How to Nurture Leads with Content Marketing

The ultimate goal of content marketing, like all marketing efforts, is to close sales. However, studies show that many businesses struggle to create a strategy for content marketing, and 79% of leads generated from marketing never actually convert.

This leaves many small businesses stumped. If you’re creating high-quality content optimized for SEO, what’s the reason it isn’t converting? It all depends on how you nurture your leads.

Success in content marketing requires that you nurture your leads with new information and support at all stages of the funnel. Whether you’re new to the process or you need a refresher on current practices, here’s what every small business should know about how to nurture leads with content marketing.

Any small business that wants to nurture leads should start by understanding their sales funnel. The typical marketing funnel consists of three stages: awareness, consideration, and purchase.

Content created in the top-of-funnel stage should be designed to create awareness. This is the stage when a customer first learns about a brand and their offerings, so it should be less focused on trying to close a sale, and more concerned with connecting to the customer. After all, 68% of customers spend time reading about brands they’re interested in — so this is your chance to make an impression.

The best way to create meaningful connections with customers and form a lasting impression is to identify with their challenges. Use past customer interactions to identify your target audience’s biggest pain point. When creating content in the top-of-funnel stage, ask the following questions:

• What are your customers’ biggest questions and challenges?
• What do they want to learn more about?
• What are they searching for and why?

This will be different for many businesses. For example, personal styling company Stitch Fix has a series called “Ask a Stylist,” which invites prospective and current customers to submit their styling and wardrobe questions. Stitch Fix then publishes the best questions on its website and has personal stylists answer them in detail. By answering questions like, “how do I assemble a capsule wardrobe for work,” and “what shoes can I wear with a maxi dress,” prospective customers see why they might need a personal stylist and learn the value of such advice.

Another way to approach top-of-funnel content is to help the customer clarify their challenges. They might not know exactly what it is they need help with—but your introductory content can explain their struggles for them while gently introducing a solution.

BioLite, a company that creates off-grid energy products for recreation, succeeds at this with a blog post titled, “This Year I’m Reducing My Carbon Footprint, Will You Join Me?”. This article creates awareness around the importance of reducing a carbon footprint, and how that can be achieved through consumer choices. This targets climate-conscious customers who are interested in making more sustainable choices, but aren’t quite sure where to start.

The best type of content in this category includes educational pieces like long-form blog posts, videos, and downloadable guides. You might also create a dedicated blog where customers can browse content and other resources that answer their most pressing questions. Research shows that small businesses with blogs receive 126% more lead generation than small businesses without blogs, so if you don’t have a blog yet — it’s time to start.

To get ideas for what to write about, look at what questions your customers are asking in support messages via email and social media. You can also use a tool called Answer the Public, as well as Google’s auto-populating question feature, to see what people are wondering about in your industry.

Once you’ve established the topics you’ll cover for the awareness stage, consider how you’ll capture customer emails. For example, you might include a pop-up form on your resources page, or you might ask for emails in exchange for a long-form content download. This will enable you to start nurturing your awareness leads in an email drip campaign that encourages them down the path toward purchasing.

Below the top-of-funnel content is the consideration phase. This stage is in the middle of the awareness and decision-making stage, making it the crucial educational phase. Content in this stage needs to clearly identify the customer’s challenge and provide a tangible solution. In other words, this content should show the customer how your product will solve their challenges and make their life better.

To create effective middle-of-funnel content, a survey of current customers can help you pinpoint exactly how your product is being used to solve the most pressing challenges. In a customer survey, you might ask questions such as:

• What is the biggest challenge our product/service has solved?
• Which features or services are most important in achieving this goal?
• What is one concrete example of how our product/service has helped you?

It’s important to ask the right questions so that you can gain specific details about how your product is helping customers. Then, you can use these responses to create middle-of-funnel content.

For example, a case study can showcase the details of a specific customer success story. Running and cycling tracking app Strava features a case study with its customer, The San Francisco Running Company. This showcases the challenge that the running company had prior to using Strava (wanting to connect to more runners) and how the app helped them exceed this goal by growing their community to over 6,000.