How to Use Content Marketing and SEO to Fuel Your Lead Gen Machine

Content marketing can do wonders for building organic traffic and increasing brand awareness – but for it to be the most effective, it needs to generate real leads. The most effective content strategies account for every stage of the customer’s journey and tie each into the next. If you want your content strategy to be most beneficial, it’s worthwhile to carefully consider how it will integrate into your lead generation strategy.

At CSP, we excel at maximizing SEO to yield real-world, tangible results. Read on to learn more about how content marketing for lead generation can transform your lead gen strategy.

Tying Content Strategy into Lead Generation

You are likely well aware of the many facets of content marketing. But how closely have you looked at using content marketing for lead generation?

Content marketing can be used to attract attention from all sorts of markets, but in most cases, only a small percentage of potential targets are genuine leads for a specific business.

When you tie content strategy into lead generation, you carefully design content to attract a target audience. That way, more of the people you draw in are likely to be viable leads. You separate the wheat from the chaff from the beginning, which can improve the effectiveness of your content marketing efforts considerably.

How to Write Content to Generate Leads

If you want to write content that will generate leads, you need to first understand your target market. You can create amazingly compelling content and bring in tons of traffic, but if only a few of the people you bring in are a good fit for your product or service, you won’t wind up with many conversions.

Start with Research

Research is one of the best investments you can make in your content strategy. With the right approach, it can tell you so much about the individuals and groups that will find value in what you offer. Research is the first and often most important part of building a lead generation magnet.

• What is your target audience searching for? They are looking for something specific when they start using a search engine. They need an answer to a problem or a solution that will alleviate discomfort or frustration. Once you know what they are looking for, you can provide it to them with your content.
• What are your competitors doing? One of the quickest ways to jump-start your strategy is to look at what competitors are doing. If they offer something similar to what you offer, chances are they have already figured out some of the key factors that drive your target market.
• Which keywords do you need to target? Your target market is using specific keywords to find what they need. Find out what those are and integrate them into your content strategy.

Create Content for Your Target Market

With the right research, you can craft customer personas that give you specific targets for your content. For example, in your persona development efforts, you might discover that the most likely customers for your product are women aged 30-39 with foot pain.

Knowing that the most promising leads fall into this relatively narrow category can be quite helpful. You can narrow down your content strategy to produce content that will appeal to this persona. That way, most of the people that the content draws in will already be prime leads for your product or service.

SEO Best Practices for Content

When considering content marketing for lead generation, there are multiple ways to get the results you are looking for. When you combine several effective approaches toward a common goal, the strategy becomes even more effective.

High-Quality Content to Act as a Lead Magnet

You have more tools at your disposal than ever for content generation, but human-first marketing remains the gold standard for developing a lead generation magnet. Focus on creating high-quality content that goes the distance to address the needs of your target persona. Whether it’s articles, blogs, white papers, videos, or any other type of content, keep the focus on quality.

Pillar/Cluster Strategy

Keep content organized for people and search engines by utilizing a pillar/cluster strategy.

A pillar page gives an overview of a broad topic while cluster pages cover subtopics. The pillar page includes links to the various related cluster topics. Together, a pillar page and cluster pages provide comprehensive information that your target audience can rely on to address their questions and needs.

Extend Reach with Social Media

Social media platforms provide an inexpensive way to extend the reach of your content. It can take a little time and effort to learn the ins and outs of each platform, but once you have a basic understanding of a few, you can incorporate social media posting into your strategy. With some extra steps, you can add social media to your multi-channel marketing campaign and increase engagement.

Tracking the Results and Refining Future Content

One of the most powerful guides in your quest to link content marketing and lead generation is analytics – Google Analytics for most, although there are other similar tools. Analytics is key for content performance tracking, showing you metrics like traffic sources, bounce rate, conversion rate, and other data points. These demonstrate how your content is performing.

Effective lead generation requires trial and error. To consistently produce content that will achieve your goals, it’s necessary to try various approaches and see how they perform through analytics. Each time you review the metrics, you can adjust content to better achieve your objectives.

Get Help from the Experts at CSP

You understand the ins and outs of marketing, but no one is an expert at everything. If you are curious about implementing content strategies that integrate lead generation, we are here to answer your questions.

Tie your content and lead generation strategies together with the help of our expert team, and turn readers into leads effortlessly.