The Final Online Frontier: Content Marketing & Automated Lead Generation

The internet is a continuously evolving, independent marketplace. This seems to overwhelm most small- to medium-sized companies who wish to leverage digital tools to increase their bottom line.

What is a business to do with continuously decreasing profit margins cutting into their shoestring marketing budgets?

The prices of traditional mass marketing avenues — such as display advertising, cost per action (CPA) marketing, behavioral targeting, search engine optimization (SEO), and even online pay per click (PPC) marketing — are increasing, with limited resources available to track the effectiveness of such campaigns.

So how can you continue to blindly devote your hard-earned dollars toward these approaches?

Do you even know if the marketing dollars you spent funneled back to you to contribute to your bottom line? Or did they merely evaporate into the marketing abyss of Unknown Results?

The problem that many small and midsize businesses are facing is the inability (or I should say “lack of resources”) to manage all of the new, fragmented online marketing avenues that historically bring in limited target data — or no data at all, other than mere “exposure.” Businesses need more data to competitively leverage their product or service in today’s online marketplace.

With rising costs and limited resources to “experiment” with new online marketing channels individually, how does a small to medium-sized business even think about competing online today?

Many C-level business owners are hanging their heads low and sweeping their internet marketing pipe dreams under the rug, feeling unable to successfully coordinate their fragmented online marketing efforts, to return results, and to follow up with potential leads.

Chin up, buttercup — there’s HOPE!

Savvy C-level business owners have a plan to get their organizations in line and ready for this new frontier of online content marketing: They are using their own online real estate to do the work for them, and they’re using the most relevant marketing automation tools available to facilitate the development and definition of buyer personas; to develop educational industry-related content; and to strategically map trackable pathways through their site, so they can organize their leads by name and level of potential value.

So now that you have an idea of what the smart business owners are up to… as the resident marketing genius in your organization, you should re-evaluate your traditional marketing efforts and strategize the new directions you can take with today’s online marketing automation tools.

This means you’ll need to create:

• Buyer personas (the internal processes necessary for self-promotion)
• Industry-relevant, educational content that your audience craves
• A content map for your online real estate, so you can ultimately guide the right personas into quantifiable leads for your organization

That may sound like a simple 1-2-3 approach, but I can assure you, it takes a team to make this happen, and it’s probably going to be a rough road.

I applaud your moxie in deciding to embrace this entirely new frontier of content marketing. But you’re gonna need patience in your new journey. The level of creativity you will exhume, the education you will receive along the way, and the fulfillment you and your team will feel will be well worth the investment of time, energy, and (most importantly) financial resources you put forth — both qualitatively and quantitatively.