Lead Generation Through Content Marketing

by MarcPickren on July 26, 2011

The following is a guest post by Brian Whalley of HubSpot. HubSpot is an inbound marketing software company in Cambridge, Massachusets, that focuses on helping small- and medium-sized businesses with lead generation online.

The core of any successful marketing program is generating new leads for the business. Since businesses began advertising their services and products online, they have been trying to find better and less expensive ways to generate those leads. This is very important to watch: Businesses are trying to generate leads just like they were last week or a month ago, but many of them are experimenting with new methods of advertising themselves and attracting attention. Generating content and inbound marketing is one angle that those businesses are taking to attract new visitors and leads to their websites.

Who’s Interested In Locksmithing?

Unlocking More Leads With ContentOne of the toughest questions businesses face when developing website content about themselves is answering the question: “How are we interesting?” Many marketers and business owners, like Ollie below, are afraid of how boring they believe they are, or that no-one could possibly be interested in their businesses. The simple solution for this challenge is to go ahead and put your feet in the water. Start a blog for your website about whatever it is that your business does. While you’re there, write your first post about one thing that you can explain to people about what you do, or a tool in your job. If you’re a locksmith, you would be surprised at how many people want to read about how a lock works, what tools you use to open a lock, or how evolving technology has changed your job in the last ten years. Don’t believe me? According to Google, last month approximately 1,300 people searched for the phrase, “Double Cylinder Locks.” That’s a lot, and that’s just on the technical name for a specific lock.

How can you get there?

We use inbound marketing to describe how great business leaders educate everyone around them on their industry and business, most commonly though blogging. Let’s call that business leader Ollie. When someone asks for a recommendation or reviews for that type of business, everyone knows to refer that person to Ollie, and Ollie is soon flooded by leads who are looking for his products or services. Ollie has established himself as a leader in his field and his great expertise is widely known. At the beginning, Ollie was only interested in making sure that his content about locksmithing was accessible to people looking for information, but he has now positioned himself as one of the most accessible people creating information about locks and locksmithing. Ollie writes about what people are searching for and wanting to learn about, and it will be found online.

Ollie is now in a great position to generate leads from his blog. He can put a lead generation form with an offer (Perhaps a free consultation? Or a guide to picking your new lock?) or some kind of call-to-action on his blog, in his blog posts, or in other places on his website. No matter where he puts those offers, he is in a leadership position and a reference expert in his industry now.

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Even in EDU Marketing, firms have started to push reputation management as a new form of online marketing. This is a response to the expansion of the Internet, with notable growth in social media and user-generated content. As quickly as the Internet generates content, it is indexed and archived. This content is hard to erase, especially with the wave of social media in recent years.
Who Cares about a Business’s Online Reputation?

Whenever a user searches for information on the web, the positive or negative reviews build in the user’s mind the qualities, without necessarily having any first-hand experiences. Because of this fact, it is essential to, in a sense, “make a good first impression.” Countless types of users will be using search engines daily. With diligent management of online reputation, a good first impression can be made on users such as:

Consumers
Stockholders
Journalists
Employees
Business partners

These are the users who eventually have the most power in the market and on sustainability.

Online Reputation Management and Search Engine Optimization
Online Reputation Management (ORM) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) have similar approaches and methods, but their objectives are different. SEO modifies content on websites to appeal to search engines, while ORM seeks to control the information that shows up from a search. Because search engines optimize search results constantly, it is essential in SEO and reputation management to monitor the results continually as well.
Reputation Management for EDU Services
There are a myriad of for-profit education services in the United States; it is not only hard to gain exposure, but it has become difficult to maintain that exposure. Reputation management for education services seeks to utilize all the tools of traditional ORM, but applied to the education industry. This includes managing search engine ranking pages (SERPs) and optimizing these results to generate good exposure. Reputation management is much more complex than management of content, as it is an extension of marketing and focuses on the end user. Eventually, reputation management will be as essential as managing credit scores.

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