It’s never been more important for businesses, and marketers, to utilise multiple channels to maximise their lead online generation efforts. With 80% of purchase decisions starting online, it’s critical that your lead generation strategy, and your website, are optimised to attract visitors, turn visitors into leads, and ultimately customers.

A multi-channel lead strategy should utilise everything from blogs to email and social media, to funnel visitors to your website where they can research, evaluate and purchase. To be truly effective in creating leads for your business, your website will need great design and useful information, as well as clear calls-to-action, content offers with forms to capture leads.

So how can marketers bring this all together? In this article, we look at the key channels businesses can use to create a multi-channel lead strategy to generate more leads.

1. Blogging

Blogging is a highly effective channel for lead generation. Through both organic search in search engines like Google, and sharing blog content across social media and email, blog articles drive traffic to your website.

According to HubSpot’s Benchmarks report, companies that blog 6-8 times per month double their lead volume. To maximise the impact of your blog strategy, every blog post should include links to landing pages within the copy of the post, as well as a prominent call-to-action at the end.

2. Email marketing

Many businesses think that email marketing should only be used to communicate with existing prospects and customers. However, email can be a great channel for new lead generation. Here are some ways you can use email to generate more new prospects.

• Focus on an opt-in strategy. If you’re buying email lists and spamming your prospects, no one will want to share your email with others. They will only want to unsubscribe! The first step to email lead generation is to make sure you have happy subscribers that enjoy receiving emails from you.
• Send people valuable offers. If you send really interesting or valued offers, whether it’s downloads, discounts or educational content, people will be more likely to share your emails with their friends or colleagues.
• Give people the tools to share. Don’t forget to add a ‘Forward to a Friend’ links or social media sharing buttons within each email so people are encouraged to pass it on.

3. Social media

Social media is a powerful channel that marketers can take advantage of to generate leads. Here are some tips for generating leads on social networks.

• Build a loyal following. Building a relationship with potential customers is a critical first step. Social media connections are really about people, not always company-to-individual. Get to know your audience online, communicate, share information and be generous. In order to generate leads, you need to have human interaction with others.
• Remember, social media is a dialogue. Companies that only use social media to blast out messages about themselves aren’t using social channels effectively. The goal is to interact with others and be helpful. When you share content on social media, don’t always post something that relates to your company. Share links to other interesting things you’ve found online. People will be very thankful you are noticing their work, too!
• Influence connections for content sharing. Publishing and sharing content that directs traffic to targeted landing pages is the single biggest lever to increase lead generation through social media. Share your content offers by posting links to landing pages, in addition to blog posts, discounts and other great resources.

4. Organic search

While promoting your offers across channels is crucial for lead generation, it’s also equally important to make it easy for people to find your landing pages through search engines. To do this, you need to apply search engine optimisation (SEO) best practices to your landing pages.

• Pick a primary keyword for each landing page and focus on optimising that page for that word. If you oversaturate a page with too many keywords, the page will lose its importance and authority because search engines won’t have a clear idea of what the page is about.
• Place your primary keywords in your headline and sub-headline. These areas of content have greater weight to search engines.
• Include the keywords in the body content but don’t use them out of context. Make sure they are relevant with the rest of your content.
• Include keywords in the file name of images (e.g. mykeyword.jpg) or use them in the ALT tag.
• Include the keywords in the page URL.

5. Use links and CTAs within content

Your content offers themselves are great channels for lead generation. Throughout your blog articles, social media, emails and web content, include links to other relevant and targeted content offers for potential customers. Not only will this increase your lead generation, but as people share your valuable content, other leads may discover the content offers too.

6. A/B testing

While this isn’t a channel as such, it is a great way to increase leads across all channels and tactics. A/B testing can be used in calls-to-action, landing pages, email marketing, advertising, and more.

According to HubSpot research, A/B testing landing pages and other assets can help you generate up to 40% more leads for your business. When done correctly, A/B testing can provide a huge competitive advantage for your company.

