Your potential customers continuously consume all kinds of content online.

They are on the web looking for entertainment, education, and product reviews, looking for solutions to their current problems. Naturally, as a business owner or a marketer, you want to always be in front of your potential clients, but the internet is so overcrowded with all kinds of materials that your head starts spinning whenever you think about how to break through all that noise. New AI tools exacerbate the issue by empowering lazy marketing.

Another problem is that content marketing, especially the blogging side of content marketing, takes quite some time to start generating meaningful traffic, so many businesses tend to drop their blogging efforts. It's sad to see blogs with the last posts released many months, if not years, ago.

I am here to tell you that it is possible not only to break through the noise but also to generate leads and even sales with content in both B2B and B2C spaces. With the right strategy, of course. This is something you can implement yourself when you understand the basic logic behind it. It is pretty straightforward, so bear with me.

Lead generation with content in B2B and B2C companies

Here is a short but very important side note: You can generate leads with content regardless of the type of customer your company aims to serve. Blogs are often associated with B2B products, which makes sense, given higher software prices and the fact that purchasing decisions take some time. Hence, there is a necessity to build up authority and trustworthiness as a brand that knows what it's doing.

B2C companies can also benefit from content marketing. The fintech space is one of the most obvious examples of how authority and trustworthiness play a considerable role. For example, deciding to switch to a challenger bank can be influenced by the company's ability to address any doubts that can arise in a customer's mind when browsing through banking alternatives.

How to tailor your content strategy for lead generation

Let's start with the general logic. The main focus of your marketing efforts is connecting your product, business objectives, and customers. Here are the most fundamental things you need to understand before you launch any campaign:

• What your business objectives are
• What products, goods, and services do you make
• Who are your clients

Let's look at all 3 in greater detail.

Your business objectives

Now, what are your current business objectives? Are you focusing on growing your customer base? Cross-selling new product plans to your existing customers? Decreasing customer churn rate? Your business objectives influence the type of content you need to generate, your distribution channels, and the lead magnets you will require to succeed. Since the topic of this article is how to generate leads, I will focus on that; however, make sure to sign up for my newsletter if you don't want to miss articles covering how to meet other business objectives.

Your products

It's pretty straightforward: what problems do your products solve, how do they solve them, and how are they different from your competitors (if different at all)? You should know this by now, but if you don't, this is your sign to think about your products again and see if you can explain what your product does and what kind of value it produces in simple terms.

Your customer

And this is the most crucial part because it influences almost everything about your content. You don't have to generate an in-depth buyer persona if you run most of the marketing yourself since they're time-consuming and, for the most part, useless at the early stages since your offering is most likely to be unpolished. However, you need to understand the most important things about your customers if you want to touch their hearts with your content:

1. What kind of business segment can benefit from your services
2. Decision maker's role in their organization
3. What problems do they face in their daily work
4. Where do they go to find solutions for their problems

Obviously, you can identify many more things that (you think) can influence your potential customer's content consumption patterns. However, the four I mentioned will play a defining role in your strategy.

Content marketing tools within the funnel

We are approaching the strategy part, but here's another idea you need to internalize before we move on. First, different content types serve different purposes throughout the customer's journey to your solution. Second, customers' search requests identify the stage of their product purchasing journey.

What's important is that you need content that covers all stages of the customer acquisition funnel and corresponds to the most popular customer requests within each particular stage.

Are you still with me? You must also ensure that your content is properly interconnected across all funnel stages so that one thing leads to another.

Example! You are a social media agency, and your customer is the head of marketing who is responsible for SMM in their small organization. Say they don't know how to grow on X, so naturally, they go online and type in "How to grow the audience on Twitter/X." Ideally, you have a blog article or a YouTube video that perfectly answers this exact question, so they click on it, and thus, there's their first interaction with your brand.

Lead generation through content

Throughout the process, your main objective is to capture your potential customer's information so you can interact with them later through content that gradually leads toward a purchasing decision. One way to do this is to give your readers or viewers some free value or to interest them in getting more content products from you later.

By ensuring customer's access to high-quality content during the awareness stage of the funnel, you might succeed in convincing your readers to sign up for a newsletter if they are not ready to try your products or fill out a contact form. You can now send them regular updates about your products or new blog articles when you capture their email.

To get more qualified leads, you should work on your gated content. Gated content gives your readers much value in exchange for detailed contact information. Usually, gated content forms require readers to fill out more fields than usual; you may even ask readers to share their company size, revenue, and more, depending on the type of product that you're selling. This way, you capture a wealth of data, including more insight into their most pressing problems, allowing you to target these readers with more targeted offers or allowing your sales team to prepare for a better potential reach out.

Remember to place CTAs throughout your blog post, regardless of whether you're promoting a demo, a newsletter, or an eBook. Integrating it within the text also makes a lot of sense since it is easy to ignore a sign-up form that is placed out of context. The best analogy here is seeing a product integration within a YouTube video or an ad roll in the middle of your watch.

Another important note is to remember to soft-sell your solution in your content (you're in it to generate paying customers, after all). Whereas regular blogs should occasionally mention your solution, gated content can be a little bit more straightforward about the benefits your customers get from working with you.

Supporting releases with content

Focusing your content on the problem you're planning to solve with the next product or feature release is also a good idea. This strategy can help you with lead generation when you already have some sort of readership.

Focusing on the issues solved by your upcoming solution can lead your readers through the lead acquisition funnel and eventually to an article or a page that describes the solution in better detail. There, you can ask your readers to request a demo or to sign up for the waitlist if your product is not out yet or you want to test the demand before you commit to the release.

To summarize

Here are the points that you need to remember:

1. Know your product, your objective, and your customer's problems
2. Focus on producing high-quality content
3. Give value in exchange for readers' contact information
4. Make sure your content covers all stages of customer acquisition funnel
5. Make sure your content aligns with readers' search intent
6. Put the right CTA throughout your content
7. Track your leads and provide them with targeted messages to convert them into paying customers

With this knowledge in your arsenal, you can see how content marketing strategy contributes to lead generation. Content is only one piece of the whole picture. Customer acquisition requires a mix of marketing tools and techniques to capture your target audience efficiently. Sign up for my newsletter if you don't want to miss more tips on acquiring new business with marketing tools.

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