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How to Use Content To Ignite Your Lead Generation and Conversion

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The video above is a replay of a recent live webinar I conducted. Combined with the text below you should have a pretty good feel for how to use content to generate and convert leads.

This presentation is targeted primarily to marketing consultants because I work with so many of them, but the bottom line is this works for any business that has any kind of online presence. I present in the context of what you might do for your own business, but then what you might actually do for your clients’ business if you’re in consulting.

In fact, this presentation’s brought to you by the Duct Tape Marketing Consultant Network. I have a network of about 150 independent marketing consultants and small agencies around the world that license the Duct Tape Marketing material and brand and collaborate and create systems and use tools altogether. 

Content today

Speaking of content, what’s wrong with content? Why doesn’t it necessarily work or why’s is it so much work? A lot of it has to do with the way that we have evolved and thought about content. It was initially, “Hey, you need a blog. You need to write in that blog three times a week, you just need to write, write, write, write, and produce content.” A lot of consultants, a lot of business owners looked up and said, “Okay, I got a bunch of content in there. Now what? It’s not really turning into business for me and, quite frankly, it’s the hardest thing I have to do. It’s the most time-consuming. It takes the most work, and I don’t see the ROI.”

I think for a lot of consultants, the challenge is that we’re thinking in terms of generating a lot of phone calls, lots of leads, and huge lists, when, in fact, most of the consulting firms I work with could go from surviving to thriving with six or eight more clients. You use whatever number works for you, but a lot of times, it’s not really that many. Really, instead of a huge lead generation or funnel approach, you really just need a system that’s going to generate clients for you, and if that number just needs to be six or eight for you, do you really need to be talking to 70, 80, 100 people? No, you probably need to be talking to 12 or 16 over the course of the next few months.

Instead of goals for building a list, what I like to tell consultants is you need to think about appointment goals. How many appointments would it take you to meet your revenue or your client goals in 2019? What’s that number for you?

Most of my consultants sell a long-term monthly retainer approach. We have kind of a fixed monthly retainer for the type of engagements that we do. Pretty easy math to figure that number. If you want to add $250,000 in revenue, or let’s say you’re starting a consulting practice, and you want to build that in 2019 to that level, and you sell a $3,000 a month retainer, then you only need seven clients month-in, month-out over 12 months to reach that goal.

I think that that’s an important concept because most consultants, most marketers, will tell you that if they could get in front of 10, 15, or 20 qualified leads, there’s a really good chance that they’re going to turn half of them into long-term retainer clients. Think about those appointment goals. I think what that does is it helps you to start getting the mentality of, “Hey, I need to work on fewer numbers, but harder. I need to work on qualifying them. I need to work on educating them. I need to work on showing them immense value before I ask for money, but I don’t need as many. I just need to have a better system for who I work with and how I educate them and how I convert them.” That’s the whole setup for the premise of really this system of using content to generate leads.

Changing the way you think about content

I also want to position how I think about content. I’ve been referring to content for the last few years as the voice of strategy. To me, it’s not just another tactic. It’s something that actually is going to be the thread that runs through a great deal of how you communicate who you are and what you do and how you’re different, certainly.

For us, this is the Duct Tape Marketing System, and it starts with these three foundational elements. The first one is you’ve gotta know who you’re talking to, where you’re trying to go with your business, how you’re completely different, and what problem you solve. I mean, that’s the strategy part that sits on top.

Then your content is really about communicating that strategy, and then we have another great tool that you can Google, I’ve written about it a lot for years, called the Marketing Hourglass, which is really then our approach to using content to guide the customer journey. We’re going to talk about this middle component, but I’m going to really tap into it and talk about it in the context of lead generation.

Here’s the deal. We’ve been talking about content. It was very clever a few years ago to say content is king or content is queen or whatever your approach of positioning is, and I really talk about it now as being air. Content powers every channel. If you came to me and said, “Hey, I’ve got my website up, and I want you to SEO it,” and you didn’t have a strategic approach to content, there’s not much I can do or really any SEO person could do for you.

Same is true with referrals, social media, advertising, email, sales, PR and even your strategic partners. These channels are all powered today by content. By raising content to a level of your marketing strategy and not just “what are we going to write about this week?” I think you put it in the proper prospective.

