6 Tactics to Increase Leads Using Optimized Content
How to make sure SEO is converting your ICP.
Hello and welcome back to the monthly newsletter, where we give you SEO & content marketing tactics based on the experiences we’ve had working with SaaS companies so you can help your company succeed without all the trial and error.
This month, we’re discussing six actionable tactics you can use to help increase the number of leads you generate from your optimized content.
Here goes…
You’re not alone if you’ve ever had to explore the reasons why organic traffic is going up, yet there doesn’t seem to be an understood influence between SEO and revenue.
***Part of the struggle is helping leaders understand that SEO is part of a growth marketing motion and that, especially as a content marketing effort, isn’t ONLY a short-term lead generation tactic.
Nonetheless, here are some ways you can help showcase your strategic thinking skills and use all that organic traffic to influence your revenue.
1) CTAs for nurture or to sell
We’ve all done it, and many of us still do it from time to time, but a big reason you’re not moving people into meaningful lead types (free trials, demos, booked sales calls) is that you’re positioning every CTA on the biggest asks.
Think about it. You’re only inviting your audience to engage on your website or with your company if they signal they’re about to be a customer/trial the product.
Read the room, and audit the CTAs in your content.
If you’re working on a bottom-of-the-funnel piece, then sure, invite them to learn more or sign-up.
But if they landed on a topic that’s further away from your direct product, we want to think of ways to get them to move closer without scaring them away - aka how we can nurture them properly.
Examples:
CTAs to your subscription-based/community-building channels so you can offer them more free value, put your intelligence on display, take up more mind-share, and deliver them your content at a consistent cadence
CTAs for high-ticket, value-based, and often first-party data-intensive resources about the industry (Test gating and leaving ungated)
CTAs to results/case studies when they’re applicable to the larger topic
CTAs as simple as getting them to another relevant content/product page you’ve already mapped through the funnel.
2) Integrate your content types together
One of the biggest opportunities in all of SEO is integrating high-value lead-gen and demand-gen content assets and types together.
If your company has resources such as podcast episodes, webinars, courses, a YouTube series, or trend reports that generate demand, working them into your larger SEO and content strategy can help amplify those results.
Too often, we find these siloed in their own separate subfolders on a SaaS marketing website. The company hopes people will navigate from an optimized blog to one of their other resources.
You can avoid relying too heavily on “hope” by embedding those higher-value resources into the optimized content - thus getting more eyes on them and your company’s depth of expertise without the need to navigate away from the page.
3) Fill out the bottom & middle of the funnel
There are a lot of marketing teams that, for one reason or another, avoid creating bottom- and middle-of-the-funnel content topics.
These are often any of the following:
MoFu Explainers
How to use [product type] to achieve [solution]
Why to use [product type] to achieve [solution]
MoFu Lists
Best products in [category] for [solution]
Best companies in [category] for [solution]
Gift guide for [people interested in x]
Alternatives to [competitor service or product]]
Price of [competitor service or product]
BoFu Lists
[X] company vs [Y] company
[Y] company vs [Z] company
[A] product vs [B] product
[A] product type vs [B] product type
Some companies feel like it’s too obvious that you’d make your product look good and add it to the top of your own list, and others fear upsetting their competition.
Here are two responses:
Someone will make this content, likely your competitor, whether you decide to make it or not, and they’re definitely getting qualified leads from them. This is an opportunity to control the narrative.
People are smart. They do know you’re going to speak well of your product. This is your opportunity to control one of many parts within their research/shopping process, AND you don’t have to be dishonest or disrespectful to your competitors.
One of our clients used this exact formula to influence over $1 million in revenue with just 14 pieces of content.
And if you’re feeling cold-footed about going straight into comparison posts, then start in the middle of the funnel with how-to style content you can easily market your product inside of and showcase your internal subject matter experts.
4) Industry assets and peer marketing
Use tools, templates, spreadsheets, big annual reports, and anything downloadable that is so valuable that collecting people's email addresses doesn’t feel invasive.
These assets are a goldmine for keywords, organic traffic, and backlinks, but they’re also a great way to get people content that helps them do their jobs better and makes you look like a hero.
And as a cool-er lead, you will use their information to distribute more educational, nurturing material and not immediately hand their information off to the sales team.
5) Fuel paid ads, social media, and your SDRs’ email campaigns
The content that’s been optimized for a search engine should fuel your other channels and teams. You don’t have to sit and wait for it to rank to perform for you.
Instead - use it to fuel SDRs’ email campaigns, give your paid team some content they can use in their retargeting campaigns, and ensure you use all or parts of that content to support the narratives your brand and employee advocates are talking about on social media.
Here is how much value one SaaS company we worked with experienced when they started distributing their optimized blog content across all channels (organic, paid, social, partnerships, and email):
6) Leverage organic traffic & tools to help with retargeting
If you’ve ever been in charge of running paid ads for a company, you know you need some type of cold ads to attract people to the website.
From there, the pixels on your website pick up information about that person/company, and that allows you to retarget them.
If you’re bringing in organic traffic from your content that’s a part of your ICP, then you’re able to help the sales and paid ads teams identify additional outreach and retargeting opportunities whether the platform ads them automatically (like LinkedIn) or you use tools like ZoomInfo or Clearbit to see who has been on your website and what they were looking at.
How are you leveraging your organic traffic for your company?
Do you have a unique way that you’re using your growing organic traffic to benefit the company you work at?
We’d love to hear it and include it in one of our future pieces of content.
Related + New Resources For Your Team
[Read 📖] The SaaS Content Marketing Guide: Building a Strategy that Increases Brand Awareness and Influences Revenue
Check out our new guide that walks you through what you need to build the most effective content strategy from finding your ICP to reporting to your executives!
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[Read 📖] 8 Must-Have Content Types for PLG Companies Investing in SEO [+184 SaaS Marketers Told Us Which They’d Build First]
Ever wonder which optimized content types perform best for PLG companies or which types of content are best for startups without the influence of a strong brand?
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[Watch/Listen 👁️👂] Making & Measuring Quality SaaS Content Feat. Amanda Natividad of SparkToro
From deciding what content marketing opportunities to pursue to the metrics Sparktoro uses to measure success, Amanda shared plenty of insights that'll help you think about your own efforts.
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[Watch/Listen 👁️👂] Pure SEO vs. SaaS Marketing
Nate and Derek discuss SEO and SaaS marketing - specifically, how SEO can support company growth and why a "pure" SEO strategy can conflict with your other SaaS marketing efforts.
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