to use to find a problem, they are going to come across your site naturally, and will look at it as an answer to their particular problem.
Bonus – Amplify Your Content
IZEA’s new self-service influencer marketing option called ContentAmp is perfect for content marketers with smaller budgets. ContentAmp allows you to distribute your blog or website RSS feeds to a network of top social media influencers who promote your content. These influencers share the articles natively with their audiences, instantly increasing traffic and engagement. The entire process is pay-per-click, meaning you only pay for the traffic that is being driven to your content.
The best part is that campaigns can be setup in 2 minutes or less by following 4 simple steps:
- Add Content
- Set Budget ($10 minimum)
- Set Distribution Channels
- Measure Impact
