As much as the savvy and intelligent marketer understands, developing and nurturing a good content marketing plan is crucial in creating more leads. However, to post content that doesn’t work is detrimental because the platform could be used to showcase other content.

Thus, in the next part of this guide, I will explain how you can leverage content marketing to generate leads even if you don’t currently get the expected outcome with this strategy.

What is a Lead Generation?

Lead generation is one of the most vital elements of all the marketing activities practiced in today’s business world, aimed at reaching out to strangers to convert them into potential customers.

These can work through websites, social media, email marketing, and more to generate interest or inquire about specific products or services. Lead generation is the process of accumulating a pool of prospects, the objective of which is to eventually filter through to a list of qualified leads with the potential of being turned into customers by the sales teams.

This procedure assists businesses in increasing their clientele base and boosting their total sales and revenues. He also highlighted that some of the most powerful lead-generation strategies include content marketing, strategic advertising, and customer relationship management.

Why is Content Marketing Effective at Generating Leads?

Among the various strategies, most marketers are convinced that ‘content is the king’ idea, and there is ample reason for that. In combination with the principles of SEO, correct and popular content can attract targeted visitors, retain them on the site, and even turn them into regular buyers.

Insightful content forms a healthy funnel fundamental to any marketing strategy. Using content marketing makes it possible to gain better brand recognition, find quality leads, and sell.

The reverse is also true and here and again refers to the second dimension of criticality. In fact, without good content, though it is hard to establish trust, it is even tougher to get people to visit your website.

That brings us to define the meaning of quality content and how to create more leads using quality content. After reading this complete set of guidelines for creating content marketers developing lead and sales content maps, you will have 10.

Steps To Generate Leads Through Content Marketing

High-quality content is usable throughout the funnel. Here are 7 steps that you can apply to your content marketing efforts to generate leads and increase sales conversions:

Step 1: Research Your Customer Avatar

Myer’s marketing adage states that the first rule of marketing is that your message should reach the intended customer. Whenever your content doesn’t get to your target clients, it garners attention from irrelevant leads and messes up your lead-getting process.

Remarkably, you should understand your customers clearly when handling your content marketing strategies. A good example is the customer avatar exercise. A customer avatar is a fictional buyer persona. Therefore, developing a nice customer avatar that most people like will simplify this process.

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Customer Avatar Exercise

A customer avatar can also be called a buyer persona, which is a well-defined and specific description of your target buyer. Yes, it is a work of fiction, and the very work helps you define the target audience to which you want to sell your products.

Here’s an example of a customer avatar template from Xtensio:

Using multiple customer avatars may be needed to target multiple distinct customers. This will assist you in developing content that grasps the attention of several categories of people to gain them as leads.

But know this: I have seen it done before with websites with their design and functionality – if you try to create content that fits a large audience, they will end up with no audience.

To create your customer avatar(s), write down the following information:

• Demographic information: The standard fields users enter include name, age, gender, income, location, and occupation.
• Values: This will involve coming up with an understanding of what they’re passionate about and what they value. What do they want to achieve, wish for, and strive towards?
• Pain points: The issues that they encounter may be conceptualized as follows: The question then remains: what do these keepers lose sleep over?
• Preferred sources of information/entertainment: From media, what other related blogs, magazines, or books do he/she frequently patronize? What programs are to their liking when it comes to television?
• Role in the purchase process: Are they the ones who make the decisions and buy your product, or do they need to consult a husband, a parent, or a boss?
• Most significant objections: What are the primary complaints and ambivalences regarding your product?

However, what should be done if you do not know who your target audience is at all? Well, you can do market research to learn more about it. Fortunately, many alternatives exist for people who struggle with their everyday working tools.

It is not necessary to design a buyer persona from a fresh slate. You may find it useful to employ one of the existing customer persona templates on such platforms as DigitalMarketer or HubSpot.

Customer Research Tools

Here are some of the top tools that I recommend for researching your customer avatar:

1. U. S. Census Bureau

Work in the field of people, mainly located in the U.S.. The U. S. Census Bureau will help you get data profiles, survey results, and information about the latest developments concerning people in the United States.

You can leverage their data to determine whether your target market is out there and whether your customer avatars are real.

2. Facebook Audience Insights

Facebook Audience Insights offers rich information about 2 groups of people: a short message to all general Facebook users and those associated with the specific Facebook Page.

You can further study the characteristics of this data to get more of such audiences as your current followers and provide content that can benefit them.

3. Think With Google

The insights at the weblog Think With Google rather reveal recent tendencies within consumer behavior. The information provided on this site can be used to analyze which changes have happened in the consumers and their needs which can help develop further content marketing approaches.

