Content makes your business visible online.
Without content, your customers won’t find you, and without customers, your business won’t take off.
Content marketing is an important part of any marketing strategy. It has a powerful impact on WordPress SEO and shapes your company’s brand image. It can also drive up traffic and increase your email subscribers.
Good content can engage customers and convince them to give you their email. This gives you a chance to reach out to them and convince them to buy your product.
So, how do you create content for lead generation?
To create content that gets leads, there are two important ways to make it happen. First, define your customer avatar. Second, write compelling blog posts.
Define your customer avatar
Your first step is to define your customer avatar. Having a clear customer avatar helps create better content. A detailed customer avatar helps you focus your content on a ‘real’ person rather than a faceless audience.
What is a customer avatar anyway?
A customer avatar is a fictional representation of your customer. It holds all the attributes of your potential customer giving you a clear picture of who your customer is.
When creating a customer avatar, the more specific you are, the better. Start by listing their demographic information. Define your customer’s age, income, marital status and other relevant information.
Give your customer avatar a name and even create an image of them. You can choose a picture you find online or create an illustration of the avatar.
Describe their daily activities that are relevant to your business. Imagine what their pain points are and list the challenges they face.
Let’s take a look at a customer avatar that a job portal might create. This particular job portal helps women with children find flexible work.
Sandra is a 35-year old stay-at-home mom with a degree in computer science. She has two children, both of whom are in school full-time. Sandra thinks that she can go back to work. She has more time on her hands than she knows what to do with. Her children are also more independent.
However, she hasn’t worked for over five years. She sometimes did freelance writing for extra income. Now that she wants to work, she is struggling to find jobs that pay well. She also needs the flexibility to work from home. She finds it difficult to find a company that can overlook the gap in her career.
With a clear avatar in place, a job-portal specializing in work opportunities for women can tailor their message to their audience. They do this by addressing their pain points and offering solutions that customers actually want.
You can use a customer avatar template like one from Digital Marketer.
Creating a customer avatar makes your audience real to your business. You’ll be able to write content that feels friendly and speaks to them directly.
Create compelling blog posts
Now that you have a clear customer avatar to write for, you can start a blog with informative posts that drive up leads.
Blog content is widely used. It is also a proven way to drive traffic to your website and create leads.
Blog posts are effective and popular, and when done well, they can improve your website’s SEO. This automatically results in more traffic and in turn, more leads. It’s also a powerful way to get people to sign up for a membership site platform such as an online course or brand community.
Writing content for the internet has certain best practices. If you want your blog posts to be visible and get shared, then you need to incorporate several ‘rules’ to make them work.
Here are the most important tips that you can follow to make sure that your blog posts are internet and customer friendly.
Do Keyword Research
When creating blog posts, it’s a good idea to write content that has information users need. You can do keyword research to find out what users are searching for and make your blog post to give them that information.
Use Google Adwords Keyword Planner or SEMrush’s keyword tools to find relevant keywords. You can also do a simple Google search to find relevant keywords. For example, type in a term related to your industry/niche and look at the searches related to that term at the bottom of the page. Here’s a list of keywords related to the term “bookkeeping software:”
This will help you find out what keywords your audience is using. Search for related keywords and phrases to get ideas for more content.
Also, look for long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords are phrases that people use when they search for something specific.
Long-tail keywords can give you ideas for content. Because they are very specific, you can rank higher when you use long-tail keywords in your post. There also tends to be less competition for long-tail keywords. This gives your content the opportunity to get more visibility.
Using keywords and long-term keywords that your audience uses is very effective. You will create relevant and useful content. This content can increase traffic to your site and help with lead generation.
Another way to make use of niche keywords is to create social media pages with content based on those keywords.
Write long-form content
Long-form content gets more social media shares and is ranked higher by search engines. Although content with 300 to 500 words is easier to read, long-form content brings in more organic traffic.
This type of content can be between 1200 words to 2000 words a post. However, posts with even higher word-counts can make a website rank higher in search engines.
Long-form content is about providing valuable information. It helps educate readers and can be engaging when it has pictures and graphs. Use long-form content wherever possible. It’s important to remember content quality matters. Don’t try to pad your blog posts with poorly written content.
Link to high-quality resources
Make sure that you link to high-quality websites when you add hyperlinks to your blog posts. When you use authoritative and trustworthy sources it adds credibility to your website.
It also makes it more likely that the linked content is accurate and true. Try to link to government resources, educational websites and authoritative sites whenever possible.
You can also interlink your own posts where it makes sense. Interlinking makes it easy for search engines to crawl and index all your pages. It helps search engines see your site’s structure. This will help with your website ranking on search engines.
Add good-quality media to your posts
Continuous pages of texts can make readers feel fatigued. It’s also uninteresting and monotonous. Add good quality pictures to your posts to break up the text and add more information.
Use graphs and charts to make complex information easy to visualize. Adding visual content like videos, gifs, and images will make your posts more attractive.
Structure your content
People no longer read through every page they come across online. They scan the page for pieces of information to find out if it’s relevant.
It’s essential to structure your content so that your audience can quickly scan it. They should be able to get a basic understanding of what you’ve written at a glance. Here are some effective tips to structure your content.
Use compelling headlines:
Headlines are the first thing that your users will see. A good headline is concise but clearly tells the audience what the content is about.
Use a relevant keyword in your headline to make it easier to find. Make it compelling by using emotionally-charged words and power words. CoSchedule has a great headline analyzer that will help you create powerful headlines.
Write strong openings:
You need to hook your reader in with the very first line. Create a strong opening by asking a question. You can make an assertion and then explain it. You can also begin with controversial or emotionally charged statements. Another interesting way to open your post is, to open with statistics related to your industry.
Create small paragraphs:
Don’t use large chunks of text in your post. Keep every paragraph to just three or four lines each. It makes it easy to scan and read.
Use bullet points when you have a list of items to explain and use relevant images wherever possible. You can also highlight important phrases using bold and italics. But it’s important not to overdo it.
Using quotes from industry leaders in your content makes it more authoritative. You can also add pull-quotes when you want certain phrases to stand out.
These are some of the things you can do to structure your blog post and make it easy to read. These tips can also be generally applied to landing pages and emails.
Structuring your content for the internet makes it easier for users to read your posts. This leads to shares, more time spent on your site, and users returning to your website. This will build traffic which will give you more leads.
Use calls to action
Now that you’ve made engaging content for your readers and led them to the end of your post, don’t leave them hanging!
Use calls to action and guide them to engage with you. Use optin forms like an inline call to action or a popup and ask them to subscribe. Ask them to join your online course or just share the post on social media.
An optin tool like OptinMonster can help you create different types of popups. You can use it to create inline optin forms. Here’s an example of one below:
Using calls to action has a significant impact on conversions. You can track conversions and revenue in Google Analytics by linking it to your site.
By using a call to action, you help complete a user’s journey on your website. You also create leads that you can convert to paying customers later.
Do more with content
We’ve just looked at different ways we can create content that gets leads. You can also use the tips given to create a website, landing pages, ebooks, mailers and more.
It’s a good idea to consider creating interactive content. Content like quizzes, contests, interactive ebooks, and pictures can multiply lead generation rates.
Try using lead magnets to give users something for free. They can access a free ebook, online course or a subscription in exchange for their email. This is another great way to do email marketing and get leads from your content.
Learning how to create good content is vital for your business to be visible online. Give your users thoughtful content, get traffic and leads so that you can make your business grow.