While increasing website traffic is important, it would be pointless if it does not lead to revenue for our customers. Our end goal for everything we do is to get more people to book with our customers. At the very least we can convert anonymous visitors on our sites into leads. A lead is someone that changes from an anonymous customer to a known contact with an email address, name, phone number and address. It is much easier to convert a lead into making a booking then it is to convert an anonymous customer. This is because we can follow up with leads by sending them emails about booking with our customers. Recall the marketing funnel and how each step a customer takes on our websites draws them closer to making a booking. So how do you create a content-based lead generation strategy? First know the anatomy of a lead generation campaign.
The Anatomy of a Lead Generation Campaign
- Lead Generation Landing Page
- This landing page is optimized for converting anonymous users into leads.
- The content should be limited but enticing.
- Have limited options on what to do. Essentially the user will decide to convert or not.
- Every other lead generation tool should all link back to this landing page.
- The Ultimate Guide to [insert Long-Tail Keyword here]
- Preferably a static page that will serve as an ultimate guide or resource to a given topic.
- The goal of this page is to bring people to our site when searching for your specific long-tail keyword.
- This page should be filled with links to other pages in the site to keep the reader engaged in our site.
- Links should include but are not limited to, the Lead Generation Landing Page, the vacation guide, blogs and other relevant content.
- Sub-Articles
- These are blog posts that are relevant to the target keyword.
- These blog post serve to provide more information about topics that the reader may be interested in while keeping the reader on our site instead of leaving to continue searching.
Planning with Keyword Research
If you have a new lead generation strategy idea, first do some keyword research to see if there is enough interest in the idea to start planning. We want to convert as many users as we can so it is vital to choose a topic that gets enough monthly searches. Use Keyword planner to research your ideas. Shoot for a keyword that is geographically-focused and has about 1,000 average monthly searches. Keep in mind that blog articles will be written about this keyword so choose one that also has relevant latent semantic indexing keywords.
What to Offer as a Lead Generation Tool?
One of the simplest avenues to pursue is a content upgrade. Basically, this is a bonus piece of information or content that improves upon what is available for free on the site. Our vacation guides are a very successful example of a content upgrade. Other examples include a cheat sheet, checklist, itinerary, list of resources, a video, full guide, free course or blog post as PDF.
Conclusion
This planned strategy is top of the funnel marketing approach. We want to generate more traffic to our sites by using these lead generating tools. Once users are on our sites then we want to convert as many as possible to leads.