There’s no disputing the fact that the lead generation game can get exhausting. After all, the probability of selling to an existing customer is 60 to 70 percent; that number drops to five to 20 percent with new prospects. Moreover, new customers cost six to seven times as much to acquire as maintaining existing customers.
Therefore, every time you start at “go” with regards to the lead generation game, you want to make sure you have it exactly right. With businesses living and dying based on the amount of promising, easy-to-convert leads they have, it comes as no surprise that market research states that 71 percent of B2B marketers recently surveyed indicated that lead generation is the most common goal for content marketing.
The report, produced by Holger Schulze and surveying 815 LinkedIn group members, revealed that next to lead generation, marketers leverage content marketing strategies for thought leadership and marketing education (50 percent) and customer acquisition (45 percent).
Other chief findings of the report include the fact that:
- Customer testimonials (89 percent) and case studies (88 percent) are the most effective content marketing tactics.
- Marketers rely on web traffic and web downloads to track content marketing success.
- 51 percent of B2B marketers look at sales opportunities to evaluate content marketing accomplishment.
So what do these statistics tell us about content marketing? That it is increasingly being leveraged to find not only leads… but good leads.
So how do you go about getting those leads that have the highest chance of converting to loyal brand proponents? The first step is to make sure you are properly nurturing your leads. In fact, 65 percent of B2B marketers have not established lead nurturing campaigns, putting you ahead of your competitors should you adopt a strategy. One of the first ways to nurture leads is to blog about topics that originate from your sales team. Since your sales team is out in the field, hearing day in, day out about what your prospective customers want to know about, lean on them for blog ideas.
Moreover, make sure your blogs are rich with cross links to other parts of your website. This encourages your potential customers to do a deeper dive into your core competencies and helps them navigate freely around your website. Keep in mind where they most likely want to visit—the pages that list your prices, features and unique differentiators.
As a final step, be careful with your email marketing efforts. Since many consumers are quick to mark company emails as spam, you will want to go to great lengths to make sure that your precious marketing email does not make it to the dreaded junk or spam folder. This means giving some serious thoughts as to the kinds of messages your consumers want to read. Most likely, they want to know how you can alleviate problems they are facing. They want you to clear up some misconceptions they have. And they want to know how much your services really cost.
Do you have any lead nurturing success tips? Let us know in the comments below!
Edited by
Justin Reynolds
