We live in a noisy world where everyone has something to say. A quick search on Google will reveal thousands of results for every imaginable query. The Internet has given professionals and non-professionals alike a seat at the table. So how do we cut through the noise and let our message be heard loud and clear by our intended audience?
Simply put, we generate leads with the right content strategy. Lead generation is king and content strategy is queen.
And programmatic marketing can get us where we need to go.
Let’s consider four ways to generate leads with the right content strategy.
- Define. Define your audience, goals, call to action, and promotional plan. Lead generation does not happen accidentally, and good content alone does not generate leads anymore. Are you looking to bring more traffic to your site? Are you hoping to sell more products? Are you looking to strengthen your social media following? Identifying your goals is the first step in creating the right content that will generate the best leads.
- Deliver. Once you know who your desired audience is, deliver your content to them. In other words, go find your audience and talk to them. It sounds basic, and yet too often, businesses wait for consumers to come to them with a need instead of going to consumers to meet the needs they have expressed in subtle ways all over the Internet. Consumers leave clues about what matters to them and what they enjoy most. By paying attention to these digital clues, we can carefully target our intended audience and generate leads by going to them directly. How do we do it? We join the conversation in discussion groups or on social media. We become the experts in our field by hosting webinars or creating white papers. We listen to the chatter and respond.
Programmatic marketing is a cool new tool in the ad tech tool box. It allows marketing professionals to employ highly targeted campaigns that combine multiple facets of traditional programming platforms. Identifying and pursuing a core target audience is key to generating leads–it does the hard work for you.
- Monitor.You should monitor your content stats and respond accordingly. Brands used to be in control of the conversation. Not so much anymore. Now the audience talks, and we listen to them. To that end, churning out blog posts isn’t a sufficient content strategy. Paying attention to vanity statistics (such as likes, shares, and responses) and watching for the rise and fall of corresponding sales numbers is a different game entirely. Audience interests and demographics should play a key role in the conversation about the right content strategy.
Programmatic marketing captures an immense amount of marketing data and analyzes it for audience insights that will make building the right content strategy (dare I say it?) easy. It also takes your ideal customer insights and generates a list of potential customers whose insights look the same.
- Nurture.Do something with the generated leads. Sounds obvious, right? Research shows that consumers don’t generally buy anything until sometime between the fifth and twelfth communication. So collecting a lead isn’t sufficient, nor is reaching out to the lead a couple of times before deciding he won’t buy. Strategic, consistent communication, however, is golden. Programmatic marketing uses the audience insights it collects to make specific marketing recommendations. Better still, programmatic marketing constantly evolves as it learns which ads work best for various consumers. If a consumer responds after a specific series of ads, programmatic marketing takes note of the pattern and uses it for future reference. It also utilizes the information gained from conversions and employs the strategy for new consumers whose profiles match the successfully generated leads.
Ultimately, good content is good. Good content that generates leads is better.
Good content that generates sales is key.
