Why Good Content Isn’t Good Enough: The Secret To Getting More Leads With Content Marketing

Content marketing is rapidly becoming synonymous with marketing itself, with many businesses jumping on board and using content to connect with prospective customers over traditional marketing tactics. But content marketing is still relatively new, and there’s a lot we’re continuing to learn about how to best use content to grow your business.

While creating and curating great content is a no-brainer when it comes to effective content marketing, it’s not enough to generate those leads you’re ultimately really after. Optimizing your content for lead generation is more than producing interesting content and trying to get as many eyes on it as possible — it’s creating an entire, immersive content experience that your audience will love and respond to.

Ok, so what does that mean? Here are 4 things to consider when building out your content experience:

Discoverability

Is your content living in individual silos or can people discover different pieces that interest them without having to look for them? You’re working hard to create content that your audience will enjoy and share, but if it’s not easy to find then you’re entering “if a tree falls in the woods” territory. It doesn’t matter how good your content is, if the people who you want to read it aren’t doing so, it might as well not even exist.

Through navigation, suggested content, and targeted call-to-actions, you want to take your visitors on a journey that helps them discover more content that is relevant to them. For example, in Uberflip’s content Hub we’ve created custom streams by topic and filled them with applicable resources. So someone interested in learning about lead generation will find blog posts, eBooks, webinar recordings, and more on that topic all in one place.

Responsive Design

If you’re surfing the web on your phone and open up an article to find it’s not mobile-optimized, do you stick around?

Even though we all know people are constantly on their phones and tablets, many websites aren’t designed for cross-platform accessibility. Creating a great content experience for your audience means making it work wherever they are, and much of the time that’s on the go (or if they’re like me, scrolling through their phone on the couch because they’re too lazy to open up their laptop). If you’re banking on visitors awkwardly zooming and scrolling through content that isn’t responsive, you’re sacrificing a big chunk of your audience — and a lot of potential leads.

Targeted content

Proper targeting is essential for keeping your audience engaged and pulling them into the sales funnel. Once you’ve figured out your buyer personas, each piece of content should apply to at least one of them. Aiming for mass appeal may bring in traffic, but that traffic will likely be less qualified than if you’ve written a blog post targeted toward a prospective customer.

At Uberflip, we align each piece of content with a buyer persona to make sure we’re hitting all of our marks, and use our Hub metrics to track what’s resonating with our audience (and what’s not). We’ve also created custom streams for different segments of our audience, like HubSpot users, which is where targeting also ties into discoverability — the more content you have designed for a specific group, the better you can lay out a content path for them.

Contextual call-to-actions

Call-to-actions (or CTAs) are the real moneymakers, and seamlessly incorporating them into your content experience is key for conversion. Whether the action you’re trying to get people to take is to subscribe to your blog or download an eBook, that CTA should be contextual. Put yourself in the position of the person you want to respond — is the CTA relevant? How will they find it? At what point are they most likely to click?

If someone is reading a blog post about email marketing, a CTA for an email marketing eBook is more compelling than just asking them to sign up for your product. Many CTAs in our Hub are specific to their surroundings, such as a call to download SlideShare templates in our SlideShare stream. Since our CTAs are synced with marketing automation, anyone who fills out a form is added to a list for lead nurturing. We’ve also placed delayed overlay CTAs to subscribe to our Hub over each blog post so visitors can read some of the post before being asked if they want to subscribe.

What are your tips for generating leads through content marketing?

Why Good Content Isn’t Good Enough: The Secret To Getting More Leads With Content Marketing