How to Use Content Marketing to Generate Leads

Content marketing is a powerful tool that can help you build brand awareness, earn more revenue, and bring in more leads. This marketing technique includes everything from checklists and case studies to interviews and blogs. But with so much potential, it can be intimidating to figure out how to best use content marketing to grow your business.

At Skoshe, our content marketing experts want to help you make the most of your content marketing strategy. We’ve narrowed down the most effective ways to optimize your content marketing into seven essential steps. Let’s take a look at how you can generate more leads before, during, and after you create your content.

Before You Write

Know Your Audience

The first step to effective content marketing is knowing your target audience. Do you know who you’re writing to? If not, your content probably isn’t going to stick with the right people. Take a look at your target audience. If you aren’t sure who qualifies, check out our blog post about how to find the target audience for your company. Once you’ve established your audience, you can ensure you write to them by making buyer or marketing personas.

These marketing personas are essentially a profile of your target customer. Beyond looking at demographics, use these personas to think about what topics would interest your clients. Consider what they want to know more about and what they’re struggling with. You can use those ideas to come up with topics that will draw in your target audience.

Take Advantage of Keyword Research

Never underestimate the power of keywords in your content marketing strategy. Using keywords will help your SEO and boost your site rankings, so it’s easier to find both your content and site online.

While optimizing your page for search engines, don’t overlook longtail keywords. Longtail keywords can help boost your traffic and sales. Since these keywords are more specific than their shorter counterparts, fewer pages will use them. That gives your content a better chance at ranking for your chosen keywords.

While Writing

Use Data

An essential aspect of making your content stand out from the rest is using facts and statistics. Not only do you get solid proof to back up what you’re saying, but you also make your company look more credible.

An additional factor to consider is the source of your data. It’s better to use data from industry-leading companies because they’re proven reliable sources. Even better, you also earn a little of their authority.

Break up Writing with Visuals

As wonderful as your content is, most readers aren’t willing to read through a long, word-packed piece. Having short sections is one of the best ways to keep your readers’ attention, but you shouldn’t stop there. Include icons, infographics, pictures, and charts to make your content more interesting to read. You’ll also want to be deliberate about how you spread these graphics throughout your piece. Try to intersperse visuals to give your readers needful breaks from long stretches of copy.

Not only do visuals pique the interest of your readers, but they also stick out better in your readers’ memory. Cognitive neuroscientist Carmen Simon states that “Visuals have the potential to impact the customer’s memory, and memory impacts their decisions.” That means that implementing visuals could be the difference between your leads leaving your site and converting.

Write Amazing Content

Writing high-quality content seems like a no-brainer, but it’s worth repeating. You want your content to be as compelling as possible to bring in more leads. Here are a few things your content should have besides visuals and data:

After Posting

Share Your Content

Once you have your content posted and ready to go on your site, give it some exposure! While some customers will find your content on their own, many won’t. Help put your content in front of more potential customers by sharing it.

You have a wide range of ways that you can promote your content. Post it on your favorite social media sites, put it in an ad, send it in an email to your customers, or whatever else you’d like. However, if you decide to go the social media route, you want to be sure that you post your content on the best social media platform for your business. At Skoshe, we recommend using these top three social media platforms for your company.

Update Your Content

After you’ve written your content, posted it, and shared it, you might think that takes care of everything. But that isn’t quite the case. If you want to capitalize on your content marketing leads, you should follow up with occasional updates and revisions. There are three significant advantages to updating your older content.

  1. Help your content stay current. As time passes, knowledge changes. To provide your leads with the most accurate information, you’ll want to check that your facts are still up to date.
  2. Build off your existing traffic. Established, older pieces of content typically bring in some traffic to your site. When you revisit those mature pieces, you can capitalize on the traffic they’re already bringing in and use them as a springboard to gain even more traction.
  3. Keep your pieces higher on SERP pages. Search engines like Google often show dates next to search results. Fortunately, these search engines go off the last time you updated your piece rather than when you originally published it. These search engines prioritize recent content and push it higher up in search results. Simply put, updating your older content helps more people find it.

Stay on Top of Lead Generation with Content Marketing

When you’re ready to improve your content lead generation, start simple. Take a look at things before you start writing, while you’re creating content, and after you post it. Once you optimize your content marketing strategy, you’ll find more leads funneling through your sales funnel than ever before. To help your content marketing strategy see more results, reach out to Skoshe today.