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Is Poor Content Hampering your Lead Generation?

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Content marketing is perhaps more synonymous with sales development than it used to be. It makes sense to focus on adding interesting content to your website and social platforms not least since it means web visitors and search engines rate you more favourably. The end game is ultimately more sales but it isn’t as straightforward as ‘add content and generate leads’. We’ve certainly gained plenty of leads and won landmark clients as a direct consequence of our content marketing activity. But we’ve been doing it for around 14 years, so we have over 500 blogs and videos on our site.

Content is Part of the Answer

So, whilst the goal for content marketing for lead generation is to generate interest in a product or service, it will inevitably take time time to gain momentum and to produce real results. Nowadays, you can’t ignore content if you want to drive inbound leads, retain prospect attention and increase credibility. If you’re not seeing leads come to you organically, perhaps ask yourself whether your visibility, through content, is doing its job.

The answer to the question for our business is simple. Targeted and (hopefully) interesting content. We have spent years up-weighting the level of content on our site. Our aim is to inform, and educate without pitching. We now see a regular flow of quality leads via the contact form on our website. And, that doesn’t include those prospects that find us online and make a call to enquire about our services.

We have converted some excellent business including household name brands. And, for the princely sum of nothing!

Given this scenario, what’s my advice?

Whilst content development and distribution is far from a quick answer to all your sales woes, my advice is simple. Build added value content on your site and point people at the content on all of the most appropriate social platforms. We know that search engines favour sites with regularly updated content and content that is relevant and keyword-rich. Google’s latest core ranking algorithm update has further emphasised the importance of rich content.

Clearly, keywords play a lesser role than in the past. However, if you want to find blogs about ‘content marketing’ it’s unlikely your article will feature high in search results if you don’t mention the phrase content marketing in the text and probably in the subject heading,

We know this works since the level of leads we receive is now significant and we’ve converted great business using this strategy.

Below are our 8 tips for effective content marketing for lead generation.

  1. Make sure your site is ready to accommodate good content. If your site was designed some time ago, or is a brochure site, maybe you need to think about a more modern site that is built with content in mind.
  2. Start writing content now. Don’t procrastinate. Increasingly, businesses will disappear from first-page search results if search engines don’t see fresh, relevant and interesting content. Make it a habit and put time aside to both research and write.
  3. Don’t overuse AI. Whilst it may be tempting to head over to ChatGPT to draft a few hundred words on your favourite topic, take care. AI can sometimes be overly formulaic, and repetitive. Over time, it’s likely that the search engines will increasingly decipher AI from genuine insight, and it will almost certainly penalise the sites that are over-reliant on this method.
  4. Identify a writer. Maybe you’re not JK Rowling or William Shakespeare. If you don’t have the skills or the time to create interesting information in writing, find someone that can. Maybe one of your team can write. If not, the services of a decent copywriter won’t break the bank for one article per week. You’d ideally benefit from more but most small businesses don’t have the bandwidth to do more than one article each week.
  5. Post and distribute the content. It needs to go on your blog and be found on your social pages including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and so on, if your business lends itself to those channels. Video is important since an ever-increasing amount of content is consumed through video.
  6. Have a strategy. Who is your target market? Who is your content destined for? What challenges do they have with which your content can assist? How can you showcase what your business offers by the content you produce? Just producing random content is ill-advised, and time and energy-sapping. So, have a clear strategy that focuses your efforts.
  7.  Do your research. If you don’t have the knowledge, go and read what others in your field are talking about. It’ll give you some ideas for topics. This is where AI can help. There are also plenty of blogs that you can access via LinkedIn or Twitter. You can set up alerts or use LinkedIn Pulse or some other source like Buzzfeed. There’s no excuse for not being able to identify topics for your content.
  8. Check your stats. You need to know the strategy is working. That comes from two main areas. The first is obvious. Relevant leads, enquiries and sales. But that won’t happen overnight and you need to be aware of that. The second is traffic, and the other key performance indicators for your website. You also need to consider social channels here. For example, the number of views I get on my LinkedIn posts is growing. I’m not into the thousands yet but it contributes to my visibility and exposure. The more visibility and views you gain, the more opportunities will be forthcoming down the line.

Content marketing is not a quick fix

Even if you have money to invest, results are unlikely to be instant. However, it has done a number of things for our business.

  • Increased sales including with some blue-chip brands
  • Increased enquiries from the right kinds of customer
  • Get us onto shortlists for which we would not have otherwise been considered
  • Lowered barriers to conversion  – my content makes us credible
  • Increased our visibility
  • Differentiated us from lower-skilled competition that doesn’t offer useful tips and content
  • Protected our margins – showcasing our skills enables us to get better quality work at rates that are less likely to be compromised.
  • We are consistently ranked highly on search engines for our keywords such as b2b telemarketing companies.

One for the Doubting Thomas’s

One final comment for any doubting Thomas’s out there. How much time does content take?  I drafted this blog on a flight from Aberdeen to Heathrow over ten years ago. I updated it in March 2024.

This was my second blog post on the one hour flight. I write most of my articles on the train, at lunch or over breakfast. I select topics with which I’m familiar. I know that I should perhaps embellish my posts with more research. gain, this is where AI can help, at least in the scoping stage.

There are some great blog posts written by experts in all manner of subjects that refer to empirical research and have screenshots and videos or links to research. Maybe my content falls down in that respect. However, I get positive feedback and my time is limited. I don’t have an army of researchers or a team to do this. I rely on little ol’ me. And I have a day job. If I allocate 1-2 hours per week to blogging, that has been enough for me to deliver around 1 blog each week and sometimes two. I have been doing that for more than a decade. And that is sufficient to give me the level of enquiries and conversions to grow my business.

If you’d like to know how GSA Business Development can help generate growth for your business through telemarketing contact us using the contact form on this site or give us a call.

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