Is your content marketing bringing in leads and sales?
In a recent webinar with Jeff Molander, one of the co-founders of the Google Affiliate Network, he shared several strategies for connecting with prospects and acquiring customers through blogging and content marketing.
Molander has trained, worked with and consulted some of the biggest companies in the world and has written several books including “Off the Hook Marketing: How to Make Social Media Sell for You.” He has also spoken extensively about how to make use of blogs, content and social media to attract leads and drive sales.
These webinar notes highlight some important takeaways to help you enhance your lead generation strategy with content marketing.
It’s ideal to generate leads by creating a little bit of actual success in people’s lives. This can be through what you write, your blogs, through what you publish inside your blogs, your ebooks, video tutorials, and all these nuggets of wisdom that you’re going to give away on your blog.
You might be thinking where do I stop, where do I draw the line. When I write blogs and I create content that educates or impacts my customers, I can’t afford to give away all my best stuff.
If you’re selling a service, you’re essentially selling a promise. We’re selling a promise of a better future, and in many cases the future takes some time to materialize through your service.
In some cases products work the same way. That’s why many of us offer free trials to generate and close those leads.
It’s similar with blogging. The goal is to create content that gives prospects a free sample or a taste of actual success.
Prove that you’re worth investing in before you ask for customers to make the investment.
Ask yourself these three questions:
1) Does the content being published on your blog teach a new skill to customers?
2) Help customers avoid a risk?
3) Or illuminate a path toward a goal that they need to achieve?
These three questions should serve as starting points. This is where I’d like you to begin to help your prospective customers experience some success.
Most of us are struggling to get attention with our blogs, and when we occasionally get that attention we aren’t sure what to do with it. What we end up doing is squandering it, because we’re not focused on creating a craving. Your success at generating leads using blogs will improve when you start getting prospects hungry for more answers, more powerful insights, more helpful shortcuts, and satisfying experiences that you can give them in return for them becoming a lead. It can be:
– A free video tutorial
– A useful white paper
– A handy checklist
– An e-book
Create something really useful for prospects that can be traded in exchange for their trust — Nuggets of wisdom that come in electronic form.
Who do they come back to? They’ll come back to the people who gave them the guidebook. Because clearly the people who wrote the guidebook or the video know their stuff.
They now know something. They now maybe have taken some notes on your blog or printed it out, and they’re going to go do that step one, step two, step three. Plus, they’re going to come back. They may even at that moment register for that download or that video.
How do you know what problems to solve? How do you know where to start? What questions should you be answering?
That’s all about listening for those pain points. how are people expressing their pain? How are people expressing their curiosity? How are they expressing their fear or their desire to achieve a goal?
Be sure that you listen. Bring it back to the top and help people solve those problems. The businesses that are creating demand for products are helping customers solve problems.
For example, the customer focus for Convirza is to help customers track their marketing’s effectiveness and also listen to and analyze their calls. That’s what we’re about. Helping them get more customer data and more marketing data.
That’s also what our blog is about. How to not only track your marketing more closely, but to use that data to optimize your marketing and sales.
