Within the constantly evolving digital marketing realm, generating quality leads for business is a challenge modern marketers grapple with on a continuous basis. According to a recent report, increasing quality leads happens to be the prime concern for 68% of B2B professionals right now.
Enticing and converting leads isn’t easy, particularly when you contemplate the utter amount of competition lurking behind the scenes. More and more businesses are executing a lead generation strategy to keep up with their sales teams’ efforts.
In this piece, we will be looking at what the secret sauce behind generating quality leads truly is.
How to Generate Quality Leads?
One report states that more than 86% of B2C and 91% of B2B marketers are making use of content marketing as the most pivotal part of their digital strategy to garner organic visibility, quality leads and revenue.
Therefore, fabricating a full-proof content marketing plan is instrumental in converting blog and website traffic into sales.
“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.” – Mark Twain
Producing one piece of content after another, like the rest of the world, isn’t a successful move when it comes to generating quality leads. The content you publish has to be led by a powerful strategy that gets the leads flowing right into your sales funnel.
Here is the step by step plan of action that ensures your content produces relevant leads for your business who have the best potential to convert into paying clients and getting revenue.
Step 1- Identify and Target the bottom of the funnel keywords first
The search terms differ vastly when the visitors within your marketing funnel are at the peak of making a purchase in the decision stage in comparison to when they are simply keen about gaining additional information in the consideration or the awareness stages.
As the customer proceeds towards the bottom of the marketing funnel, the search volume for the keyword goes down but the buy intent escalates. These are the bottom of the funnel (BOFu)keywords that you should be targeting to gain maximum leads.
Say, for instance, your company develops employee engagement platforms.
Now, TOFu content focuses on common issues that your target audience faces. This content is purely educational and centers around helping your target audience — without explicitly promoting your own business. So, the top of the funnel keywords (TOFu) for your business will be something like ‘employee engagement’ or ‘how to engage employees’.
Even though the search volume of the top of the funnel search queries is high, since the readers are in the initial discovery phase of their buyer journey, the conversion intent is low and ranking for these keywords would not result in any tangible business benefits immediately as there would be no direct conversions.
If you consider the difficulty levels when it comes to ranking, it is extremely difficult to rank for these keywords. At the same time, even if you somehow manage to get your website ranking among the SERPs for these keywords, you cannot be certain that your conversions too will increase since these keywords are going to cast a wide net wherein the buy intent is relatively low.
The BOFu keywords on the other hand usually address the queries that a person looking to buy a product or avail a service would typically search for. Comprehending the user intent and targeting the long-tail, bottom of the funnel keywords may have comparatively lesser traffic coming onto your website, but it is one of the most efficient methods for generating quality leads.
Step 2- Create a landing page for the bottom of the funnel keywords
Once you have successfully identified all the bottom of the funnel keywords that will work well for your business, create a landing page around those.
The search engines now employ advanced algorithms that are powered by artificial intelligence to make sure that the users are connected with the most relevant search results. NLP (natural language processing) content writing and user intent mapping are two important deliberations that need to be focused upon when creating content for the landing pages.
User intent mapping can be verified easily by searching for the chosen keyword over search engines and going through the search results displayed right on the first page there. As a matter of fact, if the search results display five or more service pages, the keyword is a superior candidate to aim for building a landing page.
Getting back to our example of an employee engagement platform development company, let us look at the search results for the bottom of the funnel keywords now. For this particular example, the BOFu keywords with a clear buy intent that one will be targeting might be ‘employee engagement platform’.
As we can see, in case of BOFu keywords, the buy intent is clear and all of Google’s first page searches display names of service providers. This further fuels up the chances of conversions and prevents cold leads from landing up on your website only to abandon it without making a purchase later.
On the other hand, if the results primarily favor blog pages instead, you can still take a note of that for a later stage when you’ll be deciding the middle of the funnel keywords (MOFu) while continuing the quest for the ideal bottom of the funnel keyword.
Once you shortlist the keyword for optimizing the existing landing page or building a new one, first ensure that you have sufficient and relevant content on it that can amplify your chances of ranking for the targeted keyword. Hiring a content subscription service can help you get high quality content on a weekly basis.
Step 3- Layering the landing pages with middle of the funnel content
What’s the best way to ensure that your pages rank higher and gain qualified leads?
The industry experts will all give just one answer- link building.
