Content Marketing – The Key Ingredient to a Successful Customer Acquisition Strategy

Content is great for customer acquisition and retention. It can help you generate more prospects and nurture the leads in your sales pipeline. And here is how…

The internet has made buyers much more autonomous and self-sufficient when making purchasing decisions. That is why it is a high-priority task for businesses to produce top-quality content that is educational, informative, relevant to the business and the reader and it meets the readers’ expectations and requirements.

Here are 5 tips to keeping your leads flowing in your pipeline and acquiring more customers using content:

Awareness Content

One of the most efficient tactics marketing folks use to create business awareness in a prospect, is through content. The reason why content marketing is so popular with marketers is because it is relatively cheap, easy to produce, unique and specific to the business. Unlike other one-kind-fits-all marketing tools, content marketing is exclusively created with the end user and the specific business in mind.

To make the most of content marketing at this stage, why not:

• Try blogging – having your own blog is a great way to attract new people into your business
• Guest blogging for websites that are popular amongst your readerships
• Contribute to online communities and discussions with regular posts and comments
• Infographics – we love to share information and one of the best ways to get yourself noticed as an expert is to create content that is easy to share and informative. Infographics are just that!

Contemplation Content

Once the prospect is aware of your business, your brand, products and service, the next logical step is for them to begin contemplating purchasing your product. You can facilitate this process with timely, factual and educational content such as white papers, reports and in-depth articles.

Unlike the awareness content, contemplation content is much more targeted and specific, having assumed that the reader already has some basic understanding of the product and the benefits of using it. At this stage it would be a good idea to disseminate this kind of content via email marketing, with your monthly newsletter for example.

Follow up Content

Once the prospect enters the sales pipeline and you have given them an initial offer, the next logical step in terms of content is the follow up.

Unlike the latter two types of content, the follow up is not some article or white paper the person has accidently stumbled upon, instead follow ups are very deliberate. They’re sent out at a particular stage of the sales process and therefore they are targeted. This type of content should be complementing the product while also being open for a discussion. Remember, this could very well be the last piece of content a lead receives before making a purchase. Make it stick!
Some tips to make your follow up more efficient:

When creating the follow up content, think about what kind of information the lead would need at this particular stage of the sales cycle. Be targeted, relevant and to-the-point. This is not the place for fluff content.
Create your content in advance – when working on the strategic stages of your sales pipeline, create the follow up content that would be appropriate for that particular stage and then automate it.

As you can see, content is an integral part of the customer acquisition process. From the very first encounter between a prospect and your business, until the very last stage of the sales process, content could be used to guide, facilitate and nurture the prospective customer. The key to success is creating content that is creative, it connects people, it is easy to be found and compelling to share. It may sound to you like there are one too many boxes to tick to when it comes to content marketing, but trust me, your efforts will be generously repaid in the form of happy prospects, a pipeline full of leads and many customers at the end of that pipeline.