4. Content Marketing Institute

The Content Marketing Institute is also valuable for marketers as it allows them to discover more about effectively capturing and retaining customers through engaging and relevant content delivered through various channels.

They frequently release research findings, articles on ‘how to’ and ‘step-by-step’ tutorials, and various educational materials to enable small business people to improve their content marketing strategies.

5. Claritas Segmentation

Claritas segmentation, you can identify who your better customers are, what they prefer, and where to locate them.

One of the website’s features includes several tools and paid services that are helpful in comprehending the audience preference to enhance content marketing accordingly.

6. User Feedback

Instead, one of the most effective ways of identifying your business’s ideal customer persona is to focus on the website visitors and survey them.

Known as User Feedback from MonsterInsights, it is a WordPress plugin that lets you add user feedback forms, customer surveys, and polls.

With research and creating your customer avatar(s), you have the blueprint of your audiences’ profile for which you are creating content.

Step 2: Pick Your Content Formats

As you may know, there are many different content types out there, and some types of content are better at lead generation than others.

For instance, HubSpot revealed that for leads who get through inbound approaches, it’s easier for them to convert and costs 67% less than outbound approaches.

Search engine optimization (SEO) and lead magnets, meaning those you generate, are more effective at generating more leads than outbound sources, such as social media or pay-per-click platforms.

For your content to generate as many leads as possible, you should include at least 2 primary types of content: In this category, we find traffic-generating content and lead-generating content. Is it possible to explain them further? This is what I would like to do in the next few minutes.

Traffic-Generating Content

Any content designed for Traffic generation brings people to your website and thus increases the number of people visiting you. Leads can be generated without traffic, but they will be ineffective, especially for businesses not well known to the target audience.

Below are some of the best content kinds for traffic attraction. Pick a few from this list to include in your content plan:

• Blogs: This content type is also a must-have for any content plan as it is universal. Your blog works like a node in this extensive network. It should also catalyze traffic to your website’s other web pages.
• Social media posts: These posts will assist keen readers in visiting the blog and other pages containing related information.
• Videos: Mind-blowing fact alert: YouTube is the second most important search engine in the global market. It is worth posting video materials on platforms such as YouTube to attract unlimited users through search engine results in the coming years.
• Podcasts: Let your guest invite their audience to continue listening to their episode and, at the same time, build your own.
• Infographics: You can post on blogs and social networks to make engagements and share the posts.
• Photos: Image sharing on sites like Pinterest may increase traffic to the business’s Internet resources.
• eBooks: Another benefit of the Infobar alerts is that more people can visit your website by listing free eBooks on various online markets.

Lead-Generating Content

Lead-generating content is your marketing commodity which you put in the form of lead magnets, assuming the role of informational gifts you provide to consumers for their email addresses.

Lead magnets are one of the tools that are considered indispensable for lead generation. It’s several degrees removed from giving out our email addresses to anyone unless we are incentivized.

Here are some of the best content types for generating leads:

• Downloadable resources: These can range from auto-generated lists of tools one can click on to checklists of resources.
• Webinars: It is pretty easy to generate interest in webinars and therefore use them as lead magnets given their high perceived value.
• Discounts and coupons: Great if you own an eCommerce website and want your loyal customers to have a separate area to look at what your business has to offer. You need a coupon code for which users will give their e-mail addresses.
• Free trials: If you sell any software with a subscription service, you can give this product a free trial to site visitors to help create the leads.
• Quizzes: It can be a free quiz for those on your Internet site. If you adopt the same content, you can use the quiz to generate leads if people submit their email addresses to view the quiz results.
• Mini-courses: This can be a systematically sent series of emails showing people how to do something or videos demonstrating how something is done. Here’s an example from OptinAble University that can help illustrate their usage.
• Free challenge: If you assist people in overcoming hindrances or attaining goals, you could provide a gratis straightforward to gain one objective in particular over the given time.

In step #5, we will discuss the formula for the perfect lead magnet for your online business.

Step 3: Choose Your Content Distribution Channels

Thumbs up for your content marketing strategy, man! I must say that you’re really improving now! Up to this stage, all you have is a bird description of your ideal customer and the form of content that will lead them to your site.

You must be concerned with where and how to share that content so potential customers can find it.

Although there are many different content distribution channels, they all boil down to 2 distinct methods: In an identical way, paid and organic activity rates may follow similar trends.

You may need time or money making your content assets more searchable online.

Organic Distribution Channels

Organic traffic is highly useful for small businesses as a way of marketing products with no need to include paid advertising. However, this is not easily achievable, and you cannot anticipate immediately getting organic traffic. Next, organic traffic needs time, or even months, to begin contributing to a company’s overall traffic.

