The term “hack” as used in this headline means techniques for attracting high-quality leads in record time.
Interestingly, they’re called hacks because they WORK EXTREMELY WELL and only a few businesses use it.
When it comes to content marketing, trust me when I tell you that your competition is probably doing it wrong.
Here’s why:
According to recent studies, 60% of companies find it difficult to create content on a consistent basis. What’s more? 65% of companies stated one of their biggest challenges is producing engaging content that generates sales and revenue.
Regardless of how scary those stats are, it’s the reality. The struggle to attract leads which ultimately turn to sales seems to be an eternal battle for most businesses.
The truth is attracting readers to your content requires both an understanding of arts and science. It calls for creativity and the ability to produce content that’s compelling, useful, as well as satisfies the end user.
It isn’t only about creating quality content, how about attracting leads which is even more important?
If nobody knows your content exists, it’s quality doesn’t matter. That’s why it’s relevant as a content marketer to know how to attract leads with your content.
What kind of content do you produce that captures the attention of your target audience? What kind of audience is your content geared towards and how do you put your content out there?
These are some of the questions you need to ask when you’re designing your content marketing strategy.
Below are 10 of the most important content marketing hacks you need to include in your strategy to boost and attract quality leads:
1. Guest Blogging
Guest blogging is the practice of creating content for other websites in your industry. In a nutshell, you provide useful content for the website and tap into their audience.
The amazing result that Buffer recorded is one of the best examples of the power of guest blogging.
At their initial startup stages, Buffer sought to acquire more leads and decided to go through the guest blogging route and it was beneficial to them.
The brand saw an influx of 100,000 users as a result of their guest blogging endeavors.
And Buffer didn’t stop there. As visitors landed on their website through the articles they (i.e., Buffer) got featured on authority sites, there were more compelling articles on their blog to engage the new users. This singular act boosted the authority and popularity of Buffer even more.
Now, Buffer has four blogs which include the Open blog and Transparency blog, where content about their challenges and successes as a brand are shared.
This growth hack worked extremely well for Buffer, as they now have over 400,000 subscribers/users and more than a million fans all over social media.
That’s impressive, right? Well, your content marketing story doesn’t have to be any different. All you simply need to do is pull a “Buffer”. And you can do this in numerous ways.
One amazing hack is blogging through forums like Quora or Reddit.
On question and answer websites like Reddit and Quora, all you need to do is find questions about topics which you have already covered in your blog, then create short but quality content that provides answers to the user’s inquiry.
Now, as with any form of guest blogging, the purpose is to attract leads and keep in mind that the answers to questions on such websites aren’t accessible to the user who asked the question alone, it’s for everyone who wants to learn more about the topic.
Therefore, include a link to your blog, which provides an even more elaborate answer to the user’s question.
The end result is that you attract extremely targeted traffic that’s your exact audience match because it’s an answer to questions being asked. With this hack, you can effortlessly get the exact type of traffic you created content for.
2. Make Your Blog Compatible With Social Media
The importance of social media in content marketing can never be overemphasized.
As a matter of fact, when companies respond to customers and users over social media, those customers end up buying from those brands at a 20% to 40% increased rate.
This reveals the importance of social media to your brands capacity to attract better leads.
When you’re sharing your posts, ensure that the open grid is properly implemented, so your photos appear on your posts. Have you ever seen a post shared on social media without images linked to it?
Always share your posts with accompanying images.
To illustrate how powerful images are when you’re sharing content on social media, take a look at the example below without an image attached to the post:
Now look at that same post with an image attached:
Which looks better? It’s obviously the second one. You may be losing leads in droves by simply neglecting to introduce images on your shared posts on social media.
Furthermore, notice the difference in the description of the two shared posts? The first one is extremely vague and the other is quite clear, and your bet is as good as mine on which description would attract better leads and it’s the second one.
Lastly, don’t share posts without links to your website, the whole aim of sharing your posts on social media is to attract more visitors to your landing page or website, and turn them into leads and customers.
Here’s an infographic that summarizes the most important elements to include in your shared blog posts to ensure they’re well-optimized for social media.
If you still have doubts about the power of social media to boost your lead quality, here’s a case study from Intrepid Travel to inspire you. Their content marketing experience will certainly clear the doubt.
The brand created a content hub, tagged The Journal.
The Journal includes content from the brand on travel tips and the hottest destinations but the brand’s game-changer was its introduction of the Facebook integration.
This integration allowed users to share their content on social media and then have it instantly posted on Intrepid’s Journal. It ensured that the brand connected to users on a personal level.
