Content marketing strategy for lead generation
Overview
What is content marketing?
Content marketing is a way of inbound marketing where you build valuable content and put it into a blog. Ideally, this blog should get a lot of traffic because of the added value but also because of
Why through content?
I can already hear you saying, why can’t I just use Facebook/Linkedin/Google Ads and other platforms to get my leads in?
There are 2 very important reasons for this:
- The buying process is different for each potential customer
- Inbound marketing, new users ‘without doing anything’
Where is my customer in the purchase process?
It is very important to know that not every person is ready to buy a product after seeing it once on your website.
We are in the process of purchasing a person. For some sectors it is very long, for example real estate. Some people search for 2 years until they actually buy their home.
On the other hand, there are sectors where everything has to happen very quickly. Think of locksmiths. You want to be able to move into your house at the same time, this is not a decision you should think about for a long time.
Most companies are stuck with customers who need to return multiple times and compare as well. That’s where content marketing comes in.
Some people are not yet looking specifically for a particular product, but are looking for solutions to their problems. So they’re looking for information. Take as an example a company that sells personal care products. People on holiday will search for things like: ‘what to do when you burn out on holiday’. We can write an article about this with some general tips but we can also refer people to our après-soleil products.
The person may click through to these products immediately or they may come back later and recognize your brand and only later proceed to purchase.
Inbound marketing
With platforms like Facebook/Linkedin/Google Ads, your ads are actually shoved in front of someone. You go online looking for your customers. Inbound marketing is the opposite of this, you get people to come to your website (with content, among other things) so that they convert.
SEO is a very important point of your inbound marketing strategy. People who are actively looking for information can find you in the organic results of Google or other search engines.
With a good blog, you can attract a lot of this search traffic to your website. The advantage is that after setting up the blog post, we don’t have to do anything else. It’s a bit of a ‘get traffic while you sleep’ scenario. When the blog is live it can generate traffic to your website.
Watch out!
There’s a very big side note to this, though. A blog that is not active is also going to rank very poorly in Google. So try to add new blogposts often and also start updating/evaluating things once in a while. At the end of the day, you won’t have to be as short on time as you are with PPC marketing.
How do I get started?
Start from your products/services
You want to sell your products or services so of course you have to make sure that the content you write is related to this.
We should think of each product/service a bit like a cone-shaped object. The point is the topic itself and what is around it actually gives support to this point.
For example, the central product of an online shop may be ceramic vases. So you want to market these with content marketing. The central subject are the vases but we don’t want to talk only about the product itself. We can talk about the different techniques/materials to make these vases. If we have a few supporting articles on this then our Google ranking for the keyword ‘ceramic vase’ will also improve.
You need to start thinking of the content as a cone-shaped 3D object. The top of this cone are the ceramic vases but the sides (where the top rests) are the supporting articles on techniques and such. Also, these supporting articles are very good for bringing people in. Often these are the articles that are searched for the most. In our example, people can look up something about a particular technique, then read our blog post about it and can continue browsing the website and possibly sign up for online ceramics classes.
Cross-pollination
On the blog
If you have different products/services on your site then it certainly can’t hurt to do some cross-pollination. With this we are going to get new customers but we can also upsell existing customers.
Someone looking to purchase a ceramic vase online may also be interested in classes on ceramics. Feel free to link these different blog posts together.
Other channels
Obviously, you want a lot of traffic on your blog posts. Usually this happens through Google Search, if you write good content about a particular topic you can score well in the search results. But blog posts can also be shared.
Through Google Search, you will be able to attract many users with your blog in the long run. However, you can use other channels like Linkedin, Instagram, Facebook, Medium… to ensure an initial boost to your post.
If you want to go a step further you can even add UTM track codes per channel so you can see where you are getting the best results. Because you share it from the moment the blog post comes online then this can also have an impact on your SEO score.
Consistency
It’s true that a blog needs to be monitored less strictly than, say, a Google Ads campaign that turns over 100 euros every day.
But that certainly doesn’t mean it should be neglected. It is essential that you create a good content plan and that you also start evaluating your performance.
It’s one thing to have a blog but it’s quite another to improve it systematically.
If you see that certain topics are catching on, you can expand this to get even more and better traffic.
