Ever struggled to create content that demonstrates your organization’s value while generating buckets of leads in a way that feels authentic? If so, we get it. Our clients have had that problem too. And we had a solution.
Lead generation requires developing relevant, downloadable content that organically connects with your demographic at the middle of the funnel and requires them to enter their email (and possibly more info) for an exchange with your brand of some sort. For a company that’s hit a wall or struggling to achieve their next goal, lead generation is a must. Heck, it's also a must if you're just ready to grow more or add a marketing channel that'll bring in even more customers and revenue that you're currently producing with just blog or landing page content and good SEO.
By implementing smart content marketing strategies you can generate up to 10,000 leads in as short as six months*. When we say smart, we mean marketing strategies that don't require you to spend dollars and time to recreate something new but instead allow you to reuse well-crafted, actionable content that's already on your website, again and again. That’s where implementing strategies like premium content offers and a content repurposing strategy comes in.
Check Your Lead Generation is Turned on
Before you get started with the two lead generation strategies below that will help you generate 1,000s of leads in a short timeframe, you need to make sure you have the three basics of lead generation set up to work for your brand. These three lead gen basics are:
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You have paid for and implemented a marketing automation platform that'll let you build landing pages, create forms, send automated email nurture campaigns, etc. At First Page, we recommend HubSpot to all our clients (and use it internally). If you'd like to understand more about using HubSpot, we can help.
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You already have a form on your website or blog that captures people's email address who want to become a Subscriber of your business (receive an email newsletter or new blog posts via RSS).
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You know the questions you want to ask each potential customer who fills out a form, and understand how to segment or qualify your leads as SQL (sales qualified leads) or MQL (marketing qualified leads). These questions are usually in line with information that is in your brand persona. For instance, if you're targeting people with the job title of "Founder or CEO" you might ask them in your form for their name, email and job title.
Build 10,000 Leads With: Content Repurposing Strategy
Repurposing content is a marketing strategy that involves refreshing the best content that you’ve created in the past that’s just hanging out in your archives. Chances are you originally created that content with all the branding and marketing strategies in mind that already work for your company’s products, services and demographic. It might just need some tweaking — or to be represented in a different digestible format.
Content repurposing works best for those posts or blogs that you were most excited about when you originally posted them, or the landing page on an important topic that you really invested in developing. The content you're proud of. With content repurposing, you’re not reinventing the wheel. You’re just upgrading the rims.
How It Works
Maybe when you originally published some of your top blog posts the leads really did pour in, but then they slowed down or stopped altogether. Then that content got buried on your site by newer posts. To revitalize that content and extend its ability to generate leads, consider turning those posts into more of an interactive user experience.
For example, let’s say you’ve already published a "complete 101" guide for a topic that reflects your brand’s strengths. It performed well for a while, and you even got some leads, but now it’s underperforming. Instead of creating something new that might seem repetitive to your followers and leads, add some new elements and update the post to a new content format.
Our favorite method is to create a swipe file PDF form of the existing content, allowing you to offer that 101 guide to leads through helpful pop-ups, forms, or CTAs throughout the pages of your site. When that content sparks interest, an individual can fill out a form to download the file. This provides them with valuable content and generates leads for you. All you have to do is take the content you already wrote, and redesign it into a nice PDF download.
To avoid spamming your leads or making your offers seem disingenuous, it’s important to only implement a content repurpose strategy for the content that provides real value to your demographic. Avoid having a popup on every page on your website.
Repurposing your content is the easiest, quickest way to get into the lead generation game. Once your redesign your best landing pages or blogs and implement a form and nurture email campaign, you can sit back and watch the leads accumulate every month.
Build 10,000 Leads With: Premium Content Offers
While content repurposing creates a product for leads out of existing content, premium content offers take that strategy a step further by creating new, long-form content that’s only available via download. Again, this is content that’s truly helpful to your demographic and provides value to their lives. There's a reason they want to exchange their email address and other personal information with you to obtain this content.
So what content do you create?
Wading through the hundreds of topics that you could tackle can be overwhelming. Especially if someone else has already said it before and you’re fighting Google’s algorithm to deliver content to your demographic. Chances are it’s equally as frustrating for the people in your demographic who are searching for in-depth, educational content.
Here are some ideas:
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Create a webinar that gives away an insider tip or features an interview with an expert and gate the webinar videos so that people have to provide their email address to receive the video
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Think of your *best* lead keywords and topic ideas, and create a "everything you ever needed to know" about this topic guide to download. This is always a good place to start if you're going to have one good download on your site.
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Co-create a guide with 2-5 other brands who also market to the same demographic your business does. They can help you generate a good idea, and then when it's time to promote the content, you have 2-5x more people to get the word out to and help spread the content you spent so much time on.
How It Works
Instead of soliciting downloads of 101 guides, you’ll need to invest some serious time into creating amazing content in the form of ebooks, webinars, kits, industry research, product demos and more. Premium content offers contain the valuable content that leads can’t find anywhere else on the internet for free.
While it might take you more time to research, create, and package premium content offers, the value that they bring to lead generation and your brand is priceless. Ideally, you’ll be able to keep this type of content available on your site indefinitely, which saves you time and energy in the long run.
Premium content offers should be placed strategically throughout your site, but only in the places that seem natural. This is what prompts them to provide their information without feeling like they’re being told what to do. Once you get a good library of premium content offers, you can create a library or content center that has all of your branded downloads in one spot.
When developing marketing strategies, especially when it comes to content repurposing and premium content offers, your number one underlying goal should always be to deliver valuable, accurate, and helpful content. That’s the real secret behind building 10,000 leads in six months. Anyone can deploy these strategies, but the content has to be worth the download for them to work.
*Actual results do depend on the amount of traffic your website landing pages receive today. We achieved 10,000 leads in less than six months for a client who received 2-8,000 visits a month on the landing pages we put repurposed content on.
