Boosting brand awareness and informing consumers about the products/services your business offers is possible with great content. Modern consumers spend a lot of time finding and consuming digital content. If you want to effectively edge out the competition, then creating a detailed content marketing funnel is imperative. 

Nearly 82 percent of business owners report using content marketing to further their reach. As you develop a content marketing strategy for your business, consider what goals you want to accomplish. One of the main content marketing goals you should have is generating more leads. 

Generating qualified online leads with the help of great content will allow you to grow your bottom line. If you are serious about generating content marketing leads, check out the great tips below. 

1. Focus Your Attention on Top-Performing Topics

The only way to create effective content marketing campaigns is by monitoring the results certain pieces of content generate. Whether you’re creating blogs, eBooks or case studies, you need to assess how well your audience is receiving them. Having this information allows you to hone in on top-performing topics. 

Getting familiar with the Pareto Principle can be helpful when trying to capitalize on top-performing topics. This principle basically states that around 20 percent of your work will result in around 80 percent of your results. This means that 80 percent of the traffic and leads you generate will come from 20 percent of your content. 

By identifying top-performing topics, you can develop content that’s engaging and informative. Producing this type of content consistently allows you to generate more leads. 

2. Produce Evergreen Content

A lot of work goes into producing online content. Ideally, you want the hard work you put into developing content to produce results for a long time to come. Some business owners make the mistake of dating the content published on their websites. Content that is optimized to stay relevant and fresh for long periods of time is referred to as evergreen content. 

Using evergreen content is beneficial because it does things like:

  • Generates more leads
  • Provides a boost in website traffic
  • A future-proof form of content
  • Less work for business owners
  • Content that can be promoted over and over again

Choosing the right topics is crucial if you want to generate leads with evergreen content. These topics should be based on keywords that are consistently popular. Most evergreen content comes in the form of in-depth guides, case studies and tutorials. With the help of the team at Small Business SEO, you can create evergreen content that gets results. 

3. Just Say No To Fluff

Focusing solely on content length can become problematic. Some business owners make the mistake of padding the word count of their blogs with fluff. If readers feel like this content offers little to no value, they probably won’t share it with others. This can get in the way of your mission to generate more leads with content marketing. 

Rather than focusing on a particular word count, you need to provide detailed and concise information about the subject being covered. Focusing more on the quality of the content instead of word count can serve you well. Changing the way you approach content creation can help you engage with potential customers and win them over. 

4. Optimize Content For Search Intent

Generating more leads with your content marketing efforts will require lots of hard work. In order to produce content that your target demographic likes, you need to become familiar with the term search intent. This term is used to describe the purpose of an online search. Search intent comes in four basic categories:

  • Queries seeking informational intent will generally feature the word how
  • Navigational queries are used to help a consumer find their way around the Internet
  • Transactional queries are performed by consumers looking to make a purchase
  • Commercial queries are performed by people looking for information to help them make a purchasing decision

When trying to figure out search intent for content you’re developing, you have to learn how to think like a potential customer. Studying search engine results pages is a great way to see what type of terms are being used to find your business online. You also need to closely monitor autofill results to optimize your content for search intent. 

5. Perfect Your Call To Action Format

Before creating new content, you must figure out what you want to achieve. Some content is created for the sole purpose of relaying information to your target audience. Other content will be created to motivate readers to take a specific action. Describing the action you want the reader to take should be spelled out clearly in the call to action. 

In the past, the call to action was presented to website visitors via a pop-up. Over time, the tactic of using pop-ups has become outdated. These days, successful content has a call to action in the text at the bottom of the page. 

Writing an effective call will require you to:

  • Focus on outcomes and benefits
  • Remove any obstacles preventing readers from taking action
  • Use only first-person language
  • Create a sense of urgency

By implementing these tips, you can make your call to action stand out. If this part of your content is convincing enough, you should have no problem generating more leads. 

6. Content SEO is Crucial

Generating more leads with your content will require you to make it more visible to search engines. If your content is on the radar of popular search engines like Google, then improving brand awareness will be almost impossible. This is why you need to ensure all your content SEO bases are covered before publishing a piece of content. 

If you want your content to attract attention from search engines, then using internal/external links, relevant keywords and an easy-to-scan format is vital. With these elements in place, you can help your content move up the search engine ladder. 

7. Provide a Great User Experience

The longer you can get website visitors to stay on your domain, the higher the chance will become of turning them into actual customers. If you want to accomplish this goal, then realize the value of providing a great user experience is important. The last thing you want is for your website to turn a potential customer off, which is why routinely auditing your website and its content is wise. 

Providing a great user experience will be easy if you do things like:

  • Focus on mobile usability
  • Make sure content pages load quickly
  • Create a table of contents with in-page links
  • Use appealing graphics and images in your content

By providing a great user experience, you can motivate website visitors to share the content on your website. The more shares the content gets, the easier it will be to generate more sales leads. 

8. Work on Beautifying Your Content

Do the majority of the blogs on your website look like hunk blocks of text? If so, you are undoubtedly losing potential sales leads. Modern consumers like blogs that are easy to skim and consume. This is why you need to work on beautifying your posts. 

You can make your posts easier to scan by using bullet points, bold subheadings and shorter sentences. With these elements in place, you can keep website visitors interested in the content being published. 

9. Consumers Love Getting Things For Free

Getting readers of your content to take action will be much easier if you provide them with something free. In most cases, this free item will come in the form of an eBook or a consultation. You must realize that free is a gateway to turning website visitors into actual customers. 

The “payment” for this free content should be email addresses or other contact information. This information can be used at a later date to market more of your products/services to a person that’s already shown interest in your brand. 

10. Take Content Promotion Seriously

Simply creating great content won’t help you attract potential leads. If you aren’t consistently promoting new content on social media, then driving more traffic to your website will be impossible. Not only does promoting content on your social media help you generate leads, it also enhances your online presence. 

11. Monitor Results and Make Adjustments

If your main goal is to optimize your content for lead generation, then tracking certain metrics is imperative. These metrics should include things like the overall traffic generated by a piece of content and how many shares on social media it received. If you see certain content types performing better than others, alter your marketing strategy accordingly. With the right data, you should have no problem producing content that gets results. 

Are You Ready To Start Generating More Leads?

From creating evergreen content to promoting new blogs, there are many things you can do to generate more leads with your content marketing. With the help of Small Business SEO, you can expand your online reach by producing optimized content.