Content Marketing approach to develop Lead

By Lucid Softech IT Solutions | search engine optimization,  19 Jul 2015

Lead generation has become an important modern marketing strategy, which strives to create demand and get their messages heard from increasingly sophisticated buyers, In today’s complex world, marketers should use lead generation to build brand awareness, nurture our customers and prospects, qualify leads, and revenue generating measurable qualify leads, and ultimately generate measurable revenue.

Content Marketing is the creation and sharing of content for the purpose of promoting a product or service. Content plays an important role in your B2B marketing strategies. You need it for lead nurturing, lead scoring and demonstrating thought leadership in your space.

Lead Nurturing

Lead nurturing is the process of building relationships with qualified prospects regardless of their timing to buy. Over 50% of leads are not yet sales ready, so nurturing those leads can help you maximize results rather than throwing them away.

Lead Scoring

Lead scoring is an integral part of modern lead management. By tracking your prospect’s behaviors and web activity, you can determine their level of interest in your solution (engagement) in addition to your interest in them (demographics targeting). Only by combining both factors can you send truly qualified leads to sales.

A content marketing strategy answers questions such as:

• Who are the buyer personas and what are their content needs and preferences? This questions looks at the type of information different ‘archetypes’ of buyers seek during their buying journey and maps the customer touch points, preferred communication channels, and – to some extent – the content formats, although that’s a question for the content strategy too. Buyer personas haven’t been invented for content marketing. They are used for an overall marketing strategy. But in a content marketing strategy you take a more complete look at them.
• Which marketing and other organizational goals can we realize or improve by better using content marketing? An example: traffic building, conversion optimization, event marketing, lead generation and management, email marketing, social media marketing, marketing automation, customer service, etc. can all be improved by a better usage of content and content marketing. Your content marketing strategy looks at this. As a matter of fact, don’t just ask what organizational goals content marketing serves as in the chart. Many people, especially those calling the buying shots, have no clue what content marketing is and so do many executives, even in marketing. So, ask what organizational goals you can support and strengthen instead of trying to separate content marketing from the overall equation.
• Which content marketing metrics and KPIs do we need to gauge success, in correlation with other marketing metrics and KPIs? Although there are some typical metrics used in content marketing it’s important to speak a common language across all marketing and even business efforts. Content marketing is not an island. One of the crucial success factors in implementing marketing ROI across the organization is finding common metrics and using a common language between different departments.
• How will we structure the internal organization – or better: how will we make sure that all content marketing related processes and flows are properly organized, in correlation with other marketing processes and/or teams? Often, content marketing thinker’s advice to build teams that are more or less dedicated to content marketing. In practice, this seldom happens (except in some major firms) and team’s better focus on the tasks and goals than the exact roles, realizing each company is different.
• For which other marketing goals and even business purposes – on top of the usual suspects – can we use content marketing? Examples: to support your customer service team, to empower sales, to optimize website conversions, etc.
• Which organizational processes, stumbling blocks, competitor data, management goals, customer insights, business stakeholders, teams, external partners, overall marketing priorities, etc. do I need to know in order to succeed? Before even thinking about content strategy, content inventorization or content production, these crucial questions need to be known.
• How is the industry you are in changing? And more specifically: how is the buyer’s journey of your buyer personas evolving in the industries your customers are active in and your business is active in. What role can content marketing play? As an example: look at the evolutions in the B2B services industry. Content plays a clear role but look further. For instance: Key Account Management is a priority in that industry. Can it be served using an optimized content marketing strategy? Also look at the influencer sphere of the buyers in that industry and at the different types of buyers.
• What questions do we need to answer and steps do we need to plan to put our content marketing strategy in action and move to the content strategy that looks at more content-related aspects?
• What existing budgets can we tap into to better achieve the goals using content in areas where return is below expectations (and what are these areas, of course)? An example: you may have an overall budget for your website but maybe it’s better to invest in more relevant content for your buyer personas instead and putting that design makeover on hold this year. Or maybe your organization invests a bit too much in generating traffic and leads but conversions stay behind. You can turn down the volume a bit and invest more in conversion optimization and lead nurturing, using content.
• How do we forecast and get budgets when no existing budgets can be tapped into or adapted? If your organization is missing out on important opportunities – and it always is – you need to make the calculated case for additional budgets.