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Top 5 Content Marketing Tips for Warming Up Cold Leads

Tricia Lim

Tricia Lim

What is marketing without the right messaging, strategy and ultimately, content? 

If you’re looking to boost your lead generation, you can’t overlook content marketing as they go hand in hand. Simply put, content marketing is one of the most useful and important lead generation strategies.

To understand this approach better, lead generation is the process of attracting prospects to your business, to peak their interest with the end goal of converting them into a buying customer. In short, it’s a way of warming up potential customers to your business and leading them to eventually make a purchase. You might have seen some lead generation examples such as blog posts, eBooks, and other forms of online content. 

Here are the top 5 content marketing tips to generate traffic and warming up your cold leads!

Table of Contents

1. Understand your audience

Above all else, you need to understand your audience, their interests, pain points, and subsequently, their buyer journey which we’ll go into later.

In the business of marketing, you need to know who you’re marketing to.

“Don’t build links. Build relationships.” - Rand Fishkin, the founder of SparkToro

After all, content is only great and effective because it works for its ideal audience.

Just like how memes owe its success to the relevance factor with its audience, the same applies with content marketing. You first need to understand the type of audience you’re trying to attract before you can create the right content that they’ll resonate with. 

Ask yourself these questions when conducting your customer research:

  • Who is your target audience?
  • What are their characteristics?
  • What are their needs?
  • What benefits appeal to them? 
  • What types of social media do they use?
  • What keywords do they search on?

You can create a buyer persona to curate content specific to your audience based on the accurate data collected through conducting surveys, research, and interviews. 

2. Understand your buyer's journey

Secondary to your buyer persona, your buyer’s journey is equally as important to understand. A buyer’s journey will help you to develop content specific to your audience and the stage that they’re at before guiding them towards becoming a customer.

Here are some prompts to better understand their overall buyer’s journey:

  • How did they find your site? 
  • How do they progress from visitor to buyer? 
  • What happens after they make a purchase? 
  • How do they use your product post purchase? 
  • What do you do when they encounter support issues?
  • How do you encourage first-time buyers to become repeat customers?

As a content marketer, understanding your customers’ experience can help you better understand their needs and the kind of content that interests them. You never know which stage of the buyer journey they’re on, so it’s best to be prepared to meet their needs at any point.

Pro tip: create a customer journey map. Doing so will give you a visual representation of the different steps your prospect faces and what needs to be met to ensure that they have an enjoyable experience with your brand. You can apply this to your keyword strategy to prompt the right search engine users to seek out your site. 

Remember that each target group is unique so it’s best to create a few different maps to cover the major market segments of your business.

3. Create a content marketing strategy

No matter whether you’re marketing online or offline, you need content to attract leads. You’ll need content for every stage of the buyer’s journey to convince and guide them further into your sales funnel. 

Once you’ve established an understanding of your target audience (their wants, needs, and buyer journeys), then you’re ready to start developing your content marketing strategy based on your target niche and your goals. 

Your content marketing goals could be to:

  • Increase brand awareness
  • Position your brand in the market as a trusted brand
  • Grow your following on social media
  • Generate leads for your prospecting database
  • Educate audiences about the benefits of your product or service
  • Establish yourself as a credible thought leader and expert in your industry

 

Whatever the goals of your content campaigns are, remember that they need to be S.M.A.R.T–Specific; Measurable; Attainable; Relevant; Timely. These goals will help you monitor your success and progress. 

One of the models that we implement into our marketing strategies is this: the GSOT framework. We find it helpful to lay out all our goals, strategies, objectives, and tactics to mobilise our plan.

Another component of a great content marketing strategy is having a clear value proposition. It’s often a short description stating why customers should choose you over your competitors. A strong value proposition clearly defines the problems you want to solve for your customers, and the promise of value that they expect you to deliver. Think of it as an important conversion factor for your business because it may be the factor between winning and losing a sale.

Here’s an example of a clearly written value proposition by Bloom & Wild, an online flower delivery company that makes ordering and receiving luxury flowers easy and simple. According to a statement by Aron Gelbard, founder and CEO, “We’re enabling [our customers] to order flowers and gifts from the palm of their hand with better product, designs, and payments.” 

While there are many flower delivery companies out there, Bloom & Wild focuses on offering the smooth customer experience that people want along with competitive pricing. When you communicate your value proposition as clear as Bloom & Wild does, your customers will advocate for you and your business.

4. Create highly valuable content

When it comes to creating content, naturally, you want to curate the best content for your niche. With the arsenal of data collected from your customer research, you can craft content that will capture their attention and appeal to solving their pain points. 

Focus on creating content based on the topics, needs, benefits and keywords of interest to your audience. Content that stands out is the kind that offers high value, it’s easy to understand, and it has to be engaging. 

Here are a few ideas to help you get started in creating highly valuable content:

  • Provide how-to information for solving a problem
  • Share emotionally engaging stories
  • Advice on how to avoid common mistakes in your niche
  • Research and compile interesting data within you industry
  • Share relevant quotations or interviews from leaders in your market
  • Create guides that will help audiences succeed at their goals

 

Content marketing tip: incorporate lead magnets into your content marketing strategy. Lead magnets are basically content that leads can access once they release their personal information to you. It’s usually a long-form resource offered in exchange for your prospect’s contact information. Examples of lead magnets are ebooks, reports, guides, cheat sheets, and other downloadable assets.

5. Generate content consistently

The success of content marketing relies heavily on creating high quality content and being consistent with it. The more quality content you produce, the more your traffic will grow. So, if you want to achieve results, you need to create and churn out content on a consistent basis. Thankfully, this is completely doable with the advent of the content calendar tool. Trust me, it’s a marketer’s best friend. 

Set your goals on how much content you need to produce and with the help of a content calendar, you’ll get into the rhythm of consistent posting in no time.

Source: Medium

Wrap Up

At its core, content marketers have to create content that captures visitors’ attention, spark interest, and introduce value to lead them along the buying process. Put these content marketing practices into effect, and you’ll start to see more qualified leads for sales conversions. 

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If you’re looking to achieve your content marketing goals, get in touch with us hello@medianetic.me! We can’t wait to see how we can add value to your brand, business, organisation.

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