How to Generate Leads and ROI With Content Marketing

Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract a clearly defined audience and to drive profitable customer action. Very interesting, I hear you say, but how can it going to show a return on investment and help me generate leads in the process? Quantifying a return on investment (ROI) for your content marketing strategy can prove to be challenging, and often takes time.

Below we focus on the steps you need to take in order to create a solid content strategy that will be measurable and will help generate leads for your sales team

Buyer Personas

Understand who your customer is by creating buyer personas. A buyer persona is a fictional but true to life synopsis of your target audience. Your business may have 3 or 4 buyer personas but when you are starting your content strategy just pick one to get you started.

Identify Pain Points

What keeps your buyer persona awake at night? What is your customer lacking, what is his pain point, and how can you help to solve it? What are the questions they might ask themselves when they are looking for a way to address their pain point? The answers to these questions will provide you with the bones of your content strategy.

Generate Leads

There are a number of ways your content marketing can generate leads for your business for example having a Call To Action (CTA) at the end of a blog post where the reader fills in a short form consisting of various fields (often just their name and email address to begin with) in exchange for the offer. This offer should be something of value to the reader, for example information that helps them address their pain point, so that they will provide their personal information in exchange for it. As potential customers populate your CTA, their journey becomes traceable, allowing you to calculate the ROI on each lead as they convert to a sale.

Continue to create great content

Content comes in many forms and it’s your job to make it interesting. Mix it up by trying various delivery methods for your contents;

• Blogs – are a great way to get email subscribers by delivering content so engaging that your readers sign up to hear more. By offering an incentive to hear more such as a content upgrade such as a downloadable checklist or template will often encourage the reader to offer an email address. Doing a simple calculation on the number of emails sent versus the number of CTA forms populated will provide you with a good benchmark on what it will take to produce a successful campaign.
• eBooks – are generally gated content and as a result can turn some readers off signing up. However, those who do will be genuine leads, less is more so to speak. Your ungated content should all be leading to your first gated piece, gently guiding the reader along the buyer’s journey.
• Video – why not record training sessions and turn them into gated evergreen content that can be used again and again.

Don’t be afraid of asking for something in return for something else. If your readers are getting something of value it is a fair trade-off and one that will benefit both of you in the long-term. It also allows you, early on the process, to evaluate the man-hours it takes to create a successful campaign