Users no longer came to the site just to read the content but were also involved in the content creation process.
This singular hack boosted Intrepid’s brand engagement to new heights; increasing its following on social media to over half a million.
3. Email Marketing
The Argos brand, a toy, home furnishing, and trinket retailer saw a massive boost in conversion by simply engaging in targeted content marketing through emails.
Argos’ strategy was quite simple, when a customer visited the website and was about a buy a product but abandoned the product in the cart, through web data and what they wanted to purchase, Argos would get personalized data about them and use this to create content targeted at them.
This retargeting method would send the customer a compelling email containing content about 6 alternative products similar to what the user abandoned that may be more beneficial to the customer.
The content was able to be deeply personalized as a result of the array of information Argos already possessed about the prospect.
Now, that’s just one way of using emails to boost your lead quality through content marketing.
It might interest you to know that 70% of web users said they love reading emails from their most preferred content creator.
Could this be the reason why emails have a 3X more engagement rate than even social media? I guess so!
Hence, never downplay its power in your content marketing strategy, and always ensure that your web visitors get an email every time you create and publish new content.
Also, make sure you include links to your blog in your emails, and make them brief. Why?
Because the average email read time is 15 to 20 seconds. What’s more? You need to create enough suspense that drives them to click through to your blog.
Below is a screenshot of proper copy for emails:
4. Utilize the Full Potential of LinkedIn
LinkedIn is one of the most underutilized social media platforms for generating leads through content strategy but it’s yet one of the most powerful.
Through LinkedIn Pulse, you can create content for your target audience by sharing your posts on the platform.
These posts you share on LinkedIn Pulse not only attract your audience but the posts ultimately create awareness for your brand. Think about it, you won’t have to figure out how to aim for your specific audience, it provides that for you already — you simply need to create engaging content.
One way to make sure that your content engages your followers up to the point of clicking through to your website is to ensure your posts are short and straight to the point.
As a matter of fact, research has shown that shorter posts do a lot better than longer ones on LinkedIn.
Furthermore, you’d want to make the posts shorter so it becomes bait, making users want to click through to your website to learn or know more.
There are numerous successful examples of brands that succeeded massively with this hack and one popular one is the multi-million dollar brand, Hubspot.
HubSpot is consistently able to generate up to 321,000 visitors monthly to its sister website Inbound.org by simply using LinkedIn to send traffic to its content.
One amazing thing about LinkedIn Pulse is its notification feature. Whenever you create new content and post it, your followers on the platform get notifications and can easily read your snippet posts before clicking through to your web page.
5. Create Groups or Interact in Groups
Online Groups, whether on social media or personal brand interaction forums, are an excellent way to generate better leads for your brand. For example, Rip Curl, self- tagged “the ultimate surf brand”.
They created an online group named The Journal. This group was created by surfers and for surfers.
It’s basically an online publication; a collection of individual surfing experiences, photographs, and stories, etc. This creates an interactive platform for users and brands — thus allowing visitors to feel a part of what you offer.
The introduction of this platform The Journal pulled in over 100,000 YouTube subscribers and more than a million followers across social media.
That’s how powerful groups can be. So make sure you create groups or interact with already created groups on social media which will allow you to directly communicate with your audience and share relevant content.
Aside from this, you can easily create a buzz about your brand through groups; the more people are interested in your updates and posts, the more shares you’ll see. This ultimately creates a social buzz for your content, which can effortlessly generate better leads.
If you’re wondering where you can find these groups, you can start with Facebook and LinkedIn. They work really well.
Both social media platforms have groups across various niches. And all you need to do is either create a group or join one relevant to the kind of content you produce.
After joining a group, you can begin to make updates on a daily basis or at particular times the groups have the most activity. Once you begin to do this and your content is relevant to what the group’s audience wants, you’ll begin to effortlessly pull in leads interested in what you offer.
6. Create Well-Researched Content
It’s no longer news that Google pays serious attention to in-depth articles and ranks them higher in the search results.
But it isn’t just Google that likes in-depth articles; your target audience also prefers rich and valuable content that answers their questions completely.
Always ensure that you carefully consider every detail of the subject matter that you are writing on. Don’t do a haphazard and quick work. Also, ensure that the content has over 2,000 words.
The term “in-depth” means giving careful consideration to all details and aspects of a subject.
This means that you extensively research your topic and then carefully craft a 2000+ word article to address every obvious subtopic in order to provide a complete solution.
Creating in-depth articles is a great content marketing hack that will increase your social media shares, improves your organic traffic and search ranking, and ultimately boost your online visibility.
