There is an interesting statistic that shows how effective content is in generating leads for companies vs. those who don’t use content at all.
The stat, from a study conducted by HubSpot and MarketingProfs, shows consumer businesses gain 88 percent more leads and B2B organizations gain 67 percent more leads.
It stands to reason then, the more content you create, the more leads you generate.
The study confirms this.
If you create new content just once a week, your leads will increase by 77 percent.
Not too shabby, considering all you know about fresh content and search engine optimization!
But it’s not as easy as saying you’re going to create new content every week. It takes a lot of time, a lot of determination, and some know-how about SEO, community building, and writing shareable pieces.
How Do I Find the Time?
How much time do you spend now making cold calls, going to networking events, and attending conferences?
How many new customers do you typically get from each of those activities?
How many customers come from word-of-mouth?
Would it be easier for you to take the time you spend making cold calls and going to networking events to create new content?
That’s all it is…a reorganization of your time, but to something that works more effectively (and doesn’t take as much time) than the traditional methods.
Where Do I Start?
Blogging is, hands down, the most effective way to generate leads. But it’s also the most time intensive.
Instead, I’d like you to think about using webinars to build awareness, create thought leadership, and generate leads.
Blogging can come later; when you’re comfortable creating content and can commit to doing it more than once a week.
Following is the process I recommend you use:
- Determine your webinar topic and invite an influencer in your industry to present on your behalf. Radian6 does a nice job with this with monthly webinars. They invite a newly published author to present information found in their book and they offer the webinars for free. It gets them new content once a month, the free price tag brings in several hundred attendees, and those people become leads for their social media monitoring software.
- If you have budget to create a postcard, do so and mail it to your list of customers, prospects, friends, and family. Do this three weeks before your webinar.
- Write a new release about your webinar and post it on Pitch Engine or one of the other free distribution services. Do this two weeks before your webinar.
- Two weeks before your webinar, send an email to your contacts (or newsletter distribution list) inviting them to attend. While some of these people will already be customers, some will be people you haven’t talked to in a while or prospects who lost touch with you. Don’t be afraid to reach out to people you haven’t talked to in a while. This will serve as a way to get back in touch.
- Two days before your webinar, send another email to your contacts. But this time, remove the people who have already registered or who have opted out of your mailing.
- A couple of hours before your webinar, send one last email to your contacts, reminding them of the webinar. You’ll be surprised at how many people register the day before, and the day of, your webinar. Those last two emails will be your most effective.
The people who register for your online event now become warm leads for your organization. You want to be careful not to sell during the webinar, but to provide valuable information they can take back to their desks and implement immediately.
Remember how I said at the beginning you should be creating one new piece of content a week and then I only walked you through a monthly webinar? Well, all the content you’re creating around the webinar – the news release, the postcard, the emails – all count, if they also have a home on your website.
So get to it! Start generating some new leads!