Want More Inbound Leads? Revamp Your Content Strategy

Want More Inbound Leads? Revamp Your Content Strategy

By Peggy Tierney Galvin, Chief Strategy Officer  

The bedrock of strategy in today’s digital marketing landscape is content. Prospects are seeking solutions to their problems at all phases of the buying process. According to one report, 91% of B2B marketers use content marketing to connect with prospects. That demonstrates how significant lead-generating inbound content marketing is now. 

There are three steps to creating a content strategy that wins prospects’ confidence and their business: 

  1. Understand your target audience’s problems in depth. 
  2. Use those problems to produce content that addresses those problems. 
  3. Make sure the marketing and sales departments are communicating well so that everyone has the most recent information on what your target audiences are interested in. 

Let’s go through each of these elements together. 

Elements of a successful content strategy 

Prospects and customers are looking for content that shows your comprehension of their company, goals and challenges – in detail and with examples from real life. They also want to see your knowledge of best practices that they can apply to their daily work duties. 

Therefore, you must produce content that speaks to each of your target markets – vertical markets as well as the particular purchasing influencer job positions within the company. Your prospect will value information that appeals to each of the individuals within his or her organization who will need to approve the buying decision, as each will have different criteria; the CFO will have different concerns than a technical lead, for instance. 

Prospects typically use a search engine to begin looking for resources. Your content strategy, therefore, needs to be closely linked to your Google Ad strategy so that your content contains the keywords your larger ad strategy is using for SEO and SEM. Incorporating SEO keywords into your content can help drive organic traffic to your website.  

It doesn’t matter whether you have the most eye-catching eBook on the internet or the most well-known and relevant podcast guest in history if your prospects can’t find your material in organic search results. And your content must show up on the first page of results for users to see it. 

Developing a solid backlinks strategy is another technique to enhance SEO. Backlinks from articles published in online journals and blogs point interested parties to your website. Backlinks from authoritative websites also signal to search engines that your content is valuable, which improves search rankings. 

Adding gated content to your website is another strategy for acquiring leads. To access higher-value assets like white papers and success stories that address their current pain points, prospects must first give you their contact information. 

The power of personalization 

Today’s consumers need a personalized experience and addressing the requirements and concerns of various audiences by tailoring content to each stage of the buyer’s journey can help deliver on this expectation. Since the pandemic made it harder for sales teams to meet face-to-face, marketing has been filling the gap with more specialized, account-based marketing. 

For instance, this information may be a compilation of use cases geared toward the prospect’s niche industry or threat analysis based on the prospect’s publicly exposed data. The future of content marketing lies in the ability to immediately and explicitly demonstrate value to each individual prospect. 

The convergence of sales and marketing 

Around-the-clock customer and prospect access to brands is now possible – and expected. Additionally, companies now have unprecedented access to prospects’ behavior. Therefore, it is necessary for marketing and sales to continue to converge in new and deeper ways. To get immediate feedback on the concerns, interests and needs of prospects, marketing and content creation leads must maintain constant contact with the sales team. These kinds of specifics are what will make a content marketing program successful and efficient. 

Get the great content you need 

In the current extended world of digital marketing, content has developed into a key facet of organizations’ demand generating activities. If done correctly, content creation is a potent way to connect with customers and prospects and draw them into your sales funnel. A significant tool for attracting new business is the use of highly targeted content that meets the needs and challenges of prospects. 

Using sales team feedback to stay aligned with prospects’ issues and requirements is a great way to ensure your content is aiding in lead generation. It can be challenging to produce all the content required for each stage of the buyer’s journey, and not all businesses have access to the in-house expertise to do this. Consider working with a company that offers content marketing services if that is the case. This kind of service might offer content planning guidance, as well. Create a strategy that serves prospects and gets them directly to your door, using the best practices mentioned above. 

Need help creating a content strategy plan or the content itself, or both? We’ve got plenty of experience helping customers create content that generates inbound leads. You can reach us here 

Ready to take your marketing program
to the next level? We can help.