Content and lead magnets are excellent marketing tactics for building trust and qualifying potential customers or clients. Often a marketer’s best tool for luring prospects and moving them down the marketing funnel, their success greatly depends on delivering content that answers people’s queries and addresses their pain points in the most relevant way possible.
In this post, we’re covering some of our favorite tips for driving higher lead-to-opportunity conversions and suggesting ways you can engage with and convert content leads into ones that are sales qualified.
How to Turn Content Leads Into Sales Opportunities
Getting content leads is challenging enough; turning them into customers is a whole new level of difficulty. You must fight through a sea of competition while keeping people engaged and convincing them your product or service deserves their attention.
Use these six engagement strategies and techniques to fatten your pipeline and close more net new business.
- Profile Your Leads to a Niche Audience
Profiling leads to a narrow target audience helps you avoid having to deal with an army of leads to convert. Besides, a limited number of qualified leads is all you need to increase your conversion rates.
Learn your lead’s challenges, pain points, and needs inside out and then create and share content that aligns with them. Easier said than done, but when you understand your customer’s problems, you position yourself as the potential solution.
Conducting qualitative customer research, sending out detailed questionnaires, and creating buyer personas help you identify customer obstacles and develop solutions to help them overcome them. Some marketers look for insights into a prospect’s behavior by visiting their website and studying their social media to see what they like, comment on, or share.
Takeaway: It’s wise to remember the 80/20 rule, where 20% of your customers account for 80% of your revenue. It’s a good reminder that lead quality is far more critical than lead quantity.
- Personalize Content
Most content is produced for broad audiences with similar needs, preferences, and requirements. Creating highly personalized content journeys increases your chances of attracting and converting more qualified leads.
Personalization isn’t new, but it differs from what it was two or three years ago. Companies are using advanced data techniques to personalize campaigns that are much more relevant to their target audiences. With the right data, you, too, can create content your audience is likely to engage with. For instance, many customers don’t have the time to read a white paper, but if you can narrow the information down into an infographic or short video, you’re likely to have greater success.
Takeaway: Today’s consumers expect buyer experiences tailored to them. Meet their demand by giving them only content that’s highly relevant to their problem.
- Get the Timing Right
Don’t assume everyone’s ready to convert the first time you speak with them. Every prospect is in a different stage of the buyer’s journey—some could be in the early exploring phase; others might be close to deciding.
For instance, prospects in the awareness stage who aren’t quite ready to spend need educational marketing content that teaches them more about their challenges. Your content should be tailored to that reality. Effective approaches are thought leadership pieces, eBooks, case studies, and points of view.
On the other hand, prospects in the consideration stage are already at the point where they’re weighing the advantages and disadvantages of multiple products or services. These prospects need content that helps them evaluate all their options. Brochures, comparison sheets, and buyer guides are usually effective during this stage.
Takeaway: When you share content with prospects that doesn’t match their expectations, you risk losing them. If you want to increase prospect engagement, create content that reflects where they are in their journey.
- Build Mutually Beneficial Relationships
Building trust with prospects before engaging with them is essential to creating and maintaining long term business relationships. When prospects trust your brand, barriers are eliminated, and transparent discussions lead to real solutions being explored.
Ways to build trust with prospects include your company’s website, blog posts, landing pages, and social media posts. Each touchpoint helps a prospect understand what your organization stands for and how your products or services can solve their problem. The content you share should educate and inform, be empathetic and relevant, and engage a prospect on their terms and in their timeframe.
Takeaway: Successful selling begins with effective problem-solving, which is built on a foundation of trust.
- Omnichannel Approach
Omnichannel marketing converts leads faster by keeping them engaged and informed. You might need to try and test different channels to discover which are most effective with your prospects.
Drip email campaigns are a good start but boosting buyer engagement requires going above and beyond. You can follow up with prospects on their LinkedIn or social media accounts or with a video conferencing platform. Liking, retweeting, and commenting on their posts helps you stay connected and keeps you top of mind as a potential solution to their problem.
The challenge for sales reps with an omnichannel approach is the risk of coming off as artificial, pushy, or trite when attempting to connect with prospects. Two good ways to avoid these traps are adopting a customer-centric point of view and speaking with the same tone and impression as your “real world” channels like trade shows.
Takeaway: Always keep in mind that it’s a real person you’re marketing to. If you want to build a genuine relationship, find non-intrusive ways to reach them on a human level.
- Measure Content Performance
Is your content resonating with prospects? Measuring content performance is one simple way to find out. You can track metrics like number of views, downloads, and time spent on a page. Whichever metrics you choose, they’ll bring you one step closer to fully understanding your audience and recognizing where they are in their journey.
Takeaway: Successful content marketing depends on the right efforts put in the right direction. It’s the only way to know what you’re doing is working.
To learn more about how to best engage with content leads to transform them into opportunities, book a consultation with 3D2B today to discuss how AI-driven sales engagement solutions like Outreach can help you automate sales engagement, build a better pipeline, and move deals forward with the right actions at the right time.
Call us at +1 813-320-0500 (US) or +39 06 978446 60 (EMEA) or contact us online for help meeting your sales goals.
