How To Use Content Marketing To Generate Leads for Your Small Business

Content marketing is still one of the most effective ways to acquire leads for a small business. Nothing but the content you produce can translate your vision and values to captivate potential buyers and drive them home to a conversion.

However, as a small business, you have to be very precise with targeting and content choice to draw the leads you need and convert them effectively. So how do you win clients with content marketing while staying cost-effective?

Read on everything you need to know about content marketing lead generation and safeguard yourself from lead generation missteps that might cost you customers.

Short-Term vs. Long-Term Benefits of Content Marketing

Whether you generate leads for solar business, insurance, finance, or other high-ticket niche, there are two underlying goals you can achieve with your content marketing strategy:

• Capitalize on trends and market momentum. Content around news and events and seasonal content can help generate leads here and now. At the same time, this content only lasts until the buzz is there, disappearing when the trend runs its course.
• Create evergreen content to generate business leads over time. Listicles, tutorials, how-to guides, and case studies can help you generate hundreds and thousands of leads down the road, even though you may not feel the impact immediately.

It takes a few weeks to a few months for newly published content to gain visibility—unless it goes viral—so it’s best to combine short-term and long-term forms of content to get comprehensive coverage and keep your business online at all times.

Organic Content vs. Paid Content. vs. Buying Customers

When it comes to lead generation, you can’t reinvent the wheel. There are three core lead generation channels to tap into: organic traffic channels, paid traffic channels, and lead generation services (for example, affiliate networks) that sell leads.

With content marketing, you can effectively address the first two:

Organic Traffic Acquisition	Developing organic traffic channels is hard – it may take months and years to come online – but it’s the most sustainable source of leads in the long run. Social media marketing, referral programs, blogging, SEO – you can create content for all these traffic channels for free, growing your online presence over time.
Paid Traffic Acquisition	Paid content marketing includes advertising on social media, third-party websites, and Google. Likewise, you can leverage influencer marketing, sponsored newsletters, and all available traffic channels where you can advertise for money.

In reality, creating content for free or paid traffic channels requires the same set of skills. You have to define your ideal buyer, segment your audience, and select the most effective marketing channels and the right content for each group.

The good news is that there are plenty of AI tools, from ChatGPT to Grammarly, to speed up the routines on all fronts. Even if you’re selling unordinary products like, for example, HR software, you can leverage AI to create educational videos, do voice-overs, and more.

Tip: Use AI to create your website in minutes

Step 1: Define Your Ideal Buyer and Unique Selling Proposition

First things first: you need to know your ideal buyer and unique selling proposition. In other words, you need to know who your clients are, what content they like, and how you can persuade them you’re so good that they don’t want to look further.

Here are some key aspects to address when defining your ideal buyer:

• Demographics: Location, age, gender, marital status, education, budget, and every other piece of information you can collect with your performance marketing software (I’ll discuss lead generation software in the last paragraph).
• Psychographics: Needs, wants, motivations, lifestyle, and other nuances that may affect the decision-making process. Psychographic factors are less objective and prone to sudden changes, but this is still the marketing psychology that drives purchases.
• History of interactions: engagement across touchpoints in the current and previous buying cycles.

Knowing what your buyers like, you can create lead generation content that resonates with every client. For example, if you’re selling solar panels, eco-conscious homeowners may want to know how your panels help reduce carbon footprint, while early adopters might be interested in the most technological and efficient solar panels.

Conducting competitor analysis allows you to identify gaps in the market and tailor your messaging to address unmet needs. By understanding your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, you can position your products more effectively and highlight unique selling points that resonate with your audience.

Step 2: Address the Most Essential Organic Traffic Channels

It’s hard to argue that today’s digital world is ruled by search engines (Google) and social media. No matter what you sell and whether you are B2B or B2C, most of your clients search for products on Google and spend time on Facebook and Instagram.

So why don’t you target them with stellar content?

