How do you educate and nurture your leads with long-form content?

1 What is long-form content?

Long-form content is any type of content that is longer than the average blog post, usually over 1,500 words. It can be an ebook, a white paper, a case study, a guide, a webinar, a podcast, or a video. Long-form content is meant to provide in-depth information, insights, and solutions to your audience's problems, challenges, or goals. It can also showcase your expertise, authority, and credibility in your niche, and build trust and rapport with your leads.

2 Why use long-form content for lead generation?

Long-form content can help you generate more leads for several reasons. First, it can improve your SEO ranking and visibility, as long-form content tends to perform better on search engines, attract more backlinks, and generate more social shares. Second, it can increase your traffic and engagement, as long-form content can capture and retain your audience's attention, reduce your bounce rate, and increase your dwell time. Third, it can grow your email list and conversions, as long-form content can offer more value and incentives for your leads to opt-in, sign up, or buy from you.

3 How to create long-form content for lead generation?

Creating long-form content for lead generation requires a strategic approach that aligns with your goals, your audience, and your buyer's journey. To get started, identify your target audience and their pain points, needs, interests, and preferences. Use tools such as surveys, interviews, analytics, and buyer personas to understand your ideal leads and what they are looking for. Then, use keyword research, competitor analysis, and content gap analysis to choose a relevant topic and format that suits your audience and goals. Outline your content and write a compelling headline that captures the attention of your audience. When writing the content itself, use a conversational and informative tone to educate and nurture your leads with relevant, valuable, and engaging content. Finally, optimize the content for SEO, readability, and conversion by using best practices for keywords, meta tags, headings, images, links, schema, calls to action, opt-in forms, landing pages, and testimonials.

4 How to distribute and promote your long-form content?

Creating long-form content is just the beginning. To reach and attract more leads, you need to distribute and promote your content. Start by publishing it on your website or blog, using categories, tags, menus, and search functions to help your audience navigate. Incorporate lead magnets, pop-ups, banners, and widgets to entice them to download or sign up for your content. You should also share your content on social media platforms and groups where your target audience hangs out. Use catchy captions, hashtags, images, videos, and stories to spark interest and engagement. Encourage likes, comments, shares, and tags. Additionally, repurpose your content into different formats and channels to reach a wider audience. For example, turn an ebook into a blog series, podcast episode, video summary, infographic or slide deck. You can also syndicate it on platforms such as Medium or Quora. Lastly, leverage your email list and network to spread the word about your content. Send an email newsletter or a drip campaign to subscribers and leads to inform them about its benefits. Ask partners, influencers, customers or colleagues to share or endorse it.

5 How to measure and improve your long-form content performance?

The final step in using long-form content for lead generation is to measure and improve your content performance. To do this, you need to track and analyze SEO, traffic, engagement, and conversion metrics. For SEO metrics, use tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Moz, or Ahrefs to monitor and improve organic ranking, impressions, clicks, CTR, bounce rate, dwell time, backlinks, and domain authority. Traffic metrics include sessions, users, page views, sources, devices, and locations. Monitor and improve these with tools like Google Analytics, Google Data Studio, or SimilarWeb. Engagement metrics such as social shares, likes, comments, mentions, ratings, reviews, and subscriptions can be monitored with BuzzSumo, Social Blade or Hootsuite. Lastly for conversion metrics such as leads, opt-ins sign-ups sales revenue ROI and cost per lead use Google Analytics HubSpot or Leadpages.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?