How to Capture Leads from Content Marketing

Do you have traffic to your website or blog but they are not turning into customers? Do you have plenty of engagement but not converting them into leads or sales? Obtaining a good amount of traffic with your content is one thing, but turning that traffic into sales is another. In fact, 60% of B2B marketers identify lead generation as their top online marketing challenge.

Effectively using content marketing strategies can not only boost traffic to your website, but be used as a tool to turn that traffic into quality leads for your business. Content can takes many forms, including:

• Blog posts
• Articles
• Free Guides
• Webinars
• Videos
• Books and more

Regardless of what type of content you create, the key to successful content marketing is always providing something that is genuinely valuable and relevant to your targeted audience. Whether you’re creating a video, podcast, or blog post, it’s important to help solve their problems and establish your brand as an authority in the industry.

So how do you use those that traffic and generate loyal and paying customers?

Understand your Audience

Before you attract qualified leads, you need to create valuable content that is clearly targeted to the audience you want to reach. By understanding your audience’s needs, your brand canprovide content that offers a solution to their challenges. And by addressing their common obstacles, you can cultivate a sense of reliability and trust with your brand – capturing new leads that can then be turned into loyal customers.

Researching your target audience is necessary for any content marketing strategy, but it’s also vital in order to ensure that you’re providing content on the networks that your audience frequently uses. You could be making the greatest content on the internet, but if nobody can find it, what’s the point? By promoting your content through social media and various distribution channels, you can reach many potential customers, and lead them back to your site and naturally move them down the sales-funnel.

Use Lead-Capture Forms

If you have a robust amount of helpful and unique content, consider producing a free guide or white paper and gate it behind a lead capture form. In other words, you are giving away some great content for free in exchange for the reader’s name and email address.  As your audience begins to download your content and provide their information, you can then cultivate these new contacts and nurture them into leads. 

Remember, certain visitors will be at different stages of the buying cycle. Most relationships take time to develop and it is your job to nurture those leads and turn them into customers. This is why it’s so important to continuously create quality content that offers value to your audience. It takes time to build that relationship.

Building trust is an absolute necessity when generating leads and loyal customers. Be sure to engage with your followers on social networks and use targeted emails to nurture your new leads and turn them into loyal customers for years to come.

Include Call to Actions

Although the point of creating great content is to answer your audience’s questions and provide information that will build trust and turn that trust into business – content still needs to be lightly branded in order to gather new leads and move them through the buying process. Be sure to include a light call to action that gives the reader an incentive to learn more or act on your service or product offerings. This is especially useful to include after high-quality content such as free guides or webinars. 

Call to Actions are also good for blog posts, too. Think about it - blogging increases a website’s traffic by 55% for brands – meaning you get more traffic to your website if you have a blog. All that traffic should be considered potential leads, and a call to action at the bottom of your blog posts will help direct that traffic to contact forms or buying pages. 

Traffic does not guarantee leads.

However, companies that effectively utilize call to actions in their blog posts generate 67% more leads than those who don’t. Just because you have a blog and include a call to action will not generate more leads alone. 

These examples are not the only ways to generate leads by using content marketing, but they are some of the most effective when implemented correctly. A successful content marketing strategy should include quality content production, promotion, distribution and measurement to help reach company objectives including, new leads and boosted revenue.

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Brad Kuenn is a Content Writer, Editor and Strategist living in Nashville, Tennessee, and he provides research, content topics, writing, editing, and content development expertise to clients. He has a passion for writing as well as art, which shines through in his work. His creativity and attention to detail makes him a valuable asset for a wide range of clients. During his time off he enjoys spending time with his wife, family, and his two dogs Brutus and Kane. 
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