The other thing about content and the reason to invest in it is it becomes an asset over time. I’m kind of an extreme example, but I’ve got content that I wrote a decade ago that still produces hundreds of visits to my website today. That’s really a way to get your clients to think about it too because there’s no question there’s work involved in producing this amount of content that I’m going to talk about today, so it not only pays today as a way to use it today, it only pays in your sales efforts tomorrow, it will pay deep into the future if you take this approach.

The Total Content System

Here’s our total content system. It starts with doing research for intent. We want to know the type of content people are searching for that would be our ideal clients, the type of problems that they’re trying to solve. We want to take that research, and we want to build, and I’m going to break all this down for you, we want to build what I’ve been calling hub themes. We’re going to build a couple pages. We’re going to structure our entire website, and that’s, again, another reason why I say that content at the strategic level is that you’re deciding what content to write about, you’re structuring your website based on that content, and your entire marking message at the strategic level is going to be based on that content.

We’re going to build hub themes. Then we’re going to figure out how we are going to get that content out there. We’re going to develop an editorial calendar so that over the course of the year, maybe we are able to develop this over and over and over again. You can do this one time, or you can do this once a quarter, what I’m going to reveal, and ultimately, the payoff will continue to grow.

The first thing I want to do is just keyword research. I mean any SEO person, any content person, any marketing strategy person understands this concept. We want to be writing the content that addresses what our ideal clients are looking for. So what are they looking for? We can brainstorm about this. You can go to forums and see what kind of questions people are asking in your industry. You can use the Google keyword planner tool that’s part of AdWords. Heck, Google will even just give you ideas. Based on any search that you do, they will suggest related searches, so there’s lots and lots of ways to actually do this research. 

It’s not about our products and services. It’s about coming up with a list that addresses the problems that people are trying to address. I’m going to keep going deeper in that. The Google Keyword Planner gives you tons and tons of data about not only related searches but also about the average monthly searches that are being done, so you get a sense of what search terms people are actually using, and then which ones are producing the most value.

This was just that idea that if you type in any kind of search down at the bottom, they’re going to list a whole bunch of related searches. This is a great, great way for you to actually get some great ideas for refining your searches that you’re doing in your industry.

There’s another little chrome browser plugin that I use called Keywords Everywhere, and it will actually bring some of the Google AdWords data into your web browser search, and so you can see some of that. Instead of jumping over to AdWords or the Keyword Planner, it actually brings that data in there. It’s called Keywords Everywhere, so just write in your browser as you’re doing a search, you get all this kind of rich data out of AdWords.

I’m going to give you a couple different examples of service-related business, and then I’ll show you just from a marketing consultant standpoint our approach.

hub themes

This is an actual HVAC contractor in Pacific Northwest in the United States, and so we do all the search, and we come up with about a dozen themes. Now, you could take an approach where you said, “Okay, twice a month, we’re going to write, in January, we’re going to write about furnace installation. In February, we’re going to write about furnace repair.” These would all be good content themes, but because we don’t want to take a year and have this spread-out approach to covering a whole bunch of themes, we want to say, “Which of these themes actually probably have the most commercial intent for what this company’s trying to do?”

The two we came up with in this case were furnace installation. That’s their highest profit thing, and then actually fixing air conditions. That kind of was their second. These become their two hub themes. What we want to do is we want to then create, and I just generically call them guides, we want to create not just a how-to blog post. We’re going to create almost the course or the guide to air conditioning maintenance or the guide to ductless heating and cooling in this particular case because people, early in their journey, I mean, if their furnace breaks, they’re looking for somebody to fix their furnace, but if they’re thinking about installing a new, complete new system, ductless system in this case, they’re going to be doing some research on what are the best systems, how do I even think about this, how does it compare to a duct system?

hub pages

They’re just going to be doing a lot of research, so we want to create the tool or the resource that is going to tell Google, “Hey, somebody who has this problem is doing this research. This is the ultimate guide.” That’s the idea behind this.

I don’t even talk about a blog anymore. I know that sounds blasphemous from a marketer who’s been blogging since 2003, but these guides are it. These are strategic components of a website. Now, we use WordPress, which happens to be a content management system that some people will call a blog, but we don’t blog in the traditional sense anymore where it’s, “I’m going to write this one on Monday, this one on Wednesday, this one on Friday.”