Generating leads online has the power to transform your marketing. Using a multi-channel lead generation strategy can reduce your cost-per-lead and deliver higher quality prospects to your sales team. The basics covered here are just the beginning. Continue to test and adjust each step of your inbound lead generation process to improve lead quality and increase revenue. Now go, put this into practice and become a multi-channel lead generation master!

Want to generate more leads? We’re experts at multi-channel lead generation and can help you set-up a strategy to maximise your marketing efforts. Give b:content marketing a call today to find out how we can help your business.

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Content marketing is the talk of the digital marketing industry right now, but for most business owners the term means very little.

The reality is, content is the heart of your website and content marketing is one of the most powerful lead generation tools available to businesses.

Whether you are targeting businesses or individual consumers, you can harness the power of content to build awareness, create connections, generate leads and achieve your business objectives. Done well, content marketing will allow you to build valuable trust with your potential customers before they even have a conversation with you.

So, how can you use the power of content marketing to generate more leads?

1. Solve your customers biggest problems

Most online search queries start with a desire for more information or a question that needs to be answered. It’s important that you take the time to understand what it is your potential customers are searching for so you can be present exactly where they are looking for answers.

Split your target customers into different groups and define their personas. Different customer groups will have different problems or questions, so establish a content plan to ensure you cover off each topic area over time.

Having a strategy that is highly targeted in this way will ensure you don’t just generate leads, but the right type of leads for your business.

2. Choose a format to deliver your content with impact

This can sometimes be the hardest part of content marketing. Once you have identified the content your customers are searching for, choose a format that will deliver the information with impact.

Generally speaking, for lead generation you want to choose a high quality, longer format such as eBooks, case studies and white papers. If you really want to go all out, host a webinar!

Make sure your content piece has a call-to-action, but keep the branding light and avoid the hard sell when using a content marketing strategy. It’s all about quality over quantity, so take the time to research the topic and make sure the finished product is polished.

If you’re looking for some inspiration, check out Econsultancy’s fantastic Periodic Table of Content Marketing which has heaps of ideas for different formats to delight your audience.

3. Promote your content

Once you have a shiny piece of content ready to go, make sure you tell people about it! Promote your content through your blog, social media and email to your database.

Depending on where your customers are searching online, you may even want to promote your content through paid channels. This might be as simple as promoting your Facebook post or Tweet in order to reach more readers, or using services like StumbleUpon or Outbrain.

Once you have a potential customer’s interest, you want to drive them to a landing page on your website where they can explore your content and offer.

4. Use landing pages to build your database

Content marketing for lead generation is all about give and take. You want to give a little away for free, and then in order to access the content, ask for a name and email addresses. Don’t ask for too much detail from people at this stage or they may go elsewhere.

Using a landing page for content like this will allow you to effectively convert visitors into leads. Once you have a potential customer’s email address, you can nurture them with subsequent emails, content and offers and hopefully turn them into a customer.

KISSmetrics have developed this great diagram showing the anatomy of the perfect landing page.

So, that brings us to our last point which is make sure you provide quality content for each stage of the buying process.

5. Provide content for different stages of the buying process

At any point in time you will have customers in the research or engagement stage, right through to the buying stage. At each stage, the questions are different and the content will be different. Map your content to the buyer journey, and be consistent by publishing new content regularly.

No matter which stage you are creating content for, the key is to focus on creating value and a tailored call-to-action. The best content marketing strategies make potential customers feel nurtured without being pressured to buy.

Done well, a solid content marketing strategy can also help you turn your customers into vocal advocates of your business, sending more and more customers your way. The ultimate lead generating tool!

HubSpot has a great diagram that illustrates this perfectly.

Summary

To effectively generate leads with content marketing, you need to focus on your potential customers’ information needs and solving their biggest problems. Once you have identified this, you can start to define your customer personas and map your content to their buying journey.

Use a variety of formats and promote your content through email, social media and paid channels where appropriate.

Over time, a solid content marketing strategy that provides targeted content and offers will help you build trust, turning leads into customers, and customers into advocates.

Not sure where to start with content marketing? We love telling stories that engage, motivate and change people. If you need some inspiration and expert advice on your content marketing, give b:content marketing a call.

We’ll get people talking about you, and to you.

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