If you want to be successful in today's hyper-competitive global marketplace, it is essential that you build an inbound content marketing lead generation program to attract and nurture a large audience of people in your niche market so over time you can convert them into leads and customers.
An inbound content marketing lead generation program is a system for creating free content that is valuable to the people in your niche market and then promoting that free content using paid Internet advertising. This is how you attract people in your niche market to go to your website and enter your sales funnel. Think of the free content you create as a magnet to attract people in your niche market to click on your ads and go to your website.
The free content you create and promote to your niche market may include blog posts, ebooks, white papers, reports, podcasts, videos, webinars, infographics, etc. Then, you advertise on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google AdWords to promote your valuable free content to your niche market so people click on your ads to go to your website to access your free content and enter your sales funnel. This is known as inbound content marketing.
Where most businesses see the biggest bang for their advertising buck is by promoting their free content on Facebook and Google AdWords because those two companies offer the largest and most highly targeted advertising platforms in the world. No matter what a person's interest (B2C or B2B) you can find them and advertise to them on Google AdWords and Facebook.
When you go to a website to read a blog post, and that blog post has thousands of shares on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, it is almost always because that company paid to promote that blog post. That is the big secret for how companies achieve success in social media marketing and inbound content marketing for lead generation. They pay to promote their blog posts (and their other free content) to get thousands of people in their niche market to go to their website and enter their sales funnel.
We tend to assume that when we see a blog post that has thousands of shares, that those shares are natural and the company got them for free because the brand is popular or they are geniuses at social media marketing. The reality is that most of those shares were generated from paid promotion on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, as well as paying for blog promotion on Google AdWords and on blog promotion networks called, “Content Syndication Networks” that place your blog post advertisement on popular websites that are visited by millions of people.
Now you know why your blog posts only get a couple of social shares instead of thousands of shares. It's because you didn't use advertising to promote your blog posts.
The reason I am talking about promoting free content and social media marketing is because it is the foundation for building an inbound content marketing lead generation program. It is how you create an advertising magnet to get thousands of people in your niche market to click on your ads and go to your website to access your free content and learn about your business. It’s also how you get people in your niche market to enter your sales funnel so you can nurture them and over time convert them into long- term customers.
In the past companies only ran sales-based ads to generate leads and customers. It was a simple advertising process where you placed an ad (online or offline) to sell something and then interested people responded to it and contacted your company as a lead and/or purchased from you. If you knew how to write great ads, this system worked well. Unfortunately, this sell-first advertising system does not work very well anymore because people now see so many ads, especially on the Internet, that we have built up a natural filter to ignore them.
We now live in a hyper-competitive global marketplace where we are bombarded by advertising on a daily basis. Every day when you go on the Internet you will see hundreds of ads. By now you barely notice them. By the end of today today you will probably have at least one hundred Internet ads served to you. How many do you remember? How many did you click on? How many companies did you contact? Did you buy anything from a company you did not know? Ads on the Internet have become “white noise” that people have learned to tune out. This tuning out of advertising by the masses is what led to the birth of inbound content marketing—businesses creating and promoting valuable FREE content to attract people to visit their website. It is human nature that we are much more likely to notice and click on an ad that is offering us something of value for free where we do not have to buy anything compared to an ad that is just trying to sell us something.
Let's face it, people hate advertising. People hate being sold to. However, we love finding solutions to our problems. We love getting valuable information for free (this free ebook for example). This is why you need to write and promote blog posts and give away helpful free information, such as ebooks, training webinars, videos, white papers, etc. Writing and promoting valuable free content gives your niche market what they want—information that helps them solve problems. By doing this you are building a relationship with them. They see you as a helpful expert who cares about making their life better. They begin to trust you and form a relationship with you and your company. And once they trust you, they will choose to do business with you!
Here is an analogy to make it easier to understand the difference in psychology between advertising (being sold to) and being offered something of value for free (inbound content marketing). I grew up in rural Wisconsin and my family had a mini farm and some horses. Unfortunately, we did a poor job of maintaining our wire electric fences and our horses often got loose and wandered through our rural neighborhood. It was always my job to find them and bring them back home to our barn. The first few times this happened I would go to them with the idea that I would just walk up to them, attach a rope to their halter, and bring them back to the barn. That did not work. They would see me and run. Then I would follow them, get close, and they would run again… with glee in their hearts. This would sometimes go on for hours. The problem was that I was trying to get them to do something they did not want to do—go back to the barn. Think of this situation as advertising where you are trying to get a person to do something they either don't want to do or are not ready to do—buy what you are selling.
After several attempts at trying to walk up to our horses and put a rope on their halter to bring them home, I learned that I needed to bribe them to get them to allow me to walk up to them and put the rope on their halter. So, I started carrying sugar cubes with me. The horses would see me and I would put out my hand so it was flat and I would let them see me put the sugar cubes into my hand. Then I would say, “TREATS!” Now, instead of the horses running away, they would run to me! I had something of value they wanted that I was willing to give them for free. People are the same. If you try to push something on them that they do not want, or are not ready to buy, they will ignore you and resist you.
However, if you offer them something of value for free that they want, they will gladly come to you. This is the value of inbound content marketing. It is a magnet (bribe) that attracts your niche market to click on your ads and come to your website to begin a relationship with you.
Yes, I understand that people are not horses. However, we operate on the same principle of we will take action and go to somebody when that person offers us something we want, especially if it is free, but we will avoid people/companies who try to push us into doing something we don't want to do. This is the difference between placing an ad that offers something of value for free without having to buy anything (inbound content marketing) compared to placing an ad that says, “Hey you! Buy my stuff now!”
Attracting people in your niche market to go to your website by promoting free content is only the first step in creating an online lead generation program. The second step is using Google AdWords remarketing and Facebook remarketing (actually, Facebook calls it Retargeting) to build an “audience” database so you can keep advertising to all the people who visited your website AFTER they have left your website and they are surfing other websites. The remarketing advertising you do will be a combination of promoting your new blog posts and free content as well as more traditional sales focused ads.
Have you noticed that often after you leave a website, that website's ads magically follow you almost everywhere you go on the Internet? That is remarketing advertising and it is in my opinion one of the most powerful advertising technologies ever developed. It is how you get the people who have visited your website to come back to your website and become a lead and a customer. With remarketing, every person who goes to your website is “tagged” with a pixel cookie and automatically added to your Google AdWords and Facebook remarketing audiences. It is how you automatically create an online database of people you can advertise to over and over to nurture them through your sales funnel and convert them into customers. Remarketing is an Internet marketer's best friend.
Now when I say advertise to them with remarketing, I am not just referring to placing ads that say buy my stuff or contact me as a lead. I am also referring to promoting your newest blog posts and other free helpful content to give those people a strong incentive to come back to your website. This is how you nurture your niche market to trust you, see you as an expert in your industry, and want to do business with you.
As we discussed previously, you create an inbound content marketing program where you use paid advertising to promote your content (your blog posts, free ebook, white paper, free webinar) to your niche market so they go to your website and then are automatically added (tagged) to your Google and Facebook remarketing audiences. You then nurture them and guide them through the 3 stage sales funnel (see next page) by promoting your new blog posts to them as well as your products and services using paid Google and Facebook remarketing ads. This is how you create a successful online lead generation program.