Here’s a list of all major organic distribution channels for you to promote a piece of content:

• Specifically, the case includes the following sources: Search engines (Google, Bing or Yahoo!).
• YouTube
• Facebook
• X (formerly Twitter)
• LinkedIn
• Pinterest
• Instagram

You don’t have to use all of these; I just listed them for you to give you a general overview of what can be considered ‘internet marketing. ’ It means that you just have to choose those websites where you are sure your potential leads can be found.

If you doubt whether your ideal customers spend much time in a certain channel, do not waste your resources on it.

Search engines are the only ‘always-on’ applications that can be easily used. They are fixed because almost everyone today has access to a few basic products or services that they use every day.

Thus, you should do it from the beginning to provide some perspectives on ranking your content in Google.

To help get your blog posts to rank in Google, check out our On-Page SEO Checklist: Ways You Can Make Full Use of Your Posts.

Paid Distribution Channels

While paid channels allow you to place your ad, you need to have some amount of money set aside to pay for the ad placement. But it can get you traffic faster than the organic methods we have just described.

Most of the time, even if you pay money to advertise in search engines or social media, there will be traffic to your site within the next few hours!

Below are the typical paid distribution media you should consider when executing your communication strategy.

• Social media ads
• Google Ads
• Paid for ads (the ads appear on other media).
• Banner ads
• Ads for your blog post (common are content syndication networks, blog posts in front of large magazines ‘around the web’ and ‘recommended stories’ sections).

Among these paid distribution channels, I propose you try Facebook ads, also known as Meta ads.

First, if your target market comprises Facebook users, pumping money into paid advertising on Facebook would be rewarding.

Then, fantastic targeting options exist on Facebook’s platform, such as Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger.

You only need to ensure you’re making the most of your Facebook advertisements to convert leads.

Step 4: Blue Print Of The Content You Wish To Promote

That leads me to the next step: combining all the decision-making into a clear content design plan.

A high-quality content plan answers the following questions:

• What type of articles, posts, updates, and other content will you need to create?
• What about their frequency of publication?
• That being said, what is your content promotion plan?
• Which screening and filtering method will you employ to monitor your content marketing campaigns?
• The specific people or entities that are expected to develop, generate, and market the content?

You may also wish to make an editorial plan for your program and record future blog posts on an editorial schedule to give you an idea of what will be featured in the next three months.

To complete each project, guidelines on managing your time effectively include using project management software such as Asana on Monday. tools such as Trello, Asana, ed Technician, or CoSchedule to keep track of your team’s content marketing calendar.

That way, you have an overview of your content’s publishing schedule, assign diverse statuses that clarify the steps of the editorial process, and save time on meetings as team members can write comments without discussing them online.

Step 5: Create Irresistible Lead Magnets

Another popular online method to obtain new leads is the provision of what is known as lead magnets on websites. But how do we generate leads, and what concrete steps need to be taken to create lead magnets?

In essence, for lead magnets to be effective, they must be the kind of offer that no customer can resist.

A good lead magnet content has the following common characteristics:

1. It solves a real problem: The content must be valuable. It won’t be effective if your lead magnet doesn’t address an existing issue your clients have. Mobile your ‘target customer’s’ pains with content topics, as in step #1.
2. It promises one quick win: Your lead magnet should imply (and should or will actually) give a singular victory fast to your customers. It should help them apply a solution to their problems when they put much effort into it.
3. It’s super specific: Do not make your lead magnet about this or that, about something that doesn’t stand out. In my experience, any time you can write a specific benefit with a lead magnet, the better it performs as a lead magnet.
4. It’s quick to digest: PDF checklists are generally practical because they enable an easy and fast understanding of the content. People get bored and may not read long eBooks or complex case studies that are usually important in making difficult decisions.
5. It’s high value: However, the lead magnet must offer a high sense of value and maximum potential value. For instance, the emotion that a given lead magnet garners should make the client feel it is worth paying for despite receiving it for free.
6. It’s instantly accessible: When you use it, your lead magnet will be most effective if it can be delivered directly, usually as downloads or as attachments to the emails you send out.
7. It demonstrates your expertise: When someone consumes your lead magnet, it should be clear to a reader that you, as an author, are an expert in a particular field or are offering something unique. This aids in the company’s conversion of leads into customers in the long run.

