7 way to drive inbound Leads through Content Marketing

A lot of you who are reading this article right now are struggling to generate leads for your businesses. But what if I told you that you can easily drive inbound leads through content marketing.

Believe it or not, today, the market for high-quality and SEO oriented content is growing exponentially and the sooner you take advantage of it, the better it is for your business. Be it B2C marketing or B2B – content is still the God damn King! Here are 7 easy ways which tell you how you can effectively drive inbound leads through content marketing.

1. Thorough Market Research

Smart decisions are based on in-depth market analysis, so if you don’t know something, don’t second guess it. Be a smart person & do market research on it. And let me break this down for you in a manner that you will be able to grasp my words better.

Suppose you want to surprise your better half with a home cooked meal, but for some weird reason, you don’t know what they like. So what do you do? Do you go and ask your neighbors what their spouses like? Would that be a very smart move, considering that your partner may have very different tastes from theirs? Or should you just wing it and guess what they like? Yeah, like that’d ever go down well.

So here, your target audience is your spouse, which is why it makes sense to go and ask them what they want instead of guessing or asking the wrong people about it. Remember – market research centers your business on your consumers, so perform exclusive market researches till you get the answers you are looking for. In this way, you can drive inbound leads through content marketing.

2. High-Converting Landing Pages

You haven’t created a landing page? Why? Where do you want your people to land when they click on your ads? Your homepage? Seriously? Go & get yourself a landing page now. Think it’s an unnecessary expense? Think again, because Moz managed to generate a whopping $1 million for Moz just through one freaking landing page. http://www.conversion-rate-experts.com/seomoz-case-study/. Landing Pages help drive inbound leads through content marketing.

3. Creating Lead Bait can drive inbound leads

Link bait is content that drives inbound leads through content marketing & if your content is awesome, it will always serve as lead bait. But keep in mind that “great content” is not the only criteria. You may spend hours on a very informative piece of article about one of your products, which may receive 3 to 4 likes on Facebook and 50 page visits. On the other hand, that stupid cat photo which your competitor posted may have received 30 likes & 500 page visits.

Why? Because honestly, link bait is nothing but a way to grab attention, & the key is in knowing your audience. Arouse enough curiosity in your audience which will make them want to click on the link you’ve posted. And voila! You’re done!

4. Focus on Your Content

Do you really think posting and updating content just for the sake of content is a nice idea? Think again. Your content needs to be data-driven and of high-quality in order to drive inbound leads through content marketing. Shake things up a bit – don’t always talk about who you are and what you’re selling – speak to people as if they’re people and not customers, and that’s when you will get the best response out of them. And also, target your content at the correct audience. Remember that example I gave about cooking dinner for your spouse? Don’t make that mistake.

9 in 10 businesses accept that content targeted at a specific group of people gives them more useful inbound leads, so you know I’m not BSing you when I ask you to focus your content towards the correct audience. http://blog.marketo.com/2013/01/how-to-develop-great-content-that-generates-demand.html

5. Content Promotion Techniques

Research where your audience is. Facebook? LinkedIn? Instagram or Pinterest? Don’t ever think creating a social media account everywhere is enough. Nah man. You’ll just be wasting your time, money and energy. Business professionals are best targeted via LinkedIn while stay at home mothers and fathers can quickly be reached through Pinterest. As for your content, create catchy headlines and visually appealing thumbnails to drive inbound leads through content marketing (they also count as promotion, you know). And go ahead and opt for various paid or organic methods to promote your content. You can read about them here.

6. Follow Trend Setters To get Fresh Content

I have already told you how to correctly target your audience via social media. And here, I’m going to tell you how the possible chain reactions that your social media campaigns can trigger. Go to Topsy.com and select the “INFLUENCERS” tab. Check which industry you want those people to be in, and you’ll be displayed a list of the most influential people and brands in your industry. Follow them – they will lead you to more connections within the next 48 hours. Communicate with them, follow up on their content strategies and repeat those techniques for yourself to drive inbound leads through content marketing. You’ll see improved inbound leads within a very short period of time (if you’re doing everything correctly, that is).

7. Inbound Leads Through Email Content

In order to drive inbound leads through content marketing, emails are an often ignored aspect of marketing, and ironically, they’re one of the best methods for getting inbound leads. If you’re putting all your focus on promoting content only via social media outlets and not emails, you’re making a huge mistake. Go ahead and share funny stories or eye grabbing pieces of articles to your customers through their email ids. This is an excellent way to nurture your leads to the level where they can trust you enough to spend money on your product. Why? Because nobody sends emails these days, which is why emails from advertisers actually managed to catch the attention of many people!

Just make sure that the content you share in your emails is interesting and relevant to your audience, this will help you drive inbound leads through content marketing.