This post was originally published on performancemarketer.com by Derek Miller
How CopyPress Uses Content To Build A Sustainable Lead Flow
Content marketing is one of the most popular tactics for generating a stable flow of traffic and increase organic search results. However, most sites investing in content are doing so for a more purposeful reason than traffic alone.
Typically, content marketing is used to generate more visitors with the goal of increasing leads and sales. If you’re looking for content to increase your lead flow, then you may want to try the strategy below. CopyPress has perfected content marketing over the last six months to increase their lead flow by 300%.
Who is CopyPress and Why Should You Care?
Before I begin, let’s provide a little context if you’re not familiar with CopyPress. CopyPress is a content marketing company that focuses on creating content. Such as blog articles, infographics, white papers, interactive, and videos. They also focus on promoting content (outreach, influencer marketing, links).
We work with brands like Hipmunk, Airbnb, Uber, and Macy’s to create and promote branded content.
We provide a fully-managed offering. We have a creative community of over 300 certified and vetted writers, editors, designers, and developers. Also, an influencer and publisher inventory in the thousands.
The strategy we describe below is possible for any company across any industry. We’ve used our unique position and resources to perfect the approach and are prepared to scale it for any business sector.
CopyPress’s Lead Funnel Content Marketing Approach
This particular content strategy is built to generate email conversions to grow our lead list. We have a steady flow of leads through organic search, referrals, and other methods – but we wanted to build more targeted leads for offerings that we wanted to grow, i.e. our infographic sales.
To help follow the strategy, I’ll be including screenshots and examples based on one of our successful campaigns.
Step 1: Pick a Topic
As mentioned above, our goal for one of our campaigns was to increase infographic leads. Infographics are still an incredible tool for outreach and link earning, as well as social media and onsite engagement. We believe we’re one of the best infographic design companies and want to highlight this offering.
Knowing our objective, we decided to pick the topic “How To Create Amazing Infographics.”
The topic is critical. The entire strategy hinges on what topic you pick. Try to make sure it resonates with your audience and matches one of your core competencies as a business. The more campaigns you run, the more likely you’ll need to branch out to peripheral topics, but for a start – pick something that is highly relevant.
Step 2: Build An Email Drip Campaign
After you pick a topic, the next step is to develop an email drip campaign. An email drip campaign is a series of relevant emails sent to users once they sign up for your email lists. These emails can trigger automatically once they give you their email. It follows that user through the entire sales funnel if necessary.
With regards to our strategy, we create a series of emails on the exact topic we’re covering before we launch the lead form. This means we must know the dates of our webinar and release of the whitepaper. Once these dates are sent, you need to set hard deadlines for the creatives to hit to be ready to launch. You want to match expectations, so it’s critical that the information in the drip emails match up with what they will receive.
These emails will be adjusted once the content is officially released. No longer will it provide an expected date, but it will simply provide the content or a link to it.
It’s important to set up ongoing emails with your drip. Don’t just send them the content and add them to a bulk email list. If they wanted to download the whitepaper on creating infographics, then set a series of infographic-specific emails to follow. We follow ours with discounts and other relevant offers that relate to our infographic creation product.
Below is an example of one of our infographic drip emails.
Step 3: Create an Onsite Lead Form
With your topic selected and drip campaign finished, the next step is to create a lead form on your website to start collecting emails around this specific idea. Our strategy has two gated forms of content (webinar and whitepaper), released one after the other – so you’ll want to create a lead form for both pieces.
The webinar form should discuss when the live webinar will be held and the whitepaper form should discuss when the whitepaper will be released. After both have occurred, the copy on each lead form should be updated to reflect the new information. In the example below, you can see that our webinar page has language saying the “webinar was already held.”
Create the lead form pages as quickly as possible. The longer you have the pages up, the more emails you can generate. We also create between 250-500 unique words on each lead form to describe why the person should sign up. These pages will live on your site indefinitely and will be used for outreach later, so make sure they reflect your brand and are user-friendly.
Step 4: Create a Whitepaper
The next step in the process is to create the white paper. It’s important that you create the whitepaper first because it will be the foundation for the other types of content. White papers should be well researched, thoroughly written, and provide actionable information for your target audience. If you can accomplish these three points, you’ll create a strong content asset that people will want to download, read, and share.
To create a great whitepaper, you need to blend research, writing, and design. Because CopyPress has a community of writers, editors, and designers, we are uniquely positioned to create whitepapers seamlessly.
If you’re trying to execute this strategy on your own, it’s important that you test your whitepaper writer, editor, and designer to make sure they understand the subject matter and can execute the project to your quality standards.
