Content can be the fuel for your lead generation by funneling traffic to your landing pages.
But many companies start content marketing without keeping an eye on their conversion and revenue objectives. Brand awareness is fine and good, but a company needs to know that their content is bringing in new customers. Therefore, it’s important to make sure your content is successfully driving visitors to your landing pages.
Landing pages are the heart of any company’s online lead generation strategy. Your website should have multiple pages that each cater to different audiences setup for inbound leads. These could be pages that encourage visitors to download an ebook or white paper, contact your sales team or subscribe to a newsletter. But after you’ve built those great landing pages, how are you going to get people to visit those pages? That’s where having great content comes into play.
Good Content Brings People to Your Landing Pages
Once you’ve built your landing pages, you can use your content to bring customers to them. An effective content marketing strategy is to user your content to drive traffic straight to your high-converting landing pages. In a nutshell:
- Build your landing pages that you’ve tested to convert.
- Do content marketing on your blog as well as your email newsletter channels. Regularly updated content is what will drive traffic back to those landing pages.
- Use your social media channels to distribute that content.
Your content plays a vital role as a conduit to get people to your landing pages. Most companies will use a blog as the infrastructure for their content.
Blogs make it easy for multiple authors to write and schedule their posts. Blogs also make it easy to integrate your content within your social media distribution channel. Besides your social channels, your various email newsletters will also be vital content channels to reach out to your prospects.
The last stage of your content marketing strategy is to use social media to encourage your audience to read your content. Social media allows you to add some context for your audience to pique their curiosity before clicking over to your blog. Keep in mind that you don’t want to sell on social media. Social media is not where you’re going to be converting. It’s part of a larger strategy to get people over to your blog, and then on to your landing pages where you have a shot at converting them.
Using Targeted CTAs in Your Content
After someone has consumed your content, you want to drive them over to your landing pages. An effective way to get them over there is to use a call to action (CTA). A CTA helps you connect the dots between your content marketing and your inbound lead strategy.
But you have to match your CTAs to where your buyer is in your funnel. There are different stages that your potential buyers are in when they visit your blog. How you convert a first-time reader on your blog to become a lead is much different than trying to convert someone who is much deeper in your funnel.
You must align your calls to action according to where they are in your funnel. Here are the three stages of a typical marketing funnel and what the appropriate call to action is for each stage.
Top. A first time visitor to your blog is at the top of your funnel. They will tend to have more general questions. They are at the beginning of the buyer’s journey. Your CTA at this stage of the funnel should simply be an opt-in box asking them to subscribe to your newsletter.
Middle. At the middle of the funnel, you have someone who’s read a few posts and perhaps even seen some of your videos. In the middle of the funnel, you’d like to give people something with a bit more density than a blog post.
An ideal CTA in the middle of the buyer’s journey is a button for people to download an ebook. It creates a little bit of a commitment on their part, but you’re still trying more to educate them than to sell them. Downloading and reading an ebook or white paper is more of a time commitment than subscribing to a newsletter, but it’s the type of commitment you can ask for now that you’re in the middle of the funnel.
Bottom. At the bottom of the funnel are people who are ready to buy. An appropriate call to action for the bottom of the funnel is a link to contact your sales team or perhaps a link for them to click to get a demo of our product.
If you are mapping your CTAs to a different conversion goal at each stage of the funnel, there is no reason why your content shouldn’t convert. That’s why it’s crucial to align your CTAs. If you have a top of the funnel visitor who is reading a few blog posts and your CTA is “contact us for a demo,” that’s not going to work. If you push CTAs that are deep in your funnel to someone who is only at the beginning of your funnel, the visitor isn’t ready for that commitment and will bounce.
It’s not up to a single piece of content to convert a visitor into a buyer. The purpose of that content is to get the ball rolling and feed into your overall content marketing strategy. Your content needs to be interesting and not just self-promotional for this strategy to work. If you aim to be informative, educational and inspiring, you’re eventually going to start driving people to your money pages.
