Convincing someone with your content remains a challenge for every business. But if done correctly, content marketing is always rewarding! It costs 62% less and can generate approximately three times as many leads for a dollar spent when compared to traditional marketing.

Today 90% of all organizations in the market indulge in creating and promoting content to generate leads. Interestingly, 62% of all companies outsource their content marketing jobs. All is not well though. According to the Content Marketing Institute, only 9% of the businesses believe that content marketing works for them.

The gap between expectations and results substantiates the fact that many businesses have yet to capitalize on the full potential of content based marketing.

In this article, we will discuss how to make things right so that your content marketing efforts turn into an effective lead generation program. Using a content marketing tool like SEMrush will definitely help you keep up the momentum.

1. Leverage Video Content with Utmost Care

People like watching videos. But they don’t like a hard sales pitch. No one really cares about what you sell or what new features your product or solution offers. Only favorable results count. If your video content has a message about changes your business can bring to their lives, that matters most to them.

Following some rules can become handy:

• Identify your target audience that can mean potential business for you. Collect some viewership data from similar videos of your competitors. YouTube channels are a good source for that R&D. SEMrush has a dedicated section for video advertisers who need competitive data from YouTube channels.

• Watch the messaging pattern in those videos. Think through them and decide on the value propositions that are already existing or missing in your product. Try to convey a single message through your video script.

• Videos, so far are the most-effective tool to learn visually and get entertained. So make it appealing, yet educative. It does not necessarily have to be of business-talks and descriptive solutions that are meaningful only to you. People don’t like to interpret so-called business languages to understand their takeaways.

• Your customers love to be inspired. So speak from your heart. Make it simple, clear and value-driven.

• Try not to cover everything you do or that your product offers in a 2-minute video. Put yourself in customer’s shoe and restrict your message to a few but important points.

• Add a personal touch to the video content. Storytelling is a good way to do that. Cover every key point with a call-to-action.

• Add examples of how your business or products have made others’ lives better and what your product or solution does to provide that help. Add behind-the-scenes look into your business. This is a good way to share your operational methods or efficiency in delivering a solution to your customer.

• Explain your customer’s success stories. People like to relate to others’ stories with their own while making a business decision.

• Collect frequently asked questions from your customers through social media, email campaigns, and other online or offline sources. Use them while preparing your video script. An engaging video must address the concerns and solutions to customers’ problems.

• Share your video on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, and other popular channels and blogs for maximum coverage. And, keep doing that.

• Always ensure that you have set a clear goal for your video and the video signifies this goal for your customer.

2. Offer Bait for Fishing Leads

Among the all content marketing strategies, this is one of the best ways to capture personal data of potential customers. People tend to share information about them when they get something valuable in return. You may offer a gift, a discount coupon, a freebie, limited trial, or even cash back while asking prospects to share their email addresses to access your white paper, brochure, or even watch a recent video.

However, don’t overdo this. Instead, use this strategy as one of the many options. Be selective when sharing downloadable materials. Advertorials are better than advertisement copies. Also, ensure appropriateness of medium for sharing your business information. A 30-second explainer video is a good treat for Facebook or Twitter audience. However, for website or blog purposes, your videos can be a little longer.

Create post leading to the lead generation page while sharing it through social media sites. Add a custom message with specific value proposition pertaining to that link. Using relevant images along with your posts is a good practice. It disseminates quick information to the readers and carries a sense of personalization.

Use a post scheduling tool for automated publishing of social media contents. It saves time and maintains regularity of posting. Pin your lead magnet posts to the top of your social media page or feed; this is one way you get maximum visibility for your most-valued lead generation pages.

3. Produce Content With a ‘Wow’ Factor

Content marketers are at every corner of this online world. So what is special about you? Unless you are really good at representing your product, service or brand unique, no one cares what you do in the sea of immense competition. Exceed customers’ expectations, delight them with your business ideas and respond to their feedbacks meticulously.

