When building a marketing strategy, understanding your target audience and their pain points is an important first step toward success. This core knowledge will drive your approach to targeting customers and prospects. It also helps establish a strategy for content marketing that can produce more, high quality leads over a longer period of time.
Effectively using content marketing for B2B lead generation starts by developing a plan which details your planned interactions with your potential customers. This is especially true with longer sales cycles that can last months or even years. Your first goal is to profile, qualify and identify which prospects are ready to buy. Your next action is to help the remaining prospects move forward through the decision making process. It’s important to lead them at their own pace to a decision that favors you.
Doing this takes a thorough understanding of your buying process and the ability to track where your prospects fall within that spectrum. Only then can you create the content that answers the specific questions your prospects have at each stage in this process. By tracking their interaction with this content, you can then monitor their buying behavior and build campaigns that will educate, shape and influence the final buying decision.
Another huge benefit of content marketing for B2B lead generation is its ability to simplify and streamline the creation of other marketing campaigns. With a wealth of content available, building customized campaigns that will be more personally appealing to each prospect becomes easy. Reusing content and driving users back to related online content is a great way to leverage the work you have already done to maximize every investment in marketing. By doing this, you’ll be able to:
- Improve your SEO rankings with more, meaningful content for search engines and prospects to find
- More affordably attract and acquire new leads by reusing existing content and creative elements
- Better profile, track and qualify each prospect to prioritize sales follow-up
- Establish your credibility as a subject matter expert
Most importantly, building a content marketing strategy for B2B lead generation is not only vital to creating a sustainable approach to marketing, it’s also one of the most affordable. While creating content does take time, the plethora of tools and resources to publish it has made getting your content in the hands of your prospects easier than ever. There are also numerous services to help you manage the whole process such as our marketing automation and implementation or monthly e-Newsletter packages. Each of these gives you the structure and content you need http://www.responsepoint.com/marketing-automation-support-and-services/to get started and maintain a well-crafted and highly successful content marketing strategy for B2B lead generation.
