9 Ways Content Marketing Can Help Increase Leads & Sales
If you have a website, you’ve decided that at least some of your customers are online.
One way to reach those customers is through content marketing.
What Is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is the consistent creation and distribution of relevant content - in its various formats - targeting a particular audience. The end goal is the same as all marketing: to positively impact profit.Content marketing is a long-term game that reflects the dynamic relationship between brand and consumer. In a relationship, both partners need to give and take. Through content marketing, you can build loyalty and advocacy by forging relationships with consumers as you provide an enormous amount of value - relevant and high-quality content - while asking for nothing (directly) in return.
This seeming lack of incentive sometimes perplexes business owners.
Why spend time and money creating content that isn’t going to earn leads and sales?
The answer is content marketing, when done correctly, does help increase leads and sales.
Creating Content Lower Down the Funnel
Content marketing is frequently associated with blog posts, but your content doesn’t always need to stray too far from services and products. It can work for some businesses or industries, but not all. It’s a legitimate strategy to build content in the middle or bottom range of the sales funnel, that stays tightly focused on your core products and services. Some middle and lower funnel content types are listed in the graphic below.
Examples of middle and low funnel content.
For example, if you’re a chemical manufacturing company, you don’t need to have a blog post on “The Different Branches of Chemistry.”
If you’re a local housecleaning business, ranking first for “best way to clean under sofas” may generate lots of traffic to your site, but it won’t make the phone ring.
For some businesses, better service pages and low-funnel content will be the focus.
For others, content in the awareness stage will be the norm.
Oftentimes, it’ll be a combination that’s called for.
A good content marketing strategy considers business goals, the target audience, and the competition, along with several other factors, when laying out a content plan that will deliver more leads and sales.
The benefits of content marketing are more indirect than traditional advertising, but they can still be measured. There are many examples of content marketing delivering results.
Content Marketing Increases Leads & Sales - the Evidence
Quantifying results from content marketing is a tough job. Complex customer journeys and inadequate analytics tracking make attributing the true effect of content on your bottom line difficult.
Reporting may present challenges, but that doesn’t mean you can’t measure the effectiveness of content marketing.
At a macro level, you can measure the role content has played on the way to a conversion - whether interactions with content occurred at the start, in the middle, or at the end of a customer journey.
For each piece of content, there are various micro-goals that can evaluate effectiveness. Depending on your goals - be it brand awareness, customer engagement, leads, sales - success can be measured, whether it be a contact form submission, a subscription, a Facebook share, a certain scroll depth, more brand searches, a download, or something else.
While keeping in mind that much of the research on the effectiveness of content marketing is from a pro-content marketing perspective, we feel confident that the data reveals enough to say that content marketing is a cost-effective marketing strategy.
Content marketing generates over three times as many leads as outbound marketing and costs 62% less - Demand Metric.
According to 74% of companies surveyed, content marketing has increased their marketing leads, both in quantity and quality - Curata
After reading recommendations on a blog, 61% of online consumers in the U.S. then decided to make a purchase - Content Marketing Institute
88% of video marketers reported that video gives them a positive ROI - Wyzowl
SMBs that use content marketing get 126% more leads than those that don’t - iMPACT
Here are nine ways in which content marketing can help grow leads and sales:
#1: Provide Matching Content at Each Stage of the Customer Buying Cycle
You can attract more customers and keep them in your sales funnel by creating content at each stage of the customer buying cycle.
You can turn awareness into interest, interest into leads, and leads into sales.
At the top of the funnel, when consumers are aware of their problem, but not so much the solution, you can both provide the answer and nudge them in the direction of your solution.
Example:
You’re an electric company offering a special time of use plan for owners of electric vehicles to charge their EV at night, when electricity is cheaper.
Alex has just bought her first electric car but is unsure how and when to charge it.
You create a piece of content titled “How and When to Charge Your New EV at Home.” You explain that charging during the night takes advantage of time of use tariffs.
Alex now searches for information on time of use tariffs and comes across your piece “What Are Time of Use Tariffs & When You Need One.”
You mention that having an EV makes for a good candidate and also highlight your own special time of use plan for EV owners.
Alex visits your EV plan sales page but wants to see what other companies are offering.
Your content has helped move Alex from the awareness to the solution stage. You have a solution to meet Alex’s EV charging needs and Alex is aware of your solution. Alex is a lead.
#2: Improve Conversion Rates
If you have generated the lead yourself (as in the example above), you’re starting from second base, but that’s rarely enough to reach home.