How to Become a Thought Leader

Identify what makes your brand act like an advisor, mentor and then build content around it. Ensure your content addresses a cutting-edge solution, a pressing topic or a typical pain point. This is how to become a thought leader. Thought leaders are good at participating in live conversations and solving other's pain points.

Using Twitter for Research

Consider an example for your Twitter followers. If you want to know your readers and understand their problem areas, go to Twitter search, type in your keyword and find out the top questions asked around the search query. Once you know what your readers want or need, deliver to them exactly what they will love to read. Stick to the topics for some time and engage them to respond to your solutions. While sharing collaterals, or offering solutions to your audience, keep consistent with your brand. This helps in brand retention and higher lead generation.

Lead generation is a natural and unbiased process. If you have been providing creative, innovative and realistic solutions to your target audience for over a period of time, lead generation automatically follows.

4. Create Content Assets and Maintain Chain Link

Videos, infographics, webinars, e-books, presentation slides, white papers, case studies, brochures, articles, blogs, and website content – do everything around a principle theme and maintain a customer-centric approach for each asset. Apply cross-linking or internal linking to tag content assets with each other. For example, your article may contain links to a related video, an infographic or a lead generation form on your website.

Similarly, a webinar video may include a link to a relevant white paper or a product brochure. This practice maximizes the reach and visibility of your content which helps in building an online reputation. The longer the chain you create, the better. In a pull-based marketing approach, you need to create a well-knit content mesh to funnel down the potential leads. SEMrush has proved its worth in the domain of competitive analysis and content idea generation.

5. Be Found in Blog Network

Writing a blog for your own website or contributing an article to a third-party site is a good idea. But that is not enough. To establish yourself as a thought leader, participating in at least a dozen of the  high traffic websites and blogs is necessary. Be a regular contributor to those sites and earn a trusted reputation over time. Once you have a prominent presence in those blogs, your business tagged in your profile can start earning more leads. Most importantly, maintain a problem-solving approach in each of your posts as a guest author.

6. Learn More From Customers Than Your Mistakes

Leads generate leads in return. It can become a routine process if you know the behavior of your leads. Ask them what they like and what they dislike. Make them feel open and easy when you survey them through a questionnaire.

You can run a survey on third-party sites like Survey Monkey or on your website, blog or on social media channels. Setting questions for an online audience is an art. Be detailed in what you ask and give them enough options or answers to select from. Make the entire process simpler. It makes their lives easier. Collect all the responses together and indulge in brainstorming. Identify what does not work and stop doing that. Repeat what works best for them and you. Apply that knowledge and experience to your content. That is how you avoid premature death of your potential business lead.

7. Follow Some Good-to-Apply Ideas

• Go narrow with your topics when producing content. The more specific you write, the more effective and action-oriented response you get from your readers.

• Try to address questions on bottom-of-funnel topics. It maximizes the lead conversion probability.

• Invest time in researching lead generating keywords. Search for the keywords that have good search volume, and that you can reasonably rank for.

• Build a keyword pool and develop key phrases around those high-value keywords. Use keywords and long-term key phrases sparingly in your content. This optimizes your content in major search engines which in turn, ensures higher traffic and more leads.

• Be regular in creating and sharing contents. Make them easily accessible to the right visitors at the right time through the right mediums.

• Work on conversion rate optimization, both for your content and for the channels you want the content to appear on. Create a robust sales funnel. Package all your content marketing avenues into a single unit so that it becomes an automated and regular source of leads to the sales funnel.

Once you know what has been successful and what not, you are most likely to repeat the success factors. No matter what form of content you create for your online or offline audience, remember that every piece of information in it carries your brand reputation. So aim to write about customer-ready solutions, ideas, and value propositions instead of business-oriented items.

Today, the internet is full of content. Therefore, the shelf-life of your content entirely depends on its engagement score and the power of retention. Following tips from experts can help you develop an optimized content marketing plan and rebuild on it.

So what stops you from applying the new techniques that you know now? Dig deeper into them and share your experiences with us – good or bad.