Basically, what we’re trying to create is collections of useful content that we could tie together and be this tremendous resource, so we actually will elevate these hub pages to the page level of a WordPress blog, and then we’ll just use the blog functionality just because it’s easy to do so to create the related pages. Again, I’m going to illustrate this with examples and go even deeper in this, but I want to get the concept across first.

The guide, or maybe we’ll get fancy and call it The Ultimate Guide to Air Conditioning Repair, is actually a page. Probably going to go in the main navigation of the website. We’re going to do everything we can to tell Google, and then everybody we share this with, that this is a useful resource that you’re going to want to share and bookmark and link to and tell your friends and neighbors about.

We’ve broken the guide to air conditioning repair into two through seven, which are basically our subcategories. If you think about this almost like a table of contents for a course that if you want to learn how to do air conditioning repair, then we’re going to break the course into types of air conditioners, repair cost factors, whether or not to replace or repair, troubleshooting, reviews of actual units out there, and then just questions and answers.

If you think about that, that’d be a nice structure for a course for somebody who’s learning. We’re also going to link to that content too because that’s going to make our page even more useful.

Ultimately, we’re going to build this resource. Instead of just having a page on our website that says, “Hey, we do air conditioning repair. Call us up,” or maybe a blog post that talks about preventative maintenance on your air conditioner, we’re going to actually have the ultimate guide. This might involve 10, 12, 15, 20 blog posts, maybe all done all at once, maybe done over time, but this is going to be a significant component of your entire content strategy.

This is our recruiting agency that works primarily in IT sector, the guide focusing on companies that are looking to hire certain jobs in technology, so we’re going to create one of our themes after doing all the research. In fact, these were the four themes that came up based on the services that they offer.

hr agency hub page

That’s another point that I want to make here is that we’re not blind to, we’re not just producing this to be an exercise so that anybody who’s out there can find this great content. These themes are also balanced with the fact that these happen to be the things they do. Instead of just saying, “Hey, we do executive talent in technology recruitment,” they’re going to create a guide to hiring. They’re going to teach a hiring department or maybe a CEO or an owner of company. They’re going to teach them how to hire executive talent in technology.

That’s what this guide is going to be good for because the person who maybe hasn’t worked with a recruiting firm or maybe has had a bad experience is kind of telling themselves, “How do we do this? What’s our best approach?” They’re going to be looking for the guide to hiring executive talent in technology, and so their hub page is going to look something like this whereas two through seven are going to be the subcategories for the hub page, and we’re going to point, and that’s another great point here is that we are going to have all of this content connected together.

That’s one of the keys to making these work is that Google wants to see that you’ve built this guide, but that all of this related content is interlinked, and to them, that’s saying, “This is a collection of material around a topic. We’re going to give that way higher marks than one blog post about a topic.” The way that this content is structured and woven together, of course, is just as important as the actual content itself. Again, all of this content will have your standard on-page best SEO practices, but it’s really the structure, it’s the development of the content and the structure that makes it work.

Then I’m going to get into why this works and how you’re going to use it for lead generation.

One last example. This is a rainwater harvesting and whole house water filtration company in Tennessee. They sell water purification, and they sell rainwater harvesting systems. Well, again, instead of just having the page that says, “Here’s what we sell,” like most companies do, they know that that client who’s going to hire them for maybe multi tens of thousands of dollar installation on a big project is probably out there doing a little research on this whole thing called rainwater harvesting because they don’t know much about it. We want them to find us as the ultimate resource of information because then they’re ultimately going to find, “Hey, that’s what we do as well.” Their hub page just came down to these couple of examples. Guide to water purification and filtering, two through seven, that’s kind of their breakdown of the categories that we’re going to build on the hub page, and then we’re going to point lots of content to it.

rainwater harvesting nashville

I’m a marketing agency, so our map of themes might look something like this.

marketing guide

These are all the themes that we might want to be writing about, so we narrow that down. One of our most important ones, if you’re a local business and you’re looking to hire somebody to help you with your marketing, I want you to find us, and so we created a hub page called the Local Marketing Guide. Our subtopics are Google My Business, that’s a really big part of local marketing; directories and citations, certainly for the online world, huge part, goes hand in hand, really, with Google My Business; local content, producing local content is an important part of how you rank locally; on-page SEO elements; reviews; and Google AdWords. Those are the six elements that we broke this guide to local marketing down.

