To generate leads in 2023, a successful content marketing strategy should include a variety of content types that are tailored to your target audience. Here are some tips for creating a content marketing strategy for any industry:
Here are five key steps to help you generate leads in any industry:
Define your ideal customer: Before you start creating content, it's important to understand who you're creating it for. Identifying your target audience will help you create content that is relevant, engaging and resonates with them.
Establish Your Brand's Message: What is your message and how does it relate to your ideal customer? Contrary to popular belief, you're brand's message has more to do with your target market than your actually brand.
Optimize for Search Engines: Take a look at the existing content on your website and landing pages and evaluate its effectiveness on whether or not it generates leads. Identify areas for improvement, and make a plan to update or remove content that is no longer relevant including focusing on specific keywords.
Create a Variety of Content: Use a combination of visuals (e.g. photos, videos, infographics), written content (e.g. blog posts, articles, reviews), and social media posts to create an engaging and comprehensive content strategy.
Track, Measure, Optimize: Be sure to have all the proper tracking software in place to make sure that you are getting the best ROI on your marketing spend. Digital marketing is amazing when compared to traditional marketing because it allows for immediate feedback & enables us to pivot and optimize our campaigns quicker.
Now let's dive into each of these deeper:
Define your Ideal Customer
This may be something you've never done for your business and may take some market research. All too often I find that businesses are trying to communicate their message to a classroom of people, instead of an individual student.
You may have heard the saying, "if you try to appeal to everyone, you'll appeal to no one" and that's exactly what we're talking about.
When you define who your ideal customer is, you know what their questions, concerns and objections are. That way we can create content around answer those questions leaving potential customers seeing our business as a no-brainer solution.
There are many options out there when it comes to helping us define our ideal customer so just do some research and find one that makes sense to you. You can also search "customer avatar."
Establish Your Brand's Message
You're brand's message comes from understanding who your ideal customer is, where they're currently at and where they want to go.
What I mean is that your ideal customer is currently experiencing some sort of "pain" and they have a dream outcome that your business can provide. Your Brand's Message needs to communicate how your business/offer is the vehicle they need to get them from where they are to where they want to go. You need to communicate that you understand their pain points as well as pointing out what makes you an authority to provide the solution to their problem.
The resource that I recommend when it comes to establishing your Brand's Message is the StoryBrand BrandScript template. This is a free tool that can you help you think about your business from your customer's perspective.
By the end of the exercise, you will have a concrete asset that you can use to communicate to your ideal customer through your social posts, on your websites, in your ads and even in person!
These first two steps are the pillars to a successful content marketing strategy so even they may seem mundane, don't skip them! They are very important.
Brand Story Script: https://mystorybrand.com/
Optimize for Search Engines
Now this is all about your website and being found on Google (or any other future platforms that dethrone the search king).
Potential customers that are looking for your product, service or even your business are warm and hot traffic and are the easiest to convert into paying customers because they are qualified leads.
When they come to your website or landing pages, they have information that they are looking for, questions, concerns and objections that they need addressed. If you don't have the answer to even just one of their questions, they could go from potential lead to choosing your competitor over you. That's why it's so important to understand who your ideal customer is so you can create content addressing all these topics.
Creating good SEO for your website is an insanely tedious task including keyword research and many other factors that I won't be covering in this blog post but here are few high level points:
Use keyword research and implement them into your website (everywhere)
Use video that keeps your audience's attention
publish relevant authoritative content
Write blog posts (like this one!)
use alt tags
Create a Variety of High Quality Content
Potential leads see thousands of images, ads and videos every single day which is why it's important to create a variety of content to be posted.
Here's a pro tip to generate more leads: no matter what type of content your producing (video, photo, written, audio) have 5 core themes that people know you/your business for. You can rotate between these themes everyday and every week to keep people interested and engaged.
When creating videos, be sure to switch up where and how you are shooting. If you're always filming with the same background, your audience might scroll past thinking they already saw the video even it could be some really valuable content!
Other types of content you should be using in your content marketing strategy are photos as well as written content like blog posts and articles.
Don't forget social media when it comes to organic traffic either! Social media should be an integral part into all lead generation campaigns.
Here's another pro tip: when you think about the buyer journey, everyone is becoming aware of your business at different stages of their journey. That's why it's important to create a lead magnet that resonates with each audience type.
Email Marketing
Another type of content for marketing is creating an effective followup email marketing campaign. Email campaigns are important for nurturing that customer relationship because not everyone is ready to buy at the same time.
By creating multiple email follow ups, you can continue to put out lead magnets to get more leads back into your funnel and over to your landing pages. It should also be mentioned that adding video to email campaigns can increase open rates by up to 300%!
Problem Aware
People who enter your marketing funnel at this stage are aware of the problem they have but may not be aware of the solutions that are available. Content that resonates with this type of audience are:
How To's
Statistics
Tips
Content relating to Surface Level Struggles
Solution Aware
People who enter your funnel at this stage are aware of their problem and are aware of the solutions that are available but still aren't aware of who provides these solutions. Content that resonates with this type of audience are:
Stories that position you as a subject matter expert
Talking about solution options that are available for a specific pain point
Product Aware
The final stage of the funnel is someone that is aware they have a problem, aware of the solutions and are know comparing the options that are available for who provides the solutions. Types of content that resonate with this audience are:
Case Studies
Proof of Concept
Comparisons between you and your competitor
It's important to create a variety of valuable lead generation content that resonates for people entering your funnel at all these different stages of the customer's journey.
And finally...Track, Measure & Optimize
You work hard for your business you want to know that your marketing spend will generate high quality leads as well as get you a return on your investment, right?
Of course you do! That's why it's important to implement the proper tracking software so you can see the impact the campaign is having on your business.
Tracking Software
Software like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Facebook Pixels and many more can help track and measure the stats from your efforts.
Be sure to work with an expert when it comes to running ads, creating landing pages and follow up campaigns so they can be measured accurately.
The purpose of tracking is to make sure that our campaigns are effective but if they aren't, we can pivot and adjust anything we need to, such as the copy, or our message or our image or video. We keep pivoting and adjusting until we find the formula that sticks with our audience.
Another important reason to measure and track a campaigns performance is to make sure that the ads aren't starting flop. The lifespan of a digital ad for a local brick and mortar business is only about 6 weeks so it's important to see when your ads aren't having as much of an impact any more.
Conclusion
In conclusion, when creating a profitable lead generation campaign in 2023, businesses need to develop a content marketing strategy that is:
Tailored to your target audience - start by conducting market research
Communicates your brand's message
Website is Search Engine Optimized - do your keyword research & produce valuable information!
Create a Variety of High Quality Content Addressing Ideal Customers Concerns, Questions & Objections
Measure, track, optimize
If you do all of these content marketing strategies with consistency, I guarantee you will succeed at generating qualified leads with content marketing in 2023 .
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