Here at OptinAble, one of our high-performing lead magnets is the Free Lead Magnet Ideas Cheatsheet:

Here are a few reasons why this lead magnet is irresistible and converts well:

1. Solves a real problem our customer avatars have: It is beneficial to companies that find it hard to make progress in forming an e-mail list.
2. Promises one quick win: Bearing this in mind, businesses can advance after going through the lead magnet and the ability to widen the email list.
3. It’s specific: It’s not telling you how to improve your ‘email marketing’ strategy but suggesting how to use the idea of ‘lead magnets’ to build your list.
4. It’s quick to digest: Here is a simple, 3-page, PDF-based fast guide.
5. It’s high value: Clients and visitors can expand the email list by following the 69 ideas highlighted in the cheat sheet.
6. It’s instantly accessible: Once users input their name and email address in the pop-up, they can click the CTA button to receive the cheat sheet.
7. It demonstrates our expertise: Some of the suggestions we have incorporated refer to increasing our subscribers.

I understand you wish to design the web’s finest lead magnets for your online business. Sign up with Beacon:

Beacon offers 3 products to help you acquire more customers:

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• Free Resource Library to build a library of gated content more effectively without hardware or software requirements.

Step 6: Write High-Converting Blog Posts

Creating substance with blog posts is another necessity for brand content marketing lead generation. Also, the blog posts can attract audiences’ attention and direct them to your website, where all lead magnets are placed.

This way, you can use blogs to kill 2 birds with 1 stone: At the same time, they would lead to higher website traffic while ensuring that leads are being generated.

All high-converting blog posts (and other forms of content) share some common characteristics:

1. An enticing headline: But approaching people aside, if someone isn’t interested in your headline, they won’t open your post. For more specific advice, kindly refer to the article and the provided title writing tips here: How do you write compelling headlines?
2. Long-form content: Essentially, the longer and the more detailed the posts are, the more chances these blogs have of ranking higher on Google.
3. Useful or educational content: A precise observation of web usage is that the average user goes online to seek a solution to his or her issues. Make sure your blogs are relevant and of importance to your audience.
4. Relevant visuals: Generally, your blog posts should not strictly be in text format only, particularly where you want to capture the attention of online audiences. When you write in point form, it can assist the readers in comprehending the data provided in your context very easily. Also, we probably know that visual content somehow enhances your marketing.
5. Your keywords: Ensure you write keywords that individuals look for while browsing the internet in your blog posts. There are particular services and applications for studying the most popular keywords that can be used for it.
6. Links to high-quality resources: Other pieces that connect to this post and others in the high-quality range should also be linked. This can assist you in reciprocal linking with other websites of your interest and thereby help you get a better SEO ranking.
7. Links to related posts on your blog: Some of the relevant recommendations include sharing a link to your posts for those interested in reading further about an issue. It’ll also help your posts get listed on the search engine results page.

Step 7: Optimize Your Blog for Lead Generation

The first task in my recommendations for improving the blog for generating leads is to add opt-in forms for the lead magnet.

First, I suggest implementing a sidebar optin form and an exit-intent popup on your top-rated blog posts.

A sidebar optin is just a simple optin form that lives in your sidebar, like this:

An exit-intent popup is an optin form that appears when the visitor is about to leave your site, like this:

These 2 optin forms are the most crucial in blogs to achieve greater conversion.

If you are interested, there is also an additional option of a slide-in form appearing on the scroll. These options are particularly important if you have long-form content:

After that, those basic optin forms are installed at the end of every blog post, you can be sure to tell which posts attract more traffic and leads.

Importance of Lead Generation in Marketing

Lead generation is also one of the effective ways in today’s marketing initiatives. It encompasses converting strangers or prospects into someone who has shown an interest or is potentially interested in your company’s products or services.

It assists in establishing a sales pipeline for future clients, which is crucial when establishing a business.

Increasing Brand Awareness

One of the key advantages of lead generation might be familiarization with the brand. When businesses aim to reach out to the larger market, then it is possible for a certain brand to be introduced to the market, which may be of interest to many people.

Several forms of lead generation include content marketing, social media marketing, SEO, and others, leading to higher levels of brand awareness and recognition in the market.

Nurturing Potential Customers

It is about collecting and converting leads, thus managing them in the funnel process. This entails creating rapport, delivering informative content that opens the prospects to the right information, and maintaining them until they are ready to buy. The warm audience might be easily influenced, and it is a great opportunity to ensure client loyalty and increase further conversions.

Improving Sales and ROI

Regarding lead generation, it has been observed that the better the method for generating leads, the higher the volume of qualified leads directly impacts sales. Instead of spending a lot of money on a large population, which usually does not represent a market that will buy a certain product, companies can target a small population that will most likely buy the business’s products, thus increasing the return on investment (ROI). This is a strategically sound formula as it dozes down the waste of resources and simultaneously offers steady revenues.

Gathering Valuable Customer Insights

It also helps companies prospect for essential information about potential clients. Information about customers that can be collected and analyzed, including demographic data, spending patterns, and preferences, can be collected and analyzed for effective marketing. Such findings prove useful in enhancing the focus of marketing initiatives and thus achieving high levels of customer engagement.