Content Marketing Tactics: How Your Blog Can Engage and Nurture Early-Stage Leads

Posted by Travis Jamison

Investing in content marketing is one of the best ways to build brand and product awareness.

On the one hand, choosing tried and tested content production and distribution tactics is a great way to attract potential customers. On the other hand (and much more importantly), your blog can help engage and nurture early-stage leads. It can be a key tool in building relationships with potential customers. Finally, it can allow you to guide prospects through the sales funnel without applying sales pressure, which can often alienate leads, harm your brand’s reputation, or hinder conversions.

In other words, publishing top-of-the-funnel content is an excellent way to steer your target toward converting in a way that feels organic and aligns with their position in the buyer’s journey.

So, if you’re looking to up your marketing game, here are the best content marketing tactics to use when targeting early-stage leads.

Provide Simple Answers to the Most Basic Questions About Your Product

One of the most effective digital marketing tactics for reaching and engaging early-stage leads is to invest in resources that tackle your target audience’s pain points.

Think about why people go online. They want answers to their questions, solutions to their pain points, and educational resources that empower them to solve their needs.

So, if you want to reach early-stage leads and gently draw them into the sales funnel, think about ways you can help them attain these goals.

One excellent way to do this is to answer fundamental questions about what your products do and how that benefits your target audience. Implementing this tactic won’t just create opportunities for your prospects to enter the buyer’s journey. It will also eliminate potential barriers and ensure you attract quality leads whose needs your brand can effectively solve.

Note, however, that perfecting this content marketing approach isn’t as easy as publishing blog posts that only describe your solutions in a conversion-oriented way. Instead, you need to do your best to prove that your brand understands and cares about your potential customers’ needs.

To do this, address your target audience’s unique questions. Offer unique value and advice. And describe potential resolutions to their needs. Furthermore, when implementing this tactic, do your best to support prospects on their journey toward resolving pain points instead of pushing them toward a purchase.

Some of the main goals to prioritize with this type of content include sharing knowledge in a way that’s easy to understand, optimizing for relevant search terms, and making the content hyper-relevant to your ideal customers.

For instance, check out how Bay Alarm does it with the What is a Personal Emergency Response System article. The brand not only answers common questions about PERS products but also 

• states who can benefit from them
• describes key features and use cases, and 
• addresses what consumers need to look for, depending on their requirements.

Source: bayalarmmedical.com

 

You’ll also notice that this resource includes a couple of product mentions and CTAs. However, they’re subtle enough not to put pressure on leads. Instead, they serve as a good way to encourage web visitors closer to the mid and low stages of the buyer’s journey to continue interacting with additional sales-oriented pages on the brand’s site.

Give Valuable Information Away for Free

When developing a content marketing machine meant to engage and nurture early-stage leads, you might think you need to draw out the process of solving your audience’s pain points. And, sure, this approach can seem logical when you consider the increasing length of the average sales cycle.

However, if you’re looking to nudge prospects toward a sale, try prioritizing consumer needs over sales instead.

Yes, giving valuable information away for free can seem counterintuitive. Nevertheless, it’s important to remember that you’re targeting early-stage leads. And they are far more interested in information and finding reputable solution providers than buying something.

With this in mind, don’t shy away from giving away proprietary information in your blog — especially if this can help hook high-quality leads into the top of your funnel.

If you check out Real Estate Skills, you’ll see that their guides, like this one, give away a ton of free value. But what’s important to remember is that the process described in this article is a complex one, which relies on readers having a good deal of expertise. So, by introducing readers to the basics of wholesale real estate and pointing out that a successful system necessitates a strategic and personalized approach, this brand does a great job of drawing in early-stage leads. It introduces them to the invaluable benefits of investing in the brand’s courses, all the while earning their trust due to a willingness to share knowledge for free.

Source: realestateskills.com

 

Consider Incorporating Interactive Formats into Your Content Marketing Strategy

If you feel like the abovementioned content marketing tactic could work for engaging your ideal customers, it’s a good idea to explore ways to take it a step further.

You see, 81% of today’s consumers demand personalized customer experiences from brands. And you can provide these types of experiences by investing in content tailored to their specific needs.

Interactive formats — like polls, quizzes, or calculators — are all excellent ways to use content marketing to engage early-stage leads. Interactive content will gently nudge them toward the lower stages of the sales funnel while ensuring they feel their needs are being met.

Check out Il Makiage’s Foundation Quiz for inspiration on incorporating interactive resources into your marketing strategy. It’s an in-depth questionnaire that takes confused prospects through the step-by-step process of choosing the ideal product for their needs. Even though the quiz directs web visitors to a personally selected product page, this resource is still great for ToFU prospects. Why? 

Well, firstly, because it includes a lead-generation element, allowing Il Makiage to capture new newsletter subscribers. Secondly, the quiz is an excellent educational resource, which teaches buyers what to look for in a foundation (and encourages them to prioritize benefits similar to those offered by the brand’s products).

Source: ilmakiage.com

 

Create the Market for Your Product

In some cases, the biggest challenge to engaging early-stage leads is that they aren’t aware of the ways they could benefit from your solutions. In these situations, the best way to use your blog is to produce content that explains why your product exists and how that’s relevant to your audience.

Try painting a clear picture of the landscape around your solutions and drawing your target audience into that world. That way, you can present your offer in an attractive setting that is logical and relevant to leads unaware of your brand’s existence.

This is an excellent strategy to create a market for your product where there was none before.

