7 Ways to Get Your Content to Produce Sales Leads -

Now

If your content marketing plan is producing a steady flow of sales leads, then save yourself sometime

and don’t bother reading this. Every marketing article I read tells me how much business has fallen

in love with content marketing and why not. I know from experience that whether selling to

consumers or business the challenge (for both marketing and sales) is to get content to produce

sales leads and not just brand awareness. However the reality is that today’s social media channels

are being bombarded with content (some great, some good and lots of crap) on a daily basis.

So how much content is created every day?

Well there are over 2 million blog posts written and posted every single day or some 84,000 every hour. On Facebook, users like over 4 million posts EVERY minute. Over 16 million tweets happen each hour. Google handles over 100 Billion searches a month. Instagram has over 100 million like per hour. Vine has over 60 million videos being played on the platform every hour. Tinder users swipe over 35 million matches per hour (is there anyone working!!!)

I know that these numbers seem daunting but when you look at the audience numbers, namely the internet has over 2.3 Billion active social media users and over 1 million new MOBILE social media users are added every day, then the possibilities to use quality content to create awareness for your business become tempting.

If you are really serious about standing out from the 2 million blog posts published every day, here is a few things I suggest you need to start doing to cut through the clutter.

First things first, the top 3 content marketing tactics are blog articles (65%); social media sharing (64%); and publishing case studies (64%

How can you cut through the noise? The question every content

marketing company tries to answer.

Well in my opinion it all boils down to “likeability”, that is how much a post or piece of content is “likeable”? In both the B2B and B2C (but especially content shared by sales people in B2B sales), the content being shared needs to have social reach, be liked and valued by the target prospects. The likeability of any content type can be increased by crafting assets using the best practices for each individual social network (media, language, tone, topic, length, etc) matched to a buyer persona or ideal customer profile. Right Profile - Right Content - Right Context and Right Timing! This does require planning between sales and marketing to know when prospects/target audience displays the need for specific content plus the ability to deliver that content to the prospect at the optimal time for action via the right social channel.

When it comes to social selling, sales people are publishing to be seen, create awareness and get expression of consideration to get buyers into the sales process. With the amount of content listed above, the challenge is how to stand out and turn social content into quality sales leads?

A formula for Content Likeability could be

Targeted Content + Situational Context + Buyer Stage + Timing

For agreement sake, let’s say we agree that the goal is to cut through the content crap and build our sales pipeline. This means we only care about the attention of a very small subset the 3.2 billion – those that match out buyer persona. This requires having content that is optimised for social media and that is adding value specifically to your ideal customer profile/buyer persona. Content that is role based, industry based and funnel stage based is a great way to organise content you intend to share – and share it you must.

The 7 Point Plan to Improve Leads from your Content.

1. Write better titles (better than this one!!)

SEO optimised titles do have an important part to play but mix it up. Here are some interesting statistics “On average, 8 out of 10 people will read headline copy, but only 2 out of 10 will read the rest.” The better the headline, the better your odds of beating the averages and getting what you’ve written read by a larger percentage of people.

The Four U’s approach to writing headlines:

Be USEFUL to the reader,

Provide him with a sense of URGENCY,

Convey the idea that the main benefit is somehow UNIQUE; and

Do all of the above in an ULTRA-SPECIFIC way.

2. Use your voice (write in the first person and bring some personality)

People don’t want to read vanilla flavoured articles from a corporate robot; you have a personality,

use it. Boring corporate articles which have no value or real purpose other than to fulfil some

content plan are a waste of time. Dilbert has written better commentary on business that the vast

majority of so called “business guru’s”. Writing in your own unique voice is as easy as writing the

way you speak. It actually requires passion and confidence more than skill. Use references and data

to support your opinion. But please do have opinions and insights to share regardless of right or

wrong. As Oscar Wilde wrote “the only thing worse than being talked about is NOT being talked

about. Get people talking about your views and opinions!!