To illustrate the impact of helpful and long-form content, below is a graph showing the average shares by content length.
But it goes beyond getting social shares. A study by serpIQ revealed that the length of the content matters to Google when it comes to ranking web pages in the organic listing. Articles that had a minimum of 2,000 words performed better on Google.
Here’s the truth: top-ranked websites have more content than the low-ranked website. It’s however important to note that you should not just focus on writing bulky content without quality.
The fact that search engines give priority to comprehensive content doesn’t mean you should focus on writing long content at the expense of the quality of the content.
If your content is long and it doesn’t contain the vital information needed by your visitors, they will lose interest and leave your page.
If you’re at a loss of how to go about writing an in-depth content which will attract more leads, below are some tips:
- Choose a broad topic to write on
- Include your target keyword (preferably long-tail) in your headline or title.
- Find and use accurate and current data that will back up every fact and information in the content.
- Proceed to create content that’s very captivating and helpful.
- Ensure you include graphics, images, slide presentations, or videos that are relevant to the content.
- Link out to authority websites
- Include a call-to-action in the content.
In-depth content has helped a lot of companies to acquire more qualified leads and increase the number of visitors they generate on their website.
A typical example of such a company is KISSmetrics. By simply creating in-depth content, the number of monthly readers increased from 0 (zero) to 350,000.
7. Use Clear and Persuasive Call-To-Action (CTA) Buttons
Your attempt at generating quality leads will not be complete if you don’t include a call-to-action button in your content.
A call-to-action (CTA) is very important in every blog post, eBook, article, or video that you publish.
Testing call-to-action buttons can equally improve your conversions. In fact, it will increase your conversion rate by 13%.
The call-to-action button is a decision point that determines whether or not your visitors will bounce or convert.
The shape, color, and size of your call-to-action button will determine whether or not your visitors will exit your landing page.
It’s not just enough to put a call-to-action button on your page, it has to be done in a way that will attract your people.
For example, the Square Register is most commonly used by US retailers. The text color of this type of CTA button is blue while the button is white with a cyan background.
Ensure that you do not use too many colors on the call-to-action button. You need to test to know which color your target audience will like the most.
Below is a screenshot of the kind of call to action buttons that you can use and those that you cannot use.
One person who has discovered the overwhelming lead generation potential of including CTA buttons is Michael Aagaard.
He wanted to know the right call-to-action to use — so he split his calls to action into two with the texts, “Get Information” versus “Order Information”.
After the test period, it was discovered that the call-to-action buttons that had “Get Information” on it increased his conversion rate by 38.26%.
8. Increase Content Interaction through A.I.D.A.
- AIDA stands for:
- A – Capture Attention
- I – Build Interest
- D – Create a strong Desire
- A – Call to Action
A lot of content marketers may not know this but it’s possible to drive traffic to your blog through high-value comments.
By commenting on other blogs you can generate lots of leads and these leads can, in turn, generate high revenue for your business.
Another way of using comments to your advantage is by getting people to comment on your blog posts and the easiest way to do so is by using the AIDA technique.
When you use this technique, you will be able to get comments that will link you up to ideal contacts and improve your search ranking.
Let’s examine each component of AIDA to get a clearer picture of what we are talking about. A clear understanding of each of these components will enable you to deploy them appropriately in order to be able to get the desired results.
i). A – Capture Attention
The two most important places you can capture the attention of your audience is through your headline and through the overall design of your website.
A strong headline and a good user-friendly design will attract tons of people to your websites.
Whether or not you generate any leads is dependent on your ability to capture the attention of your target audience, this is why you should do all it takes to capture the attention of your target audience.
ii). I – Build Interest
Building the interest of your target audience is important in the lead generation process. The level of interest your audience has in your content will determine the level of leads you generate.
To be able to build interest, your introduction needs to be very strong and persuasive.
One person that uses this to his advantage is the founder of NerdFitness, Steve Kamb. Most of his blog posts are usually started with emotional questions that challenge the status quo and trigger the interest and curiosity of the audience.
Another way to build interest is by asking the right but provocative questions that will make people react by wanting to share their opinions on the comment section.
You can strategically your introduction by asking a question that will trigger the interest of your audience in your content.
But ensure that your introduction is straight to the points and brief, all you need to aim at doing is catching the interest of your audience through the introduction.
iii). D – Create Desire
Before your target audience can take any action that will be beneficial to your brand, they need to have the desire to take the right actions and this desire doesn’t just appear, you need to create the desire in them.
A simple way you can create desire is by making use of bullet points, subheadings, and quotes.