If you type in now “local marketing guide,” which is a pretty competitive term, you’re going to find our Ultimate Guide to Local Marketing from Duct Tape Marketing. Now, this is probably overkill for most people, but frankly, marketing, local marketing is a very, very competitive term, so sometimes the more competitive, the more overkill you need in your hub pages.

marketing hub page

I even have a video on here, and then we get into the breakdown, so Google My Business. Now, what you’ll see is that’s my subcategory, and then I’ve got all these blog posts in here. Now, again, this is overkill. You might need three in this topic. I have a lot of these already written, and frankly, you might find clients that do as well, but they just haven’t connected into this. We have about half of this content written before we create these pages, and then we just supplement it to make it fit, and then we also do link out to other sites. There’s a link to Yoast and there’s a link to Search Engine Land.

We break that down further, and pretty much each one works. This is a page, the guide is a page, and all of these links, at least that are on our site, are just blog posts that we’ve created specifically for this or that we had already, and so there’s a blog post that goes into depth. Then one of the keys is every one of these pages links back to the guide page and vice versa. This interlinking is what tips Google to this being a collection of content around a very specific, optimized topic. These pages, these hub pages are almost 100% in terms of being on page one, almost from the first five or six days that we launched these.

This goes even for sites that are really not that high authority at all. For the rainwater harvesting folks, they wanted to move to, they’re in Knoxville, Tennessee, and they wanted to open up shop in Nashville. They had no presence in Nashville. It’s, I don’t know my geography, but it’s 100, 150 miles away, and so they needed something that would get them to show up in a, again, not as competitive as marketing, but certainly a pretty competitive environment.

Within about a week of creating their hub page, they’re on page one in the number two or number three spot depending upon what day you look at. The only person really ranking above them consistently is the City of Nashville, which is going to be hard knock out of that number one spot, but this is making the phone ring. In fact, the first week that we had this up, they told me they got an inquiry for about a $40,000 rainwater harvesting installation, so these pages pay. Again, just to show you theirs.

What’s interesting is, they had half of this content. It just was scattered everywhere. Their overview, rainwater harvesting, rainwater storage filters, keys to successful, common uses, and then some of their actual projects, so anybody who comes to this page dwells on it for a long time, clicks four or five pages. These are all great signs to Google that this was a useful page. That’s why these pages rank.

Now, one of the things that you didn’t see on the Ultimate Guide to Local Marketing, because we don’t have this trigger every time, particularly every time I visit, but what makes these work is that somebody who’s intensely interested in this topic and comes to this page also gets offered an ebook that’s going to give them all of this content in one portable form. I’m going to come back to that, but that’s what makes these lead generation pieces.

Content upgrades

I mentioned this idea of having something that somebody would give me their email address for. We’ve started referring to those generically in the marketing world as content upgrades. Somebody found your awesome content, and they’re clearly interested in that topic, and so we offer them something that we think they’ll want to take in addition. Obviously, it’s very linked, so in that page, that Local Marketing Guide page, people actually get offered an ebook, the free guide to SEO, Local SEO in Five Steps. About 12-15% of the people that visit that page actually take that offer, and just for context, you’re doing well if you can get 1-2% on a generic “sign up for our newsletter” kind of thing, so clearly, we’re targeting people who come to this, and because the content is so related to what they’re searching for, we’re able to capture a lot of email address, and that’s really step number one.

I guess it’s step number two. Step number one is you build this awesome piece of content that is going to, I can just about guarantee you if you follow this approach and you’re spot-on in terms of what you’re targeting, I can also guarantee you’re going to show up on page one for some of your key search times. Now, obviously, if you’re just getting started, it’s a little harder to do, but I showed you a couple of examples of companies that weren’t even on the radar for Google, barely even had anything indexed, and we’re able to get them on page one, so particularly in localized types of searches, it can be very easy to do.

Step number two is this content upgrade of some sort so that pretty much any time you run your hub page, you’ve got an offer there that is going to be very related, and you’re going to start capturing those email addresses.

