Content marketing is one of the most talked about trends in online marketing. Instead of promoting companies, products or brands in an aggressive way, content marketing focuses on targeting via editorial content. Especially in B2B, content marketing allows companies to come across as an expert, offering specialised knowledge, studies or marketing tips and underlining its own competence. However, many companies do not bear in mind: Via content marketing, you can generate leads for email marketing.
B2B marketing is often about the promotion of complex, specialised product. Content marketing can show its full potential here. However, it can also be used to generate leads for email marketing. As leads result in potential customers, the generation of leads is an important task in B2B.
Cover the Information Needs With Your Own Contents
Firstly, we need to establish, which target groups should be addressed via content marketing and which information they require. A supplier in the automotive industry, for example, would address an engineer, who designs cars, in a different manner than the CEO. While the engineer may primarily be interested in technical expertise, the CEO may wish to know how to decrease costs. It is important to select the right content channels. In the following, we have listed some important channels for you.
Blogs
Your own company blog is one of the most efficient channels in content marketing. By regularly publishing valuable content, you will create a loyal readership, who will proactively head for your website to search news. It is not necessary to publish only content created by yourself. The presentation of external studies (possibly enriched with your own figures) or comments on the current industry news can be attractive to your readers. To generate leads, we recommend the integration of an opt-in form for the email newsletter within the blog. Hold out the prospect of more specialised information to your readers, if they subscribe to the newsletter. We also recommend content downloads as teasers, where suitable and links to the download forms. For example, if you have carried out a study on a topic, try to link this.
Studies, Whitepapers, Checklists
Offer studies, whitepapers, checklists and other material to download only after registration in order to generate leads from the potential reader. A pre-condition is that the material is sufficiently high quality to justify the registration. During the registration process, take the opportunity to refer to your newsletter and other material. We recommend, you add further selection options directly in the download form so the user can click on them if he is interested. The newsletter should also be linked from the actual material.
Webinars
Run regular webinars on current industry topics. It makes sense to link webinars to publications and present, e.g. the results from a study and at the same time, refer to the study download. You should also refer to the newsletter and your download material during the registration process for the webinar. It is recommended to to offer the presentation download of the webinar as a follow-up.
Social Media
You can also generate leads for the email marketing via social media. In addition to individual posts, we recommend the use of existing content, e.g. from blogs, in social media and to tease the blog via a link. How to generate leads in the most sensible way, depends on the specific social network. While facebook, e.g. allows you to create your own category, where the form can be integrated, Twitter only allows a short link in the info text. Of course, you can also promote the newsletter via posts on your facebook wall or similar. This should be in moderation, though. Especially, when social media is primarily used to publish editorial content, users will consider too much direct advertising as disturbing.
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