Generating B2B Leads Through Content Marketing
There comes a point when the C-suite executive in your company asks, ‘What are the sales like for this month?’
It’s pretty evident that no leads mean no sales, no customers and hence, no revenue.
As much as content marketing sells, there is a vast difference between selling to B2C and B2B. This is because B2B consumers are smart and far more resourceful.
However, an important thing to remember is, B2B consumers are also human, there is a decision maker behind the company and to convince that decision maker that your brand provides the best product/service to offer, content marketing is the way to go.
So, now you have realised how important content marketing is, but just thinking of going along the way will not to cut it.
Let’s face it, lead generation is one of the most difficult yet important aspects of marketing.
To have a strategy which generates leads and is strong enough to bring your audience in the lead generation funnel is essential.
Let’s dive into this and get you a winning content marketing strategy!
The Content Marketing Institute defines content marketing as ‘a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.’
Content marketing goes beyond the selling of products and services to add value to the consumers in a way in which you won’t have to sell them, they will sell themselves,
How?
Content which solves the problems of the reader and adds value to them wins because whenever people face problems, the first thing they do is ‘search’ for its solution.
Let’s say you’re a team communications tool provider, imagine whenever a person searches for its related keywords, you provide helpful information in different formats-blogs, videos, eBooks, guides, infographics, podcasts and so on.
This builds authority and trust.
When you’re able to provide information, which is valuable and helpful, you will automatically wrap them in your sales funnel which will bring an influx of leads. This is because, according to them, you are an industry leader–someone who has the solution to everything they are looking for.
While B2B marketing is relatively difficult than B2C, it’s important to understand, explicit marketing will take you nowhere but establishing relationships, solving problems and convincing them to put their faith in you through educational content can go a long way.
Let’s explore this process in detail.
The Ideal Content Marketing Strategy for B2B Lead Generation
Like every other marketing strategy, content marketing too cannot effectively function without a strategy.
A loose content blueprint will not only cost you leads but will waste a lot of time and resources, so it’s important to spend your time in creating a content strategy backed by an actionable plan.
While creating a lead generating content marketing strategy which appeals to businesses, it’s important to focus on key areas.
Let’s understand this through a simple yet effective 5-step strategy framework
1) Identify your target audience and understand them
To serve the audience and drive them in your sales funnel, you need to keep them engaged and to do that you need to understand them.
The idea is not to create content for them, but through them.
The first step in identifying your target audience is to carry out a thorough market research to see what type of content they consume, where they consume it, what they like or don’t like to read about and what guides their buying decisions,
To get more detailed, you can segment them as per demographics like age, gender, interests, buying capacities, income and more.
Further, creating buyer personas– a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on the target audience research will give you a deeper insight.
You can easily these through Hubspot’s buyer persona templates.
2) Define your objective and goals
Your objective is to generate leads through content marketing but is that enough?
An objective needs to be backed by result-oriented goals which help in achieving the objective, these need to be SMART Goals: specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timely.
Your content marketing objective, lead generation needs to be broken down into SMART goals so the possibility of achieving them is higher and that of failure is lower.
Example of a SMART Goal: generate 20 inbound leads through social media per month for the next 4 months
These goals will help you devise your content strategy which slowly but largely help you achieve your objective.
3) Create valuable and quality content
The creation of quality content which provides value to the audience and keeps them engaged is one of the most essential parts of the process. This content needs to be midway of what you want to deliver and what your audience needs to consume.
It should be targeted at educating the audience or solving their pain points. Either way, they should enjoy the content.
Pro tip: Create content in both- bite-sized and long form contents such as blogs, webinars, infographics, carousels, videos, eBooks, guides, podcasts and more.
Don’t forget to add call-to-actions (CTAs) in your content, this drives the user towards the next thing you’re offering and gives you an idea about what’s working and what’s not.
Use the 80/20 content rule; 80% educational content and 20% promotional content.
B2B content creation is a long-term commitment and to see results, you need to be consistent and innovative in your approach towards it.
4) Content promotion
A bitter fact about content marketing is, no matter how good your content is, if it’s not distributed the right way, it will never reap the results it deserves.
Therefore, creating a content distribution strategy along the lines of different social media channels, website and email is important.
Here are some best practices for content distribution;
Promote your blogs on social media channels and via newsletters
Repurpose content– convert blog posts into videos and carousels into podcasts
Cross-promote content– Share your Instagram link on Facebook posts and vice versa
Boost your best performing content through paid ads
Content promotion determines the success of your content and gives you an insight into which channels perform the best, which content performs better on which channel and so on.
Pro tip: document your content distribution strategy to note your analysis and use it to guide further strategies.