Once you have a lead, you need different content to encourage the sale. This involves a killer sales page and various supporting pages for the sales page.
Supporting pages could include any type of content that answers the question “Why You?”: a portfolio, case studies, client testimonials, post-purchase instructions, a more transparent look into your company, a customer support portal, etc.
All these types of content help turn leads into sales.
Example:
Alex knows about your time of use electricity plan but wants to check out others.
She searches for electric companies offering time of use tariffs in their state. You and other companies show up high in Google’s search results.
Alex takes a look again at your sales page. There’s little difference between your time of use plan and those of your competitors.
However, Alex is impressed by your customer testimonials, you have a video showing how easy it is to schedule charging for an EV, and you even have an instructional page showing how to schedule charging for the top 5 EV models (one of which Alex owns), making it simple for Alex to take advantage of your electricity plan.
Your content marketing has engaged Alex early in the awareness stage and has nudged her along the funnel to the point of where she is aware of the solution, and aware of you as a provider to her problem.
Your sales and supporting content (testimonials, video, product supporting pages) helps convince Alex to start your signup process.
#3: Create Trust
Publishing comprehensive, accurate, and compelling content makes you a trustworthy source for readers.
Higher up the funnel, where content typically answers questions without a sales push, content marketing means giving and asking for nothing (directly) in return. As a result, this more equal consumer-brand relationship creates greater trust and a stronger bond.
Example:
You didn’t ask anything from Alex when she was looking for help on when to charge her electric car.
In fact, you even mentioned that, depending on driving habits and other electrical usage, time of use may not be the best option.
Alex now places more trust in you. Alex is more likely to click on your content when she sees your name in search results, and you’ll have some trust points in the bank when Alex is ready to make a buying decision.
#4: Improve Audience Retention
If you’re providing high quality content, giving answers and information that customers are looking for, that value will create a bond and that bond will do two things:
It will keep customers on your site longer during each visit, allowing you more opportunities to turn them into paying customers.
It will keep customers coming back to your site when they have a question or problem they need solving.
Example:
Alex read your article “How and When to Charge Your New EV at Home.” Alex is now travelling on vacation for a week and won’t be at home. She’s going to need to charge her EV on the go.
Remembering you provided helpful information earlier, Alex returns to your site seeing if you can solve her latest problem.
In your EV resources section,she comes across another page - “Where Can You Charge Your EV When You’re Not at Home?”
You’ve solved another conundrum for Alex and, no doubt, she’ll be back again when she needs another answer.
#5: Display Your Expertise
It is possible to be helpful while not being a big help. It’s nice to provide an answer, but if your answer isn’t wholly accurate, or it’s missing nuance, you’re effectively providing the wrong answer, or you’re forcing a reader to look elsewhere for a more comprehensive answer...which, for our purposes, is the same thing.
If you really want to help consumers, you need to provide clear and comprehensive content, backed up by reliable sources.
Content marketing gives you the chance to be seen not only as a trusted source, but also as an expert source, providing deeper and more insightful information than anyone else.
That will place you in a strong position when someone enters a deeper stage of the customer journey.
Example:
Before she bought an EV, Alex wanted to know how far she can travel on a single charge. Google’s top answer of “about 250 miles” wasn’t very helpful.
When she digs a bit more, she comes to your page “How Far Can Your EV Drive in One Charge?”
On this page, you offer a more detailed list of the average charge range by model. What’s more, you also include a column for the price range of new and used models, so Alex can ignore models above her budget.
To really display your expertise, you’ve also conducted real-world tests on several EV models, to see how their range compares to the official range listed by the automaker. Finally, you conduct two real-world tests for each model, one urban driving and one highway driving.
Alex now has a much better understanding of how long EVs can drive on a single charge. She also has an idea on the most suitable EV models to meet her needs.
Alex sees you as an authority on EVs.
#6: Benefit Your Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO is baked into content marketing. If it’s done correctly, published content will lead to more pages being crawled and indexed in Google, which results in more traffic.
Furthermore, if part of the intended audience is looking in search engines, a piece of content should be optimized for search engines right off the bat.
Example 1:
You publish pages on “How to Charge an EV When You Live in an Apartment?”, “Is Workplace EV Charging Free?”, and “Does Your EV Battery Run Out of Charge When Parked?”
These pages are well optimized for search engines - they provide in-depth and accurate answers; they use the language of customers, relevant headings, and keyword-rich title tags, among many others; and they get crawled and indexed by Google.