When you break down important information into these easily digestible formats, your target audience will fall in love with your content.
When they discover that you have gone the extra mile to make hard topics easier to understand by breaking it into smaller and easier points they will engage more with your content.
iv). A – Call-to Action
A call-to-action will help you to subtly nudge your target audience into taking actions that you want them to. Using call-to-action increases the leads you generate
Below is the screenshot of the call-to-action strategy that is used by the founder by Spencer Haws, which has helped him to generate lots of comments for his blog posts.
The AIDA strategy is a potent strategy that can be used for any type of content.
9. Generate Massive Leads through Multimedia Sources
Another content marketing hack that can help you generate leads is by having audiences through all the marketing media available. It isn’t just enough to bank on just quality content creation like blog posts and articles.
Relying solely on content creation to generate leads will not enable you to get the best out of your content marketing endeavor, it will only keep you at the mediocre level.
You also need to explore and take advantage of every marketing media at your disposal to reach your target audience. Some of the other multimedia channels you can use are:
a. Videos and Podcasts:
There are many video marketing sites such as YouTube that you can use to promote your content. Take advantage of these websites and platforms to generate leads for your website.
Video Content marketing is proving to be very potent in the generation of leads and it is being used by a lot of people including Pat Flynn.
He reaches his target audience through books, podcasts, speaking gigs, videos, and other media.
ii). Mobile Marketing
It’s no news that a great percentage of the transactions that happen online is done through tablets or smartphones.
Not every of your potential client has a personal computer and even those that do, don’t carry it everywhere they go, but most of them have mobile phones because it’s far more convenient to use.
So for you to take advantage of the opportunities available through mobile marketing, you need to ensure that your content is mobile-friendly and also ensure that your website is responsive.
iii). Slide Presentations
This is another multimedia source you can use to attract an audience and increase leads. Slide presentations were used by Ana Hoffman to generate 243,000 views for her blog and this, of course, grew her business.
10. Take Advantage of Viral Trends
Change is constantly happening on the web, and particularly on search engines, instead of sitting back and complaining about the daily updates and changes being made, you can take advantage of the changes and create content that will benefit your target audience.
One of the best ways to drive instant traffic to your website is to be among the first few people to write about a new development or trend.
If your content revolves around old and outdated trends, you may not get enough traffic but if you take advantage of new and current trends and write on them, then your traffic will grow very well.
To keep abreast with new trends you may need to attend seminars and conferences where new developments and trends are announced by industry experts.
There are also websites that you can visit to get up-to-date information on what is happening in the industry.
For example, if you want to stay abreast with the latest happenings in the entertainment industry, you can visit Mashable and Techcrunch.
If you want to know recent happenings in the world of SEO, you can visit Search Engine Land. For every niche you are focusing on, there are websites that you can visit that will provide you will current information that you need.
It is, however, important to note that it is the current trends that will drive visitors to your website — it’s the content that you create out of the information of the current trends.
For example, Moz took advantage of the Google Penguin, Panda, and Hummingbird updates and created top-notch content on those topics. This generated an amazing engagement and leads to their business.
And we all know how much the big G loves user satisfaction. When your content creates that kind of buzz, it shows that it’s something worth ranking.
When you discover a new trend, ensure that the content you create about it’s of high quality and solid enough to attract your target audience.
Once you have solid content, you can then promote the content through social media marketing, guest blogging, and blogger outreach.
Conclusion
Generating better leads is hard. No doubt!
But the good news is that you can make it a lot easier by following the right steps.
Whether it’s through social media groups, search engine, email marketing, or guest blogging, it’ll take some time, but your efforts will be well worth it at the end.
The hacks listed above have been proven and tested by top brands. Brands like Adobe, HubSpot, Salesforce, Zapier, HootSuite, OneIMS, and so on.
To get similar results (leads, sales, ROI) as these B2B companies above, simply follow their content marketing strategy.
Don’t get me wrong; you don’t have to invest a lot of money or resources, but you need to have a clear plan of action that works.
Whether your content marketing budget is $500/month or $50k/month, make sure you’re investing it towards creating high-quality and relevant content that will answer your customer’s question. If you need our digital marketing advice, we’re here to help – Request to Speak with a Strategist.
This is the type of content that Google wants to serve its users, and users, in turn, are desperately looking for truly helpful content.
Above all, you must understand who exactly your audience is and craft content that meets their needs specifically. Find out what they engage with the most and create more of it.
At the end of the day, you’ll create more compelling content, drive more traffic to your website, generate high-quality leads, grow your sales, and increase your revenue IF you understand your ideal customer (i.e., audience) better.
