4. Publish content, be useful to your target audience

You have spent time & energy creating a content dashboard to support your demand generation plan and to create thought leadership through strategic marketing content. Now is the time to execute this strategy. You will be surprised to find out how you will be able to quickly use Content Marketing to generate Leads.

Your content may be great, but people need to know about it. You need to make enough noise about the content that you have generated. This can be done through different mechanisms that include social networks, email campaigns to opt-in subscribers, PPC campaigns, Online PR and Article submissions and the type. Apart from direct propagation, also make sure that your website ranks higher on organic SEO. Download our free guide on Some simple SEO tips to better your website rankings

While you propagate content, make sure that you engage the target customer.

1. Put an abstract in place for your content, so that people can decide for themselves if it is worth spending their time on it
2. Promote multiple times on social networks. Social shares are on listening mode, so you may not be able to catch attention of your target audience with just one share. Engage with Group users with intelligent questions, debates and then plant your content in there.
3. Cross promote content. If users have liked one form of content, they are highly likely to consume other forms of content from you as well. Getting an altogether new customer for a new piece of content may be far difficult. Also read our free eBook on The art of re-purposing and cross promotions
4. Make sure that you have lead capture and marketing automation infrastructure available at your website. Make sure that the visits to your website count and your contact DB spirals upwards.
5. Analyze results from your propagation regularly. You can track a variety of parameters using tools like Google Analytics . Download our free eBook on Analyzing your marketing campaigns effectively
6. Be thankful to your contributors/ people who are making suggestions to help your content plan succeed. You can do this by mentioning them in your content as credits or refer their links in the references section. Following simple rules will help you expand your social networks pretty quickly. Download our free eBook on Expanding your social networks

A Summary of this series of blogs

1. So Marketing has changed! Time to stop complaining & leverage the change – 5 easy steps – This is where we summarize what has changed in marketing and how you can systematically plan to leverage the change.
2. Invest in content marketing to build thought leadership and a strong following – Content marketing is like any other project. Plan it well and create fantastic content that can then be leveraged in different campaigns that you plan to run
3. Expand your social networks, Listen, contribute, participate – Social networks offer you a great potential to manage viral marketing. It also offers you the capability of reaching a larger (& right) target audience very efficiently.
4. Publish content, be useful to your target audience – Having created content, make sure that you propagate it well across your various channels. Re-purpose content, cross-promote and analyze your efforts regularly
5. Measure, Analyze, Track and take decisions – No matter which channel you use to propagate your content, measure, analyze and track to take meaningful decisions. If thing are not working, change them in real time
6. Build and nurture leads – Nurture relationships with potential prospects till they are ready to do business with you.

I hope this post was able to give you some ideas about how you can use Content Marketing to generate Leads. You really start with the thought leadership, but once you create content that is useful to your target market, you will quickly realize that they will start lapping it up and increase the level of  engagement that they have with you.

Best regards,
Atul Dhakappa