Now, people aren’t just going to find your content magically, so part of what makes this a lead generation play is, yes, over time, you’ll start getting organic leads that you theoretically did nothing because they showed up, they did a search, they found your page, they gave you their email address, and they’re ready to get more information from you about working with you.

But initially, you can turn the tap on by marrying this with some sort of advertising play, and today, I’m certainly not going to go into great depth, but today, the easiest, fastest, cheapest way to generate some eyeballs to your awesome content is through using Facebook advertising.

Over a course of the next year, if you were to produce four of these content hubs, again, really focused on your ideal customer, and I’ll let you off the hook, just try one, and then you create a content upgrade, something that will be useful. I mean, don’t just say, “Oh, we’ve got something free here. Sign up for it.” I mean, make it very related. The good news is, sometimes, the simpler, the better. It could just be a checklist of things to do, or it could be a list of resources to get more information. It doesn’t have to be this 40-page ebook. Then you just promote each piece of advertising and, or, I’m sorry, each one of your content hubs in social media or in advertising.

Now, the hard part’s going to be creating your content hub, but after that, this gets pretty simple, and the results are pretty amazing. Create an ad account, build a custom audience. In many cases, that’s just targeting, maybe geographically because you only work in your community, publish one of these hub pages with an upgrade, put the status, I mean, you don’t even have to write an ad. You just put the hub page on Facebook as a status update, and then boost that post, your custom audience, and you will, within five minutes of publishing it, you will start getting eyeballs on that page. The more useful it is, the more targeted you are, the better your success.

The beauty of a page being so valuable is that people are going to share it. They’re going to comment on it. It’s not just going to be, “Oh, click. That cost me 20 cents.” They just came to the site for 43 seconds, and then they’re gone. They come to the site. They bookmark it. They share it. They go to multiple pages, which just, quite frankly, things like dwell time and number of pages on a session, those are huge, huge SEO factors, and Google’s watching. Again, another long-term benefit of this approach.

After you create your hub page and create your content upgrade and you’re capturing those emails, well, they’re not just going to magically convert. That’s just part of the journey. They found you. They like the content. They trusted you enough to give their email address, so what do you do now to get them to really want to move to buy from you?

First step is just make sure that you have an email series that continues to offer more value. Instead of just, “Hey, I saw you signed up for this. Let us know if you need anything,” “Hey, I saw you signed up for this. How would you like us to do a review of your website for free? How would you like us to show you what your reputation and reviews are across the web for free?”

In our particular case, because we’re marketing consultants, that’s what we do. Our email series will actually offer these free tools where somebody can get a scan of their website or that somebody can get a scan of their directory listings or their reviews or basic SEO scan. People like HubSpot and WooRank and Yext and Grade.us, those are some of the tool providers that we use that actually provide these free scans that you can embed. Somebody takes them. They get a report that says, “Oh, my gosh, the sky is falling,” and they want to reach out.

In fact, what we typically do is we’ll send these emails, and we know if somebody does one of those scans. Well, if somebody came to your website because they love the, the ad drove them to the hub page, they gave you their email address because they wanted the content upgrade, and now they took one of these calls-to-action in like a website review, for us, that’s like full-court press. I mean, that person is clearly, clearly interested. We want to get an appointment with that person.

Now, having said that, one of the beauties of the world we live in today is that you can look at their website, you can see what they’re doing on LinkedIn. I mean, you can do five minutes of research and decide, is this really an ideal client? In our particular case, and again, I’ve been doing this forever. I mean, I can spend about five minutes, and I won’t be 100% accurate, but I’m about 80% accurate on whether or not that business is ready for what we do or if they would be a good fit or an ideal client.

This, again, the reason I started with that idea that you don’t need huge numbers, you need smaller, qualified numbers, and the people by virtue of their actions, they are qualifying themselves that you can actually then really hone in on and try to get an appointment with. That’s really one of the key differences to how you would use this content.

Here’s some of the tools that used, Yext, Advice Local for scans, reputation scans, website scans. We actually have created our own free marketing checkup. We created our own free website review process, so these are the kinds of examples of ways to, you’ve got somebody who’s interested, now we’re showing them value. We’re not only getting them hooked because they’re thinking, “Oh, my. This report looks really bad.” We’re actually showing them value and helping them understand even further the importance of these elements.

