4 Content Strategies (and Tips) to Increase Lead Generation

Now, the last obvious statement: to get those sales, companies need leads.

Among the many ways to generate leads, a very popular strategy is content creation as a way for the company to capture a lead’s information details so that the sales team can contact them.

You may already have a content strategy to get your lead generation running, but couldn’t it get better? Are you using the best strategy? And what about your conversion rate of new leads, are you satisfied with it?

I’m not here to teach you how to reinvent the wheel, but to assist you in the mission to generate more leads through those 4 strategies!

But first…

Before starting to think about new marketing actions to create and convert more leads, we can save a lot of time and effort by just working with what we already have, right?

First of all, it’s necessary to understand your customer. Your lead. The one that you already converted once.

See, I’m not talking about your persona.

The persona is a semi-fiction character that businesses create based on research, and that must be revisited once in a while.

My proposal here is for you to pay attention to the leads you already have and study how they reached your company, and what path they took in order to be converted.

Quoting John Douglas (yes, yes, the serial killer hunter from the FBI) “Behavior reflects personality. [..]. To understand the “artist,” you must study his “art.”

By conducting interviews and doing research, Douglas was able to draw parallels between the serial killers’ behaviors, which helped law enforcement officers across the US catch other serial killers.

So, the idea here is to draw parallels between your customers. If you can talk directly to them, good, do it and take notes! And then pay attention to your data, observe your numbers, ask yourself questions such as:

• Which form did my leads fill out to convert?
• Which pages did they visit? How many times? For how long?
• Do they contact me with questions? Or are they more passive and waiting for my company to start the conversation?
• Do the best conversions — or most of them— came from paid or organic traffic?
• Which ad is converting more? Or, which page is bringing more traffic?

By answering these and other questions you’ll start to see patterns, so, put this data together and build a funnel based on that information.

After that, you may have a clear vision of what is working for you and maybe find some gaps in the strategy your business is currently running.

Now, we’re ready to talk about content strategy and to get more leads converted!

1. Give something useful to the prospect!

Once RuPaul Charles said, “If you want to be invited to the party, you better have something to bring”. (yes, yes, I’m quoting the drag queen, entrepreneur, and show producer).

Taking the words of RuPaul as an example, the “party” to us, digital marketers, is to receive information from visitors about themselves. However, we know they wouldn’t give it to us in exchange for nothing. So, we “bring” something they want.

The key here is to understand your customers (hey, we talked about it before!), in which stage of the funnel they are and what kind of information will be useful to them.

At the top of the funnel, e. g., you want to make the prospects aware of their problem. In the middle of the funnel, you will start to talk about solutions, and present your product as one of the options to solve their problem, not the ultimate solution. This will change at the bottom of the funnel. In the last stage, you should have a more persuasive approach to guide the prospect to purchase from you.

Whatever the stage, your mission is to educate the prospect and build trust. Then when you offer content for download — in MOFU or BOFU, mainly — your prospect will already know that your business has quality content to offer.

2. What do you wanna know?

It’s really important to know what kind of information you need to understand if a lead will buy your product or they’re just taking a look. It may be the number of employees, how much the prospect earns, where they live, their job role, and so on.

But keep in mind that depending on what you’re offering to your prospects, you won’t have room to ask for much information or very specific answers in return.

We can, for example, think about the level of exclusivity, the relevance of the content you’re offering or the funnel stage. The more relevant your content, and the more down the funnel you are, the more “allowed” you are to ask questions for your prospects to answer.

Asking too early how much your prospect earns per year is too invasive. But, after creating a relationship with them, or showing value in the content they will access, it may be worth it for them to fill out that sort of information in the form.

3. Make it easy for them

We already understand that a company must offer something valuable to the users for them to become leads and that you must be careful when adding questions to the form that they will fill out to have access to a content piece.

The next step is to make the path for the prospects as specific and tempting as possible, so it becomes effortless for them.

Specific means you should make it clear what the prospects should do on your company’s page. If it’s a form with steps, tell them how many there are, how long it can take, and especially, after they fill out everything, what will happen.

To make it tempting you should offer your prospects the “icing on the cake”, something that will convince them to share their data with your business. At each stage of the funnel, you can use different arguments and mental triggers, such as testimonials, reciprocity, or reason. The important thing here is to respect the steps of the funnel.

To make it effortless you should offer a register option linked to the main social media networks or Google, to make the prospects’ opt-in as simple as that.

If your prospect is already logged in to his Google account and then chooses to register through it, part of their information will be already loaded in the form. Same for the registration with Facebook or Instagram.

4. Write better content to improve conversion

First of all, let me introduce a concept that Russell Brunson explains in his excellent book “Expert Secrets” and mentions again in his other excellent book “Traffic Secrets”:

Basically, he explains that people will buy anything for their health, wealth or relationship. Brunson calls it “The 3 Core Markets.” Once you understand what is the core thing that motivates your customers, think about what kind of pains they want to solve and how they may go towards pleasure.

Okay, I know, this concept could have been introduced in the first topic of this article, but I wanted you to read it all, so sorry but not sorry. I also brought Brunson’s concept here to talk about the importance of excellent writing to help your prospect on the path from pain to pleasure.

How many times have you seen, or even created yourself, CTAs or texts full of quotes such as “buy now”, “get your copy”, “start converting more leads”, and similar? That’s not wrong… But we want more leads generated!

When we know that the purchase of our product by the lead is motivated by a relationship, for example, the right thing is to use this as an argument. With that, we can create content that speaks directly to the prospect’s pain. Such as:

• Have more time with your kids
• Improve your date game!
• Become the center of the party right now

See? Much more personalized!

There’s no magic in getting better results at lead generation. It’s all about knowing who your customers are, giving them information, and then receiving it back.

Cristiane Genoveva, automation analyst at Hubify