3. Write longer articles

Damn I hear you shout. Yes I know longer articles are harder (and head wrecking). Gone are the days

of 150,300 or 500 word pieces. Let me tell you, if you write content to produce results, you learn

very quickly that you can't afford to spend months or years dreaming up a daring new approach for

every 2000 word article you write. No one I know has that kind of discipline. The path to success is to

write often which means quickly, and the only way to do that is to take a page from the playbook of

people like Shakespeare, Jefferson, and Wilde – copying from others not because you lack genius,

but because true genius is clothed in the ideas of others.

There is sixteen times more content published with less than 1000 words than there is with content

of 2000 words plus. As a motivator you might like to know that Google equates longer content with

higher value, meaning better rankings and more traffic. Don’t believe me? Google it or try some

keyword terms to see the results returned.

4. Put some sparkle on it

If you are 2 out of the 10 people who is actually reading this article (congrats, thanks and keep going)

you will appreciate you need some visual stimulation (easy now) to interest your mind and eyes as

you read. Using 2 or ideally more visually interesting elements (pictures, infographics, video etc) in

your article increases the chance of getting it shared. Start by creating lovely header images , apart

from lots of high quality, low cost stock photography there is loads of free images around the web

(borrow not steal and don’t infringe on anyone’s copyright or IP). Places like Canva, Piktochart, Pablo

by Buffer are great for creating graphics. Video content if you have some is becoming increasingly

important but some great video content on YouTube you could use to engage or entertain the

reader. So every few paragraphs or so, insert some imagery that adds value to the article, maybe

some data or quotes etc.

5. Stick to your plan

I know that as you have read this far, you are one of those people who does have a content

marketing plan, right? Because none of us would go on a journey without a route plan and

destination in mind or would we? Well, if you don’t have a plan, ignore points 1 to 4 and start here.

Who is your audience, what is their buyers journey, what stages do they go through, what content

does your competition publish, how often will you publish, who will write the articles, what are the

themes and topics, who will share, when and how often. What results do you expect in 3, 6 or 12

months so you can measure success? Draw up the content plan, week by week, what content is

aimed at which customer profile and at what stage in the buyer journey will this content appeal to

them.

6. Promote like crazy

Here comes the grunt work. Publish and readers will flock to read it just doesn’t work. Now that your

fingers are tired from hours of writing 1000+ word articles, you sit back and admire the sheer feeling

of seeing your work there, for everyone to read and share across the social networks. Pause. Now

you need to spend as long if not longer promoting, linking and sharing the article. Try to get your

article under the eyes of influencers, share on LinkedIn groups, Facebook, Twitter while link build it

to site likes Bizsugar, Soup, Google+, Plurk, Hacker news and loads of industry specific forums. It is a

thankless task, even boring but it pays off. Learn to live with it and set aside a few hours to promote

each and every article you publish.

7. Gather data

If you have a content plan, then you’ll need data to check what is and what is not working. Not to

mention results against targets you have set. What content is getting read, shared, liked and by

whom. What content delivered what leads as part of a social selling strategy are all questions

needing an answer. Gathering data from your library of published assets and using it to improve

your content plan can be the difference between successful and not-so successful blogs. The best

social marketing pros (and their writers) know what works and they churn out more of it day in, day

out.

Final Words on Content Marketing

I’m not going to bullshit you; you have read this far so you are owed some honesty. Out there on the

social networks, there is a war for attention from the 2.3 Billion social media users (or your portion

of that). While the internet has levelled the playing field for both buyer and seller, the hard facts are

you have only a few seconds if that to make an impact. Creating content takes effort and resources,

promoting it take effort and time, then add in the fact that we cannot afford to be vanilla, dull, stale,

or boring. To turn visitors into readers, readers into leads, and leads to prospects and prospects into

customers, your business, my business needs to produce content that stands out. It can be done but

more strategic than that, it needs to be done as it is what your buyers want. Do you have a choice,

sure but for the foreseeable future that old chestnut of content is king has never sounded truer.

Social media marketing powered by content marketing and driven by social selling is a potent

formula. Write well my friend.

“Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”

― Anton Chekhov