The last piece of this entire puzzle is now we’ve got people that are very interested. Maybe we’ve demonstrated our value to them. One step that we’ve inserted here, and I think this is true for any consulting business, you need to come up with your paid lead conversion process because there are a lot of folks out there. We’re telling people, this is a year or 18 months, two years. This is not an overnight fix. You’re not buying a product. You’re buying a long-term system-based process. We might actually be proposing something that’s going to cost them $40,000 or $50,000 over the course of that year, and so getting somebody to go from the free marketing checkup to, “Yes, I’m going to give you $50,000,” is kind of a leap. It’s hard for people to make that decision but we basically say, “Look, what we need to do is run an online, total online presence audit on your business. We’re going to look at your website. We’re going to look at your content, your SEO, your AdWords, your analytics. We’re going to even give you a competitive landscape, and we’re going to come back, and we’re going to show you everything that we think needs fixed. We’re going to give you the highest priorities. We’re going to give you our recommendations for a marketing plan, and that total online presence audit is $800.”

Now, you’ll have people say, “Well, I’m not ready to do $800.” Well, there’s a pretty good chance they’re not going to be ready to do $50,000, right? What this does is this allows us to attract, or at least focus or qualify the people who have a mentality of investing in marketing, and that’s what we’re really after. It also gives you the, or our consultants, really the ability to do the research that they need to do anyway, and the fact that the research they end up doing some cases just to write a proposal, but now you get to also tailor your proposal, or I like to say, your findings that you did in the research kind of to their reality, so it’s not just “you need content,” it’s “you need this, this, and this” because we’ve looked deep enough to understand.

Another thing that happens then is it’s almost like they get to try you. They get to see what it might be like to work with you. They’ve paid $800, so they’re going to show up for the meetings. They’re going to take it serious, and in many cases, it’s a continuation of the education process so that when you tell them, “Well, we have to start with strategy,” you’ve already kind of told them why as opposed to, “Our proposal is we’re going to with strategy.” Sometimes, you get pushback to that because, “Hey, strategy just sounds expensive. What I need is the phone to ring,” but through this total online presence audit process, you’re able to educate them on what their proposal should include.

Our consultants that use this find they’ve gone from chasing leads to anybody who takes that serious about 100% conversion in terms of people that show up and go through that process. It also makes it easier to sell them the right thing. It makes it easier, ultimately, we found, to sell them the right budget because you are not just proposing something that, let’s face it, half the time they don’t even know what you’re proposing. You’ve taken a step here and really gone through and educated them, and because they were willing to pay $800 to get a baseline for where they are, they’re just so much more qualified.

That’s how we actually take this idea of starting with content and working it all the way through as a process that ends up qualifying and really guiding a journey to get the best possible result from somebody that you have an appointment with.

In our particular case, it ends with a presentation that might be 20, 30 slides, gives them a few reports that we’re able to pull, but ultimately ends with recommendations. This is actually just some made up ones from a real one we did, but actually ends up with recommendations that almost has them immediately going, “Okay, I see. I understand. What would it cost to do all that?” Now, instead of, “What are you going to charge me?” it’s more about “what are we going to need to invest to get all of this that you shared with me done?” Whole different conversation.

I am going to end this by just telling you this one small snippet of an example of what we do in the network in terms of sharing and training and resources and some of the tools that I just alluded to, our partners in our network, and so certainly work very closely with us.

What I want to do is invite you, if you want to find out more about the lead generation conversion tools, the whole service provider network that we’ve put together, we actually have complete done-for-you packages. When you go from that total online presence audit to $30,000, $40,000, $50,000 package, well, we’ve put those together. We do live events, training. The collaboration in the network is crazy, crazy valuable.

If you’re interested in learning more about the benefits of joining the Duct Tape Marketing Consultant Network, visit ducttapemarketingconsultant.com/live-discovery-call and join us for our call Wednesday, December 5th, 2018. I am going to just go over the benefits of joining the network. It’s very much a “here’s what you get, here’s what it cost,” that kind of thing. Hope to see you there!

The post How to Use Content To Ignite Your Lead Generation and Conversion appeared first on Duct Tape Marketing Consultant.


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