Where is your audience? Answer this question and you can begin a lead generation campaign via content marketing.
Paid lead generation can be helpful when you are just starting out, but businesses on a tight budget will appreciate content marketing. This can be done on social media, your own blog and other people’s blogs, with terrific results.
Step 1: Create Your Lead Magnet
As nice as it would be, people won’t sign up for your list without some good motivation. A lead magnet will give them plenty of motivation, as long as it has high perceived value. Lead magnets are often ebooks or reports, but they can be plenty of other things, too. For example:
- Printable planners/activities, etc.
- Video tutorials
- Free webinars
- A discount code
- Free physical products
- Email course
Get creative and offer people something they haven’t seen before. You’ll see a jump in your email subscriptions.
Step 2: Build Up Your Social Media Presence
If you want to build trust, you need to get out there. Social media is unforgiving when it comes to irregular posting, so plan ahead to give yourself enough content to post regularly. It doesn’t matter which sites you’re on, regular posting will get great results. Combine this with constant interaction with your fans and ongoing promotions to really get your business noticed online.
Step 3: Build Visibility with Contests
Creating a contest or giveaway will drive traffic to your landing page like nothing else. Everyone loves getting something for free, but they also like to try their odds at winning a larger prize. That being said, the prize doesn’t have to be huge, though the more valuable it is, the more people will sign up.
Your contest prize could be as simple as an Amazon gift card or a free service that you will give them. Either way, you don’t have to spend a fortune. Better yet, you can require that everyone share the information with their friends and sign up for your email list in order to enter the contest, thus growing your audience rapidly.
Step 4: Expand Your Content
Every piece of content you have can be used in multiple ways. Instead of posting an article once and leaving it, try repurposing it. A video can be transcribed into a report or turned into a slide show and posted on SlideShare. An article may be combined with others and turned into an ebook or made into an infographic.
The more uses you find for your content the more content you have to spread around. Some people are more interested in video than articles, so by offering both options, you can appeal to both readers and watchers.
Step 5: Link Everything to Your Landing Page
Whatever your method of delivering content, make sure it all leads back to one place . . . your landing page. This is where the magic happens. If you’ve done a good job on your content, you’ll have readers clicking through and signing up on a regular basis.
Never pass up a chance to link to the landing page, unless it’s extremely spammy to do so.
Lead generation is an ongoing strategy for businesses of all sizes. Follow the tips given here to stay on top of your content marketing and your leads.