5) Analyse metrics and review your strategy
Pushing content consistently without analysing results will not lead to success.
The best part about content marketing is, there is no handbook which can tell you what works and what does not. You need to think, experiment, analyse and review to arrive at what works for you.
This makes analysing your topmost priority.
Thanks to digital innovation, there are N number of tools to help you measure data and analyse what’s working and what’s not. These include:
Google Analytics for website
Hootsuite for social media
Hubspot for lead generation
This infographic on content marketing metrics by SEMrush can help you in deciding what and how to measure.
This can help you identify which activities to resume and which to improve.
Lead Generation Strategies
Now that you have a content strategy ready, let’s get on with the best lead generation strategies which can help you acquire your target audience in the lead generation funnel.
1) Create high converting landing pages
Before buying any product or for finding problems for their solutions, the first thing people do is to search for it. So, if you are providing solutions to those problems or selling any products and services, it’s important to have a high converting landing page.
This may involve improving landing pages or creating them from scratch because let’s face it, not all landing pages can perform well, so aim at perfecting them.
Here are some best practices for creating converting landing pages:
- A compelling headline which says what you do and how you add value to people
- The level of the copy on the landing page should only increase as the user scrolls down
- It should have a fast load time, even a second of delay in loading time could cost you leads
- Make it look good, with a simple and aesthetic design
- Instill call-to-actions (CTAs) at relevant places throughout the landing page, also add social proofs
2) Create quality content
Evidently, content forms the centre of content marketing and so, it’s important to create content which appeals to the users. Here, your B2B target audience.
So, how can you make sure that people read your content, engage with it, find it worthy enough to share and actually reach out to you, thus posing as inbound leads?
As far-fetched as it may sound, it’s not that difficult, but you need to focus on some key factors to create content which relates to them.
Here are some best practices:
- Identify what they enjoy reading by conducting a market research and analysing your published content
- The headline of the content is your hook, if it is compelling enough, then the user will read it in its entirety, if not, they might just scroll past it and that’s not what we want. So, study successful content headlines and experiment with yours. Keep changing it unless you find the one which works
- Create in-depth actionable content. Actionable content is content that people can read and then use that information for something in the real world.
- Keep the blog length between 2000-5000 words. Generally, articles supported by actionable content, statistics and screenshots perform better than short form and vague content. Create content which will benefit your readers and bring you more traffic.
3) Expand your horizon beyond written content
91% of B2B professionals say webinars are their preferred type of content.
While blogs and white papers rule written content, video generated content and webinars drive a higher ROI, this is because although, written content is easy to consume, listening to detailed information by an expert backed by case studies tend to generate more interest among the B2B audience.
Here are some best practices:
- Conduct webinars on common pain points in the industry by inviting an expert guest speaker. Distribute the invite via email and social media
- Convert your top performing blogs into videos
- Embed your blogs with videos on similar content to cross promote it and offer more to the audience
4) Up your social media outreach strategy
Social media is an essential means of lead generation because to engage with your target audience, help them and initiate discussion, you need to be where they are and this will only be possible when you up your social media outreach game.
How can you do this?
Here are some best practices:
- Consistently produce quality content on all your social media channels, connect and engage with the audience
- Follow the influencers in your industry, mention them in your posts and reach out to them, build relationships
5) Using email for lead nurturing
Emails are a great way to nurture and acquire leads by building trust with your audience, not just when they search for you but in fact, dropping yourself in their mailbox.
This doesn’t mean that you pitch. The idea is to convince them through a variety of ways to spend money on the product or service you’re offering.
Here are some best practices:
- Never buy email lists, always build your email lists through a pop up on your website or otherwise to attract only those who are interested. This will increase the chances of prospective leads
- If you want to prevent people from unsubscribing and keep them wanting for more, provide only high-quality information. Nothing is better than getting awesome information right in your inbox, without having to open the browser
- Don’t spam but send at least one email in a week with an enticing subject line which compels them to open the email and read it.
If you consistently provide high value information, cutting through the 100 other emails they get in a day, you can create an effective email list of prospective customers.
Few more lead generation strategies:
- Generating leads via email through video views
- Guest blogging
- Creating lead magnets
- Quora marketing
- Podcasting
Wrapping it up
Content Marketing is a long-term commitment and to leverage it for generating leads is one of its best uses, but it requires consistency, innovation and persistence.
Anyone can create a blog and an email list but to stand out from many people doing the same thing, you need to build authority and trust in a way that they feel confident enough to transition from audience to buyers.
After reading this article, now you have a checklist for the ideal content marketing strategy and the best lead generation strategies. Make the best use of both of them and let your leads flow.
All the best!
