Lead Generation Content

Lead Generation Content

What is the point of everything we have been blogging about for the past 6 months? Entertainment? Sure. Honing our skills? Of course. Exercise? Not so much. Generating leads by creating valuable and informative content? Most definitely!

Content that Generates Leads

The goal of any marketing effort, be it online or traditional, is to generate qualified leads that will turn into sales. We know that content plays a very important part in our online marketing efforts, so what types of content will translate into leads? Not surprisingly, the top lead generation content revolved around a social aspect. People respond better when they can see what their peers are doing. We, as humans, love validation in our decisions. In a  2011 State of B2B 

Content Marketing Survey from TechValidate.com, “24% of marketing professions rated customer testimonials as thesingle most effective type of content with another 39% rating this type of content as very effective. Likewise, 73% of respondents rated case studies as extremely or very effective in their lead generation efforts.”  By including the opinions of others, we can increase the likelihood that what we are saying will resonate with our audience and turn into a lead.

Other types of social content

Based on that same study, the most effective types of content for lead generation are:

• Whitepapers
• Testimonials
• Case Studies
• Customer Videos
• Product Videos

The pattern is if you can prove to me that other people like your product/service, and not just tell me about it, then I’ll be more likely to give you my money.

That is all well and good, but what if you do not have any of the things on that list. Whitepapers can be costly, and you still need all the information for them, you cannot just make up testimonials or case studies and those videos are not cheap or easy to produce.

Instead of using existing information from your prospective customer’s peers, we can generate it. Our overall thought process is to get them interested, hook them and then drive them in as a lead. Three ways to achieve this process are:

• Interactive Content
• Collaborative Content
• Timely Content

For interactive content, you could include a poll, survey or even a contest. Get your prospect involved. Even better, once they take the time to fill any of these things out or enter their submission, they will want to see the results and find out the opinions of their peers. According to eloqua.com, “On average we see 82% completion rates for lead generation forms when used with interactive content.” That is a huge number! People do not want to feel left out and love to voice their own opinions, so make it work for you.

Collaborative content can take your information to the next level. There is only so much one person can say, but when you let other people get involved, you can get different opinions and discussion. This can be in the form of a contest, using social networks for bragging rights or for the chance to be involved in something bigger than the individual.

Lastly, is timely content. It does not matter what or how you are saying, if it is old news, no one is going to care. If I was to have a poll about what everyone got for Christmas, I probably would not get a huge response. That happened ages ago. But if I asked about the Supreme Court finding DOMA unconstitutional, besides being a much hotter topic, I would expect a larger response because that just happened. Plus, people want to see what everyone else has to say about it.

Bottom line, if you want content that will engage your audience and generate leads, make sure you include the opinions of others, or at least set it up so it can gather and share information for everyone.