No matter what your business goals are, content marketing should be a large part of your lead generation strategy. These days, customers expect their brands to be generating interesting, helpful, and engaging content online. If you’re not, you can bet your competitors are.

Content marketing is an excellent way to connect with potential leads at every step of the buying process. However, it’s not a matter of simply throwing up a blog and calling it a day. You’ll need to conduct specific research into your buyer personas so you can provide them with content that fits their needs at every stage of the customer journey.

Here are three stages that you’ll need to develop content for:

Awareness
This is when you get your brand in front of people who may not yet have heard about your business. You want to let prospects know what you can do for them, and why they should be interested in your product or service.

Evaluation
During this stage, you demonstrate your expertise and knowledge of the industry. You want to prove to potential leads that your business is a better choice than your competitors.

Conversion
This is when your content marketing has completed its job, and your lead turns into a paying customer. You’ll monitor the conversion rates for your content marketing to see how successful each campaign is.

Here are a few ways you can use content marketing and blogging to generate more leads:

Generate Traffic
You can’t convert people to leads if they’re not visiting your website in the first place. Blogging is a great way to drive traffic to your website, as long as you use it as a way to give visitors the information they want and need.

Social media can also be used to generate traffic, as can videos, podcasts, and infographics.

Produce a Resource
Creating a valuable resource like an eBook or whitepaper is a highly effective way to convert website visitors into leads. You offer a free resource, and in return, you benefit from increased leads in your sales funnel.

These types of lead magnets allow you to educate potential leads, show them that you’re knowledgeable, and get access to their email addresses. Other types of valuable resources include webinars, e-courses, free trials, and more.

Email Marketing
Once someone has given you their email address in return for one of your resources, you have a great opportunity to reach out to these people. Since they’re well aware that they’ve given you their email in exchange for your resource, they’ll be expecting you to email them.

Keep in mind that the “unsubscribe” button is just one click away. Your goal with these emails is to continue to provide your leads with actionable advice and information, while positioning your product or service as the answer to their problems. Generally, you should create an email series, keeping it spam-free but always including a call-to-action.

These are just a few ways that content marketing and blogging can generate leads. We go into this in much greater detail in our free ebook Your Complete Gude to Generating Leads on Your Website so download it today to learn more. (See what we did there?)