Your website isn’t what it used to be. Produce more leads with a content marketing approach.
With 40% of industrial manufacturers considering their website to be a lead generator, but only about 20% of these companies generating a high volume of leads with their website (according to our latest international marketing survey), manufacturers are coming up short with their industrial marketing efforts.
A content marketing strategy coupled with marketing automation can help boost lead generation rates.
According to a recent DemandGen Report, the buyer / seller dance is now initiated by the buyer 90% of the time – and 81% of those buyers start the process with a web search.
Your customers have a problem, and your blog, white papers, social media posts and newsletter are opportunities for you to show them that you have the solution. Your website – your lead generator – should be a content hub with resources waiting to be accessed by prospects.
By understanding their problem, your company can gain their attention with a possible solution.
Modern marketing automation relies on content as a backbone. Instead of enticing potential customers to provide their contact information with a 2” x 2” advertisement in a trade publication (remember those old bingo cards?), B2B marketers provide troves of digital content to attract potential customers.
Once interested, prospective customers identify themselves (providing their name and email address in exchange for additional content), becoming leads.
Using gated content – content that leads can only access by providing more information, such as company sales or number of employees – helps marketers to qualify their leads.
Pardot, a Salesforce integrator, provides an eloquent description in their infographic of what happens once you start aggregating data.
Once you have all your data in one place and your prospects highly segmented, you can easily create nurturing campaigns designed to automatically provide information and content at the perfect time. Triggered by a prospect’s actions or a predetermined time interval, these campaigns make your sales process feel like it is a one-to-one interaction for all of your sales prospects.
You have your contacts (prospects) and you have all of the data that you’ve collected on them.
A solid content marketing strategy shifts from chasing prospects to having prospects chase you.
Therefore, your strategy should naturally shift away from cold-calling and toward producing quality content that helps solve prospective customers’ problems. This is how industrial marketing automation generates leads in the 21st century.
