3 Rules to generate Content Marketing Leads

Talking about rules to generate content marketing leads is like going to Antartica. Everyone knows where it is but only a few are able to reach there & even lesser manage to survive there. That’s being said, today content marketing is the ‘in thing’ for b2b marketers as they scramble to develop a comprehensive content marketing plan for their business.

In order to generate content marketing leads, one needs to establish two important things in his business:

1. A thought leadership platform
2. Qualified business leads from their prospects

In this article, we shall explore the second point of how to generate content marketing leads, of course high quality content marketing. But first of all, let’s take a quick look at what content marketing is all about for the uninitiated.

Content marketing is an important aspect of digital marketing, promoting content that your prospects would like to read, view or share with others and which they would value. The content that is created has to be off value to the prospect if it is to be taken seriously repeatedly.  The higher the value, the greater the propensity for the originator of the content to establish a thought leadership positioning and higher the likelihood of generating good quality business leads.

So what are the rules that you could follow to generate content marketing leads within your firm? Take a look at the 3 rules: Content could be text, visuals (infographics) or in video format. But the key thing is to deliver value.

Rule 1 to generate content marketing leads # Set your objective clearly.

Establish a thought leadership position and develop quality leads that could be converted into customers for the marketplace. The second objective is that our content marketing efforts should result in generating business leads either through people voluntarily downloading the content or writing into you.

Rule 2 to generate content marketing leads # Create content that has value

In order to generate content marketing leads, ensure that your content is appreciated, it has to have value. Value can be established by the number of people who read or view your content and follow through action that they take. The follow through action could be in terms of:

1)Subscribing your content

2)Commenting on your content

3)Sharing your content on their social media network

One must master B2B social media strategies to promote content aggressively among target market.

Recipient of your content must be understood properly and then design content accordingly. The target prospect for content marketing is clearly the SME enterprise business owner and/or the marketing head in SME organization that we feel would love to gain knowledge on all aspects of marketing in a simple manner. Research has indicated that most people while having skills in one or two disciplines of marketing were fairly un-skilled on other marketing aspects. Blog sections aims at improving knowledge levels by equipping prospects with a series of articles, white papers and videos that would help a person gain knowledge and through this establish ourselves as the premier knowledge partner for him.

At the time of going to press (as they say in the publishing business), we have successfully created a series of articles on different aspects of marketing, advertising and digital marketing. We also launched a couple of whitepapers and are working on launching our video content blog in a few months. This all helps in generating content marketing leads.

Rule 3 to generate content marketing leads # Promote and Promote

You could have the greatest article or blog on this planet but it would fail if no one knew about it. Promoting your content is as important as creating it. A good content marketing agency would help in both areas. Of course promoting anything costs money.

While generating content marketing leads, take a conscious call not to promote content using online advertising where money investment plays a critical role. Instead use social media and third parties to help promote content. Here is what third parties will do:

1. Choose right social media platforms depending upon your business. The famous social media platforms are Facebook, LinkedIn, G+, Twitter and Quora. You can promote your content aggressively on these platforms.
2. Team of employees will make sure that their network is exposed to the content.
3. Weekly emailer to the database showcasing weekly content updates.
4. Content will be carried away by third party publishers free of cost. Yes, good content will be carried by others!
5. Every piece of content will additionally be pumped up on CEO’s LinkedIn Post to give added coverage. The tendency of people searching our CEO’s or senior people in organizations is high and we knew that this would give us added exposure.

Try above rules for 8 weeks. It’s a short  period of time to consider the program a success, but you will have an understand of the direction which can help you decide the future course of action.As you gain deeper knowledge about your audience and improve your content both in terms of format and delivery, these numbers would be sure to go up, and you will be able to generate content marketing leads.