Content Marketing on Social Media

Knowing your ideal buyer makes it easy to select the right social media. For B2B content marketing, LinkedIn is the only obvious choice; the rest depends on your audience, marketing strategy, and ability to create specific content.

A less obvious thing to consider is how users perceive different social media platforms. Popularity and trust are not the same. For example, while over 94% of social media users in the United States know about Facebook, only 68% think positively about the service.

The same goes for Twitter and other social media:

Source: Statista

Here are the types of content you need for different social media:

Facebook	Engaging sharable images, videos, and interactive posts
Instagram	Visually appealing and interactive content
Twitter	Content around news, events, and updates
LinkedIn	Business-focused, data-driven content: case studies, product reviews, presentations, tutorials, etc.
YouTube	Education and commercial content, including reviews, interviews, behind-the-scenes, and more

As for whether you should produce commercial or informational content, the 50/50 ratio is fine.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

It doesn’t matter how brilliant your content is if they don’t discover it. Luckily, you can improve your search rankings by having an optimized website and SEO-driven content marketing plan that covers essential search intents in your niche.

But first of all, you need to choose your niche.

To generate leads consistently, you need a niche with at least a few sub-niches to cover. Becoming an expert in a sub-niche is easier, and then you can expand while having loyal clients to support your efforts.

Keyword-wise, you need to focus on low-competition, high-volume informational and commercial keywords depending on the content you create.

Take, for example, the “solar panels” keyword (the screenshot is from Ahrefs):

As high as the search volume is, it’s almost impossible for a small business to hit the top of the rankings with “solar panels.” And even if you get a decent spot (like maybe top-25), it’s unclear whether the users who type in “solar panels” are searching for general information or want to buy solar panels. The intent is unclear, so it’s also unclear which type of content this key phrase fits best.

Now, let’s change the approach. Here’s what you’ll see if you select to display keywords with a 10 to 20 difficulty level in Ahrefs:

There you go—these are low-competition, high-volume informational (“how to clean solar panels”) and commercial (“best portable solar panels”) keywords you can hit the top 10 for.

Other Organic Lead Generation Opportunities

On top of SEO (which includes website optimization and blogging) and social media, you can address local forums, conduct webinars, and create a referral program to encourage existing customers to spread the word about your brand.

An additional advantage for a small business would be synergizing online and offline events like workshops, trade shows, or seminars. These will increase trust and strengthen your reputation by showing that you’re a real company that’s not shy about meeting customers in person. Likewise, offline events are a great source of video content.

Step 3: Explore Paid Advertising Opportunities

Whatever you can achieve for free, you can also achieve with paid advertising. You can display your content at the top of Google search results, promote it on third-party blogs, buy social media ads, or even buy the web leads or phone calls you need.

The only difference with paid content is that you must abide by the publisher’s or platform’s rules. For guest blogging, this means following the publishing guidelines—content style and length, the number of dofollow and nofollow links, etc.; for social media ads, you must ensure compliance, accuracy of information, and transparency, among other policies.

Step4: Automate Your Lead Generation to Stay Ahead of the Curve

Automation is king in today’s lead generation, even for a small business. And it’s not just about scaling but also increasing the accuracy of what you do, collecting more insights on your customers, and saving tons of time you can now spend on strategic tasks. There’s an automation tool for every content marketing routine.

Consider a Comprehensive Small Business Marketing Software Suite

Lead generation doesn’t end with content creation – you also need to nurture the captured leads so they eventually convert. For this, you need to coordinate different marketing channels and synergize content marketing with your other marketing avenues.

Long story short, if you’re looking further than generating leads with content, you might need a comprehensive lead management system. It will help you track, distribute, and analyze leads on the fly and strategically while closing gaps between clicks, leads, and revenue. HubSpot, Phonexa, and CallRail provide such systems, so you might want to start your research from there.

Conclusion

Content marketing is a powerful tool that can be a game changer for small businesses looking to generate leads. By carefully selecting your content strategy, focusing on your target audience, and aligning your message with your business’s values and vision, you can consistently attract and convert potential clients.

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