Leads

Are you still mystified about how to generate leads from your content marketing? Why not take a bulletproof and scientific approach to your content marketing strategy to generate those leads?

80% of B2B marketers admit that lead generation is their top concern when adopting new content marketing strategies, according to a report done by the Content Marketing Institute. Do you know the steps they take to make that goal a reality?

You may be surprised to learn that they take a very scientific approach that you can use in your own lead generation objectives as well. Let’s get started learning the simple steps to use content marketing to increase your ability to obtain valuable leads from your content marketing efforts.

1. Establish the Metrics for Lead Generation

Like any good scientist, a B2B marketer wanting to study the results obtained by their marketing practices, you will have to establish metrics to measure your success or failure. The very first step to do that is to determine what your lead generation goals are, usually measured in terms of revenue. However to get to that bottom number, you have to first measure these three things:

How many leads you want each month – The number of leads you want each month may be dependent on whether you are selling premium products or have a low-end sale that needs to generate more revenue with more conversions. This is an individual decision that is determined by the B2B marketer.

The associated conversion rate – You should have a pretty good idea of what percentage of people who visited your site in the past actually convert into paying customers. You will want to target raising the conversion rate later, but for now assume it remains the same.

Traffic counts to meet your goals – When you multiply the conversion rate by the traffic count, you get a very good idea of how many leads you might expect to get from the numbers. You can have a goal to increase your conversions, by simply increasing traffic, if the number falls below the goal you have in mind.

Most websites will give you traffic counts on a monthly basis to make it easy to track this figure. Other analytical tools will give you a lot more information about your traffic as well, like place of origination, platform they’re on, and so on. However, you can also make your own reports using Excel or graphs, if you want to segment traffic in different ways.

2. Do Content Analysis

Now that you have a good idea of the amount of traffic you need to meet your lead generation goals, you can go about finding ways to attract that traffic through content generation.

Choose topics that bring traffic to your blog

Now that you know that the traffic you generate will impact your lead generation results, you can choose to analyse your content and find out what topics are working for you and which are not. Here are a couple of ways to set up metrics for your content as well:

Look at Reads or Consumption – Content that is visited often is being read or consumed more than other content that doesn’t have people visiting it. Google analytics can show you, on a page by page basis, how many people visited a page. If you have content that is generating massive numbers of reads, then you should be able to leverage that attention to increase your conversions on that page.

Make Your Content Shareable – Another metric that tells you people like your content is whether they share it with their friends or not. To ease that process, you can set up easy buttons to click embedded in your content to make it instantly shareable in the most popular social networking platforms out there.

Track Conversions – You will want to know a variety of different things from those topics that generated conversions. For instance, what topics were “hot” topics? What days were those topics published? What content layout seems to be most popular with your readers?

You can get a good idea of what works for your particular site by noticing trends and making predictions on new topics for how many leads that content should generate. Once you get an accurate feel for that number, you will be able to establish a publishing schedule that can help you meet your lead generation goals.

Sales Conversions

Not all leads are sales, but these are the most important to your business. You will want to keep a close eye on new customers and what content might be driving their decision to buy.

All in all, you will need to look at patterns and adopt strategies that make sense to increase the return on investment in your content marketing. You will need to stay flexible and nimble, and be willing to change strategies when things don’t work. Don’t go solely by the numbers. Your results are the best indicator of what is working and what is not.

3. Brainstorm Lots of Topics

It’s now time to unleash those creative juices by brainstorming multiple topics that can help you increase traffic and conversions. You will want to take the information you got in step 2 to product content with the right topics and layouts to create campaigns that will increase your odds of success. Take a broad approach by generating many, many, ideas and once you have that down, narrow them down to a few great ideas. The idea is to fine tune the content marketing strategy so that every post is a winner.

4. Get to Work, Creating Winning Content

Once you have a few good campaign ideas from step 3, it’s time to get started writing. You can generate content by writing it yourself or hiring others to do it for you. You can use guest bloggers or hire ghostwriters. Professional freelance writers are familiar with the ways to write content that will appeal to a wide range of audiences and increase your traffic or conversions.

Always take a proactive approach and continue to monitor results as you go along. Anytime you don’t meet your lead generation goals, take a step back and re-evaluate your methods. In this way, you don’t have to be a scientist to apply the same methodology that ultimately leads to success.