Search engines find them relevant and of high quality and begin ranking them highly in search results.
Site traffic, awareness, and potential leads follow.
As well as the more obvious connection that more content equals more traffic, there’s also a less well-understood benefit.
Web pages are not ranked in isolation. Instead, part of their ranking potential comes from the site they are hosted on.
When pages collect links from other websites (links have been the core ingredient in Google rankings since its inception in 1998), the entire website benefits.
This is when pages higher up the sales funnel can come into play, even for small businesses that won’t see any direct benefit of high rankings and traffic.
In these scenarios, content marketing efforts can be rewarded beyond the visibility and traffic to individual pages.
Example 2:
You have a great sales page for your electricity plan that offers cheaper electricity at night. But no one ever links to it.
Take Alex. She has friends who own EVs but some are already signed up to your plan, another is happy with their long-term contract with another company, and one friend isn’t a good match for time of use tariffs.
Alex has no reason to link to or share your sales page.
Last week, Alex forgot to plug in her car and almost ran out of battery. She searched for “what happens when your ev has no charge” and arrived on your page titled “Stay Calm: What to Do When Your EV Runs Out of Battery.”
While none of Alex’s EV-driving friends needs a link to the sales page, this information is helpful for all of them, and she links from her personal blog, which her friends are known to read.
The content titled “Stay Calm: What to Do When Your EV Runs Out of Battery” may not turn many readers into customers, but, if it becomes popular, it can boost the entire site, helping you rank higher the next time someone searches for “ev charging plans in my state.”
#7: Content Marketing Complements Other Marketing Channels
Because content can take so many forms, it can be adapted and used in many other marketing arenas where you’re trying to capture leads and sales.
Paid ads, email marketing, and social media typically direct readers back to your website. Your website needs content to send them to.
Example:
Your EV charging plan sales page is the perfect landing page for an ad campaign on cheap EV charging.
Your series of “Can You Charge Your EV When …” would suit email subscribers.
Your “EV Charging Gone Wrong - 5 Times the Battery Died at the Worst Possible Time” blog post could gain traction on social media.
#8: Gain an Edge Over the Competition
If your competition isn’t in the content marketing game, you can start attracting a larger share of the potential audience.
If your competition is using content marketing, you need to do it better.
Example 1:
Your rival electric company has a similar EV charging plan to your own and they have a sleek and clean sales page which espouses all its benefits and makes the sign-up process really easy to follow.
But, while their sales page converts well, they don’t have the content higher up the funnel to draw in as many leads.
Example 2:
Another rival electric company has started upping their blogging game, publishing twice a month.
The content is good but its targeting is all wrong. Their first piece of content is “What Exactly Is an Electric Car?”, followed by “Do Electric Cars Have Gears?”, and “When Will EVs Take Over the World?”
People reading these are not even in the funnel. They don’t even have an EV, let alone a charging plan.
What’s more, while the pages are good, the top results in Google are occupied by the biggest news publishers.
Their new content is neither targeting the right audience in the funnel nor earning enough presence in search results to earn links that would at least benefit its sales page.
#9: Content Marketing Helps You Better Understand Your Customers
When content marketing is backed up by insightful analytics, you can start to better understand your customers’ personas and tweak your content, messaging, or even products accordingly.
Analytics helps you identify where customers are coming from, what pages they land on, what pages they go on to read, what meaningful actions they take, and what pages they leave from.
When you understand what works and what doesn’t at each stage of the customer journey, you can reinforce the former and repurpose the latter.
Example:
Customers are considering signing up for your EV charging plan offering cheap electricity at night.
You create a page “How to Schedule Charging for the Top 5 EV Models” so that making use of your plan is as easy as possible.
However, you notice that customers who read this page leave the site and don’t come back. ‘That’s odd,’ you think. It’s something helpful, and other supporting pages aren’t having a negative impact.
You read the content again and notice that it mentions that Tesla makes scheduled charging complicated.
Then you remember Tesla has an 80% share of the EV market and, evidently, make up a large percentage of the blog post readers. You realize you’ve been scaring away Tesla owners, worried that they may not be able to take advantage of cheap night-time charging.
You adapt that sentence and you present a clear link to a new page you create - “The Step-by-Step Guide to Schedule Charging with a Tesla.”
You notice that fewer drop-offs are now taking place. Your content marketing insights have helped identify an obstacle, which you’ve been able to overcome with additional content.
Tesla owners are back in your sales funnel!