Public relations has shifted over the years. What was once seen as a top of funnel activity focused on awareness and impressions, is now able to support all aspects of the marketing funnel. In fact, 67% of companies use lead generation as the sole metric to determine content success. Therefore, it is important to ensure your lead gen campaign is set up for success. Here are five key elements to help bring customers from awareness to nurture them through the process until they turn into a lead.
- Pillar content
This is a newer way to boost your SEO. Instead of cramming your website with hundreds of keywords into content that doesn’t always read well or make sense, it’s now more important to provide a strong resource for questions that are being asked from search engines through pillars. This means that you have a topic of interest as your main pillar, with several topic clusters supporting it. For example, our main pillar may be Public Relations, and then our topic clusters could be Social Media, Thought Leadership, Influencer Marketing and Traditional Public Relations Services. Then, we would create sub-pillars for each of these clusters through content such as webpages and blogs. Pillar content is incredibly vital, but you also need other tactics to help you bring your potential customer to your content. - Content marketing
It’s not enough to simply create the content and house it on your website. You need to reach out to your target market and let them know that the content exists. This means distributing it via your owned channels, securing earned media placements or using paid channels to share the information as well. The more exposure your content receives, the more people you drive to your website, the higher chance you have of connecting and collecting that person’s information. - Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
You need some sort of system to help you collect and connect with those customers that have provided you with their information, and to track their engagement through analytics reporting. Your brand can’t properly connect if you don’t have a way to store and manage your customer data and to track engagement. A good CRM is vital to maintaining your customer relationships. - Create value
Customers want to stay in contact with brands that provide a good customer experience. This could mean emails or newsletters about special offers or important information. It’s more than just advertising to your target; it’s about learning what is important to them and then providing them information and resources that give value to their relationship with your brand. - Retargeting
It may take a few touchpoints to connect with some of your target. This is where retargeting comes in. Be sure to set up all of your outreach to be able to retarget those that engage with your brand, but haven’t yet provided their information. If you can show them that there is value to being connected, they may make a purchase or provide their information after some follow up
There are a variety of lead generation strategies to choose from depending on your brand’s communication goals. If you’d like to learn more about how the experts at Beyond Fifteen can help, just give us a call to connect with one of our PR strategists!