Check out how Aura implements this tactic. The brand knows that very few of its ideal customers know about Amazon repricers. However, it also understands that they have heard about arbitrage and may be looking to try out the tactic. So, by creating a high-quality resource on arbitrage that ranks well on SERPs, Aura effectively attracts early-stage leads. Then, it presents them with subtle and logical product mentions that describe the additional benefits they could unlock by investing in a dynamic pricing tool, effectively creating a market for its niche solution.

Source: goaura.com

 

Use Case Studies to Make Complex Content Relatable

Complexity is one of the biggest obstacles to engaging and capturing early-stage leads. These consumers crave understanding and relevant knowledge. Yet, their position in the buyer’s journey often indicates a lack of experience, which could hinder their ability to fully comprehend the value of your offer.

In these cases, one of the best ways to utilize content marketing would be to enrich it with UGC-based social proof to help your readers see how your offer relates to their reality.

Including case studies in your content strategy can help prevent misunderstandings about what you offer, but that’s not all. By ensuring your prospects have a crystal clear grasp of what your solutions do, you can guarantee they willingly enter the buyer’s journey with a genuine intent toward converting down the road.

For example, this guide published by Transitions Elite, is a marvelous example of a long-form piece of content optimized with case studies to drive product understanding. It contains all the info the brand’s potential clients need about the process of selling their veterinary practice. More importantly, it supports each of the value propositions with a real-life story. These transform a standard blog post into an engaging resource that’s not only informative but also effective at encouraging early-stage leads to move to the next phase of the sales cycle.

Source: transitionselite.com

 

Explore Collaboration Opportunities to Widen Your Reach and Earn Consumer Trust

Brand trust — and brand reputation, in general — is becoming an increasingly influential factor for acquiring customers.

According to a 2023 report from Edelman, 71% of consumers think it’s more important to trust the brands they buy from than in the past. And 88% of people will consider brand credibility a deciding factor when making purchase decisions.

With this in mind, when targeting early-stage leads, it’s important to attract and engage them, but don’t stop there. It’s also essential to leave a positive impression and get them to perceive your business as a trustworthy industry authority.

In addition to publishing high-quality content that delivers unique value and helps your prospects resolve pain points, you can also achieve this effect by finding collaboration opportunities with established industry voices.

People trust influencers, scientists, and, most of all, their peers. Plus, they actively seek out the advice of these figures when researching potential solutions to their needs.

So, investing in collaborative, trust-enhancing content is a marvelous way to extend your reach, for instance, by seeking out guest posting opportunities in relevant digital publications. You can also use this tactic to 

• establish your brand’s credibility
• hook new prospects into the buyer’s journey, and 
• create a positive bias toward your brand as the first choice for solving a specific pain point.

Check out how Koia does this on its company blog, where it invites registered dieticians to share their tips on healthy nutrition and the importance of protein in a balanced diet.

Source: drinkkoia.com

 

Build Emotional Connections With Early-Stage Leads

One of the most commonly overlooked benefits of producing content for early-stage leads is that this marketing strategy offers a super effective way of building relationships with potential customers.

On the one hand, awareness-stage resources boost brand and product awareness among people who have not entered the sales cycle yet, giving you an advantage over any possible solution they might discover later on due to the influential power of the mere exposure effect.

On the other hand, investing in high-quality resources that align with your ideal customers’ aspirations and values provides ample opportunity to build emotional connections between leads and your brand. This can be extremely helpful in converting customers, seeing that 76% of people prefer to buy from brands they feel connected to.

So, how do you incorporate this type of content into your marketing strategy? Well, one excellent tactic is to look for opportunities to employ emotional storytelling that aligns with your target audience’s values or interests.

For example, knowing how important ESG values are to its customers, K9 Ballistics regularly publishes blog posts about giving back to the community. These posts communicate the brand’s commitment to making a positive difference in its environment. They also elicit strong emotional responses from K9 Ballistics’s target audience, which is a great way to encourage them to continue interacting with the brand and to actively choose to support it once they’re ready to make a purchase.

Source: k9ballistics.com

 

Don’t Forget About the Content on Your Social Channels

Finally, if you want to use content to engage and nurture early-stage leads, remember that these consumers won’t always enter the buyer’s journey by making a conscious decision.

More often than not, people are inspired to buy products or services by accidentally discovering engaging content, most commonly on social media.

With this in mind, apply the same content marketing tactics described in this article to every post you publish — including on any social media channel.

To see an example of a brand doing this perfectly, check out Armra. This business has a strong social media presence on all the major networks like Instagram and TikTok. More importantly: 

• Its content is perfectly planned to engage early-stage leads. 
• It publishes tons of resources addressing the unexpected benefits of its colostrum supplement. 
• It regularly posts research and expert-backed content that elevates the brand’s trustworthy reputation. 
• It makes fantastic use of UGC, which is an excellent method of nurturing awareness-stage leads and guiding them toward the conversion stage of the sales cycle.

Source: tiktok.com

Final Thoughts

Investing in great content to build brand and product awareness and, more importantly, to engage and nurture early-stage leads, can really pay off.

Awareness-stage content is not just the best way to reach your ideal customers. It’s also the best way to position your business in a positive and likable light. Plus, it can help grab your target audience’s attention and guide them through the buyer’s journey in a way that benefits your business.

So, don’t hesitate to implement the tactics from this article in your digital marketing strategy. Adopt, adapt, and combine the tactics above. And do your best to ensure they align with your brand’s personality and your audience’s needs to ensure the best possible outcomes.

Author Bio

Travis Jamison is an entrepreneur turned investor. After selling a couple of businesses, he shifted his focus toward investing. But he was disappointed by the lack of options for entrepreneurial-type investments – like buying websites & investing in small, bootstrapped businesses. So he started Investing.io to provide a home for other entrepreneurs turned investors.