Lead Generation by Content Marketing

When you do business in America, one of the most important strategies to focus on is your lead generation programs.
How are you planning to get leads in the US so that you can sell and market to them? 
One of the popular ways that American businesses develop Lead Generation strategies is by using content marketing.  At AmeriStart, we use on a regular basis and I can tell you from experience that it works!
So what is content marketing?

CONTENT MARKETING DEMYSTIFIED
Within your industry and your profession, you essentially get paid by your customers because you have some knowledge of a products/service/process or whatever it is that you sell.  If you are in Life Sciences, you  have specialty or practice areas.  If you are in software development, you know about the issues that your software can solve.  So the real question is, how else can you take advantage of the knowledge you posses?
The answer may be in the form of content marketing.
Content marketing is essentially taking the knowledge you have and sharing it with your prospective customers in exchange for something you want.  Content marketing can and often will position your business and potentially yourself as a subject matter expert.  When you or your company becomes a subject matter expert, your sales team often can leverage this in the prospecting cycle and better position your products or services for success.
SO... WHAT DO YOU HAVE TO OFFER?
Content marketing can come in many forms.  here are a few more common ones to consider:

• White papers:  These are very common.  white papers are typically documents with text, illustrations, graphs, charts, etc. included.
   
• Webinars:  Webinars are online meetings that join together people typically with some type of telephone (or VoIP) conference bridge and often with a computer screen bridge so all participants are seeing the same presentation.  These are great, lower cost solutions than in person meetings.
   
• Trade Show Sessions:  When attending trade shows, many executives will try to lead "break out" sessions where they can give presentations on particular subject.  In some cases, the content of these sessions can be the same as you give in a Webinar, but the live atmosphere can often be more engaging and will often lead to many follow-up conversations and lead sources for your sales teams.
   
• Recorded Presentations:  Recorded presentations can come in many forms.  You may record a presentation you gave on a Webinar or Trade show.
   
• Blogs/Newsletters:  These are extremely common forms of content marketing.  You are engaged in AmeriStart's content marketing initiatives right now and if you've read this far, then you know now that its working for us.  We do it for our customers as well.

Developing the content can be time consuming and it must be packaged well.  It's not to different than a product or service itself and needs a significant investment of time and resources to implement appropriately.  AmeriStart's customers and our internal staff are often creating strategies and implementing on content marketing.
QUID PRO QUO - WHAT DO YOU WANT?
Quid pro quo (Latin for "something for something") indicates a more-or-less equal exchange.  In the case of content marketing, it means what do you want in exchange for the content you are providing.  In most cases its a simple combination of one or two things; information or money.
Many companies that sell products or services use the information exchange.  They will give you subject matter content (white papers, webinars, etc.), but they often want you to give back to them some information in exchange (business or personal information) that can get their sales pipeline moving forward.  In theory, if you are interested in the content, it stands to reason that you are more likely to be in a buying mode for some type of product or service related to the subject.
In more rare instances, typically when a company is focused on developing and distributing targeted and highly relevant information, they may ask for money in exchange for the content. Sometimes there is a flat fee for the content and other times, there may be some form of membership for access to more than a single piece of content.
This is actually something that AmeriStart does quite well.  We develop content that has a high value to our customers.  It's all about doing business in America.  Our customers tell us all the time how our information helps them accelerate their efforts to do more business in America.  We offer some free content (like this blog and our basic email newsletter) and we offer fee based information like our Field Guides (an example is our Email Marketing Strategies Guide), webinars and seminars.  We also are offering membership, which gives access to a great deal of our content.  We're proud to serve our customers with incredibly insightful and relevant content on topics in the areas of strategy,  finance, operations, sales, marketing, customer service, legal and HR.
BOTTOM LINE
Content marketing is a great way to develop a lead generation program and in some cases additional revenue streams.  The big questions are which forms will work for you and how will you implement them effectively.  if you figure this out, you'll quickly build momentum when you are doing business in America.