How to Improve Inbound Marketing for B2B and B2C Lead Generation with Content Marketing

Content marketing is and has the power to convert strangers into leads and paid customers. Even with such powerful potential, it is one of the least prioritized marketing channel.

Most freelancers, startup and small businesses avoid content marketing just because they are not aware of its potential.

The biggest challenge any content marketing or inbound marketing enthusiast face is the proof of returns from content marketing.

It is not easy and quick to measure the results from organic and inbound marketing unlike paid advertising. If you are in the dilemma and have been asking yourself the question thousands of marketers are asking, then this post might be a help.

The question?

“How can I prove that content marketing works for my company and my industry?”

The answers is as always, “You need to test”.

Now, the answer leads to the next question;

“How can you test without a budget or an almost no budget situation?”

Even though this is definitely not the ultimate and only solution for this problem, it will be a guiding compass towards the direction as my skills, situations and experiences are different from yours.

Baby Steps to Content Marketing

I agree, content marketing is overwhelming, so let’s start with the most simple step. Let’s call it the Content Marketing Baby Steps.

If you already have a blog, great!

If not, adding a blog to your website won’t take much out of the marketing budget.

The easier it is for the visitors to find the blog and it’s content, the easier it would become for you to funnel these visitors in the early research phase of your product or industry to other important pages with valuable content.

That leads us to content creation and this is another area where marketers fail due to ignorance.

You can create content for your blog in many ways like:

Writing the content yourself since you must be having a clear picture about the industry or niche you are in. You might know the questions your customers frequently search answers for.

You could use my CRAFT system, if that suits you.

Recommended: The CRAFT System for Content Creation

Or if you are out of time, you could find someone in your team or on freelance websites. Either way, you will require someone who has good writing skills.

Hiring someone on a freelance website will mean that you need to spend more time finding the right person and then making sure they can deliver quality work.

Keyword/Topic Generation

Once you are ready to create content, you will need to find topics as mentioned before. At some point you will run out of questions that customers ask and that is when keyword research tools and competitor analysis comes into help.

A few keyword-analysis tools like Google Keyword Planner, AHREF, SEMRUSH will find related keywords and their search volume per month if you provide a main topic. This is an incredibly useful if you are new to an industry.

Every industry has experts and leaders. These thought leaders put out the latest industry news and topics most of the time. Make sure that you create a list of such experts in your industry to follow.

Apart from the above methods, you could also analyze your Google Analytics and search console data to find about keywords that are driving traffic to your from search engines. These keywords can be used to build out content plans.

Once you start creating valuable content, you can push this out this content on multiple platforms like the blog, Web2.o and social media. One of the main channels for B2B lead generations LinkedIn and for B2C you could harness the combination of your blog and search engine.

You can always re-purpose this content and use them to create effective video marketing content. Creating short brief engaging videos can be used on YouTube to drive traffic to these blogs and platforms.

The audience on your blog might be at different stage of the buying cycle. You need to understand how you can move across the funnel if they are at the early awareness stage. In the next post,I will go into the process of lead capture and lead nurturing.