The Best Content To Generate Leads

If you've been living under a rock in the internet marketing world over the past couple of years, or if you're just getting started, there’s an amazing thing called content marketing that can help generate leads for your business.

It’s really nothing new, as most companies and marketing agencies have been doing it for years. But as Google changes its algorithms, content marketing has become the new norm for how to make your online marketing more effective.

Before you begin, you should have an idea of how many leads you need to get. Using analytics, you can see what your conversion rate is and how much traffic you're getting.

To determine your conversion rate you take your total number of visitors to your site divided by the number of people that converted into a lead, sale, or whatever your goal is. When you set a goal for leads, you want to take your conversion rate and determine how much traffic you need to generate to reach your goal.

Typically conversion rates are around 1 - 3% of your unique visitors, sometimes 10% or higher depending on your industry, competition, content, and use of call to actions.

This chart from Wordstream shows conversion rates from search, and as you can see the median sits at 2.35% while the top 10% receive a staggering 11.5% or higher conversion rate.

So what kind of content will generate the most leads for your business and increase your conversion rates? There are a lot of different ways to go about it, but there are four main things to bear in mind:

1. They are not promotional of your company’s products or services in any way.
2. Know your target market and buyer persona and address them.
3. The content is useful and helpful to the user.
4. It often takes a lot more time and effort to plan and create than other types of marketing.

Don’t create overly promotional content

No one really cares about your products or services unless it can help them. If someone visits your site for the first time just to find out a little bit about you, they don’t want a sales pitch before they get to know your business. They want to see that you understand their problems, know what you’re talking about, and that you can provide what they are looking for.

Just creating the content is half the battle. You have to have persuasive calls to action for those readers to become leads. This is a great list of 50 proven ways to increase your email list on Forbes by Jayson DeMers, and here are a few takeaways for you along with some of our own tips to turn those visitors into leads.

• Slideup boxes are great for visitors that are reading through your content and as they scroll down past halfway, then a slideup box pops up asking if they want to learn more or join the email list to read more about the topic.

• Lightboxes, modal pop-ups, or feature boxes are kind of like pop-ups, but not like the annoying pop-ups that you remember from the 90's. They don't open up new windows, but just a box that pops up offering something in return for them joining your email list.

• Use a Twitter lead-generation card for a piece of content you are promoting or to use a persuasive message as to why people should sign-up for your email list. Then pin it so it is always at the top of your Twitter profile. Even though these are free to create you still need to have a credit card assigned to your Twitter account to set up the card. Dana Tan wrote a great tutorial on Moz to help you create your first lead generation card.

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• Facebook will soon allow you to add up to seven calls to action on your Facebook profile, including a sign-up button where they can join your e-mail list.

• Have a clear call to action with a persuasive message. What's in it for the reader? Why should they join? How many other people also subscribe? What kind of content will they get and how often should they expect to get it? "Join our e-mail list for updates" just doesn't cut it anymore.

• Create a landing page to sign up for your email list that shows all the benefits of joining your list. Include links to case studies and client testimonials to back up what you say.

• Offer your whitepapers and webinars on landing pages so that people have to sign up in order to get them.

• Have visual calls to action in and after your blog posts.

• Use radio buttons or a check box in your contact forms to subscribe to  your newsletter or email list.

If you aren't gently nudging someone (without annoying them) to sign up then they probably won't. We live in an era of content overload, with more competition and content than ever before. It is harder to gain trust and reliable customers when there is so much to choose from, so you need to target the right customers and do something to stand out.

Who are you targeting?

Depending on your target market, or whether you are B2B or B2C, different types of content will work better.

You can also look through your analytics to see the demographics of the people visiting your site. It can show where they're from, what devices they're using, their age ranges, and a lot more. You should already have a good idea of who your usual customer is, but this can help to reach a wider audience.

Useful content earns trust

Your first goal with your content is to gain awareness and trust from your target market. Then pique their interest by showing them you can solve an issue that they may be trying to accomplish.

Give them a good call to action once you have done so to show them what they need to do next. Lastly, create a landing page where you can capture their information in trade for the content that they desire.

Worth the time and effort

While these are extremely helpful and can get you leads, you probably want this situation: A visitor comes to your site, sees a piece of content, and just has to know what’s inside. To do so, they would be glad to fill out a form to be able to see it. So what are these types of content that can get your visitors to fill out a form to become a lead (whether they know it or not)?

What is the best content to generate leads?

• Blog posts – They help to identify the needs and solutions that your users and customers are looking for. When you are producing content on a regular basis, it helps to gain you a lot of organic traffic. How-to’s, tutorials, and lists help you to rank for less competitive long-tail keywords in search engine results. So reverse-engineer what people are asking you on the phones, or searching for in Google, and write blog posts about it.

• EBooks – Use in-depth information along with visuals and embedded media. These usually contain a lot of information, and you can use topics from your blog posts to go more in depth.

• Case studies – People want to see real-life situations of how you helped your clients. Include statistics like how you increased their traffic, conversion rates, revenue, and ROI, and others will want to work with you since you showed them proof that you can do it.

• Seminars & Webinars – Find "pain points" of your customers and deliver a solution in your seminars. These are usually paired with a slideshow and done live, but record it to put on your site so others can view them at their own leisure.

• Quizzes – You may have seen people posting results from quizzes on sites like Mashable, and they are just killing it. You may not reach the virality that they have built up over the years, but you can still gain something from creating a quiz in your industry.

• Surveys – People like to feel like they are a part of something. Creating a relevant industry survey and getting the help of influencers to get it out there can get your content shared and introduce your brand.

• Slideshows – You can use these in webinars and then repurpose them on sites like Slideshare to get more eyes on your content and traffic back to your site.

• Infographics – People love data and statistics, but most people don’t like to read a whole bunch of information. Using visuals like an infographic helps for people to skim through information and get a good idea of what you have to say. Animate them using gifs and make them interactive to really grab a visitor’s attention.