Backlinking to the pages on your website from external sources happens to be the best way to increase the domain authority of your site and get your pages to rank higher on search engines. However, the issue with the technique is that it is notably more troublesome to get backlinks to a landing page. Layering the pages with MOFu content makes it easier to get links to it.
Going back to the employee engagement company example, if you consider the middle of the funnel keywords for your business (that should ideally help leads establish buying criteria), you’ll be looking at something like ‘employee engagement trends’.
If you look at Google’s first page search results and Ahrefs’ keyword explorer statistics for this particular keyword, yet again, you’ll deduce that the traffic surely has moved further down the marketing funnel here as compared to the TOFu stage, and the difficulty level of the keyword might have slightly reduced, but all the people exploring this search aren’t necessarily looking to make a purchase. Therefore, you might score a few leads, but they aren’t necessarily going to get converted to customers.
Thus you need to target the middle of the funnel keywords next, build content around them, and link back to the service or product page of your business.
The content page thus passes on the link equity to the product or service page while passing along organic traffic to the buy intent page as well. This fuels up your lead generation strategy further.
Step 4- Building backlinks to your website
You may create top-grade content but link building is equally essential for providing it with the push it needs. Without an existing domain authority, ranking on SERPs and organically driving traffic to your content as well as landing pages becomes your ultimate challenge.
The quality of your content will always end up taking a back seat for the hard work you put in making sure that it reaches the target audience. So how do you do that?
Track down high authority industry publications and start writing content for them. Focus on finding the publications that cater to the same target audience as your business.
The aim here is to link back to the content on your own blog and in due course pass along the link equity to the buy-intent page targeted at getting conversions your way.
Since you are writing for a high authority site, you can target keywords that are a bit competitive in nature. This increases the chances of the content ranking considerably. Ideally, you should target medium difficulty keywords with significant search volumes. Also, include a link to your blog organically while ensuring that the content provides value to the readers.
Once the content on the authority site ranks, it will have a two-fold business advantage for you-
1. It drives leads from the external publication onto your blog and eventually to the buy-intent page, thus bringing in business and forming a repetitive traffic cycle of sorts.
2. It passes on the link equity which is then evenly distributed between the BOFu landing page and the MOFu content page making them rank higher in the search results as well. This not only builds the authority of your website but also helps generate organic traffic.
You can also ask high authority websites (ideally the ones that show up on the very first page of Google for the keyword you’re planning to target) to review your website or mention it within the top service providers for that particular domain. This too increases the chances of your website being found.
Therefore, this approach too will work well in your favor when it comes to building backlinks.
Step 5- Making sure that your content reaches the right audience
Why not combine your content marketing strategy with your click advertising efforts and create a ‘hybrid’ digital marketing campaign? It’s a win-win!
Pay Per Click, commonly known as PPC, can generate leads and bolster your conversion rate rapidly. Combining content marketing and pay per click advertising allows you to capitalize on your content marketing strategy while you wait for the search engines to catch up and start delivering those search results.
To keep it simple, you need to account for the following –
- Knowing who your target audience is
- Understanding how to target your ads
- Having the ability to create great ads
- Collecting and converting leads
It can be a good idea to take a look at what has worked well across all of your social media platforms and then promote the best performing piece of content using pay per click ads.
This works well, because you’re taking a proven piece of content that you know will work and you’re getting it out to more people, using PPC ads. This increases the odds that you will earn a positive ROI on your ad spend.
For example, bidding on the PPC keyword “employee engagement survey providers” can help you reach the right audience who are more likely to convert. By appearing on top of the search results, you can appear on the radar of qualified prospects for a fraction of the costs.
How to Get the Formula behind Lead Generation Right?
An ideal process is the one that lays down the foundation of a sustainable strategy.
Once you get your product page ranking high and quality leads flowing in, you can move to the next product page and follow the same process all over again. You need to build links to each page separately, get it to rank and then move to the next phase of the process.
Following a strategic approach lets you build content that truly matters and streamline your efforts.
The aim of this entire process is to create powerful content that nurtures the readers through the different stages of the sales pipeline, gets your web pages ranking high in the SERPs, gets you relevant traffic in form of leads that are most likely to convert, and gives quantifiable returns by generating ROI and adding to the business’ reputation.
The best thing about this content marketing strategy is that it creates a scalable and repeatable model for your team to follow. It saves you from wasting all that important time and investment in too much work that doesn’t even get you desirable results.
Instead, it allows your marketing and content team to optimize their actions, take up a focused and planned approach, and follow the course that leads to direct results.