(2-3) How To Supercharge Your Lead Generation With Content

Picture this: It’s 10:30 p.m. on a Wednesday night, and you, dear marketer, are fast asleep. Sounds heavenly, no? Well it gets better. Somewhere across the ocean, a potential prospect stumbles across your website from a search engine. Ten seconds go by, and that prospect doesn’t bounce away. Surely it’s magic, a glitch in the matrix, a fluke. But no—something has caught their eye, so they decide to click. And then they click again. 

Ten hours later (because who doesn’t deserve beauty sleep in this hypothetical?), you wake up to a notification. Four items on your website have been consumed. One white paper has been downloaded through a gated form CTA. You’ve got a new marketing qualified lead (MQL), all while you were frolicking away in dreamland. And here’s the best part: It wasn’t some ethereal magic that brought you this effortless lead. It was the magic of content.

Cheesy transition? Worth it. 

Generating Leads is Tricky

Earning leads without batting an eye is rarely that easy. In today’s digital landscape, a key component for lead generation is collecting email addresses. There’s only one issue: The modern buyer is pretty wary of giving personal information out. Their walls are up. Why? Because when businesses get an email, they communicate. And when all businesses are communicating at once, it creates a deafening cacophony of marketing noise.

To overcome that email hurdle, your business has to make every buyer interaction memorable. You have to build credibility and provide value, because when you eventually ask for that email address, only trust can break those walls down. Fortunately, that’s exactly what content⁠—and a great content experience⁠—can help you do. 

How Content Creation Fuels Lead Generation

When you create informative and engaging content, it tells your audience that you’re more interested in being a helpline than padding your bottom line. That content you create can chip away at any ulterior motives your buyers may suspect you of having, which is key in lowering those email-limiting barriers. 

There are two umbrellas of content you can create to fuel your lead generation goals: view-worthy content and email-worthy content. And when these two types work together, it can stir up the kind of magic that will have you pulling leads out of a hat … aka your marketing automation platform. 

View-worthy items are those free-to-consume, top-of-funnel (TOFU) creations like blog posts, infographics, articles, and videos. Their purpose? To build credibility and pave the way for email-worthy content to really shine. Because once view-worthy items build the trust, your big-ticket, bottom-of-funnel (BOFU) white papers, ebooks, and webinars (and more) can ask for email addresses and expect a good answer. 

OK. So we know how content can help boost your lead-generating efforts. But how do we create that awesome content in the first place? 

How to Create Content That Creates Leads

Step #1 - Pick the Topics: 

Before you start writing, you have to know what topics your buyers want to be reading. There are two ways to do that: A) use a crystal ball, or B) do some research. Option A might be more fun, but option B is where the money is. The trick here is to find the questions your buyers are searching for, and answer them through your content. Pinpointing your user’s search intent, or the keywords they’re inputting into search engines, can be achieved through tools like Google Keyword Planner, Ubersuggest, and SEMRush.

Step #2 - Pick the Mediums: 

Content can appear in countless different media. While this article explains what kind of content to use for each buyer stage, a great way to optimize your content engagement is by picking mediums that resonate with your target buyer. If you’re dealing with more tactile consumers (like construction), video might be a better route than blogs. If you’re working with agencies or design firms, infographics could definitely hit the spot.

Step #3 - Connect Your Content: 

Once you know your topics and mediums, you’ll want to create a mix of view-worthy content pieces and some awesome, show-stopping, name-taking (literally), email-worthy items. The key is to ensure that your TOFU content is guiding buyers toward your BOFU email-grabbers. Because without that connection, some of your content will just drive traffic without generating leads—and if you’re reading this article, that should be a big no-no in your books. 

Now that you have the recipe for awesome content, it’s time to talk about the secret sauce for really amplifying your lead gen: content experience. 

Rock Your Lead Gen With Content Experience

Having great content alone doesn’t guarantee a great source of leads. Without the right content experience, you can betray a prospect’s trust pretty quickly. Let’s look at an example: Let’s say your view-worthy content has effectively guided a prospect to click on an outstanding ebook your marketing team spent months creating. 

Then, without warning, that little click launches the prospect to a dreaded static landing page. Their spidey senses tingle. They’ve seen these landing pages before–—they all look the same—and it didn’t turn out well last time. So they bounce from your form submission without an ebook in hand. And without a connective tissue that links back to your content, that bounce is likely permanent. 

Luckily, an effective and seamless content experience can help those bounces vanish (we’re really milking this magic metaphor now). Here at Uberflip, we’ve found that using overlay CTAs can 7x your conversion rate. The reason? When a contextualized CTA appears right over your content, it teases the buyer. For the small price of an email address and some other details, they can have all the goods promised just moments ago. Unlike a landing page, this content experience isn’t disjointed. It’s seamless, effortless, and above all, effective. 

Let’s Make Some Magic!

Enough talk. It’s time to walk the walk and start creating content to supercharge your lead generation campaigns. So engage your marketing teams, build that content, craft those content experiences, and *poof*—leads will appear out of thin air. Thin air being your resource center, of course. 

If you have a cool examples to share, or questions, please comment below and let us know!