Everything in business is downstream from lead generation. Defining the most effective lead generation strategies to boost sales for your businesses is no easy task.
Content bursts can be a great part of your lead generation strategy, to make sure you get search traffic to your lead magnets – and turn them into a constantly flowing sales pipeline. Here’s how…
What are content bursts?
Content bursts are sets of content that all sit under the one topic of your lead magnet, direct readers toward it and interlink with each other.
Whether you have a new lead magnet you want to start promoting, or an existing lead magnet you want to put back in the spotlight, you need a burst of content to get the organic traffic that generates leads and sales.
This is a very strategic way to approach content creation and it has 3 main benefits:
- Value-led: Your audience gets true value from the consistent, in-depth content they want to consume.
- Specificity: Your content creation focuses on one particular topic at a time – a specific objective is always the precursor to clear thinking and quality writing.
- Authority: Content bursts prove your topic authority to Google, which pleases the search engine Gods and boosts your rankings for that topic.
It’s not complicated, if your article title contains your lead magnet, you can promote your lead magnet within it.
For example, your lead magnet is a quiz called ‘How well do you really sleep?’ 1 of your content burst articles is called ‘5 top tips to improve your sleep hygiene’.
It makes perfect sense to include the CTA ‘Get your full sleep improvement report by answering these quiz questions’.
Content bursts are slightly different to a similar term, topic clusters. Whereas bursts involve publishing a lot of content on a topic in a short timeframe, clusters cover a broader topic over a longer period. Both focus on a core ‘pillar’ and build from there, but they have different approaches.
How to create your content burst
Brilliantly, this is a strategy that you can take and apply to every lead magnet you ever make! This isn’t the place for personal motivation stories, behind-the-scenes reveals, or off-the-cuff responses to current trends.
That’s not to discount them, they’re very useful types of content, but they’re not part of a lead magnet content burst strategy. So put all those ideas on another list or now, so you don’t forget them.
This strategy starts with the combination of your lead magnet and a list of your customers’ pain points, needs or aspirations. And the big questions:
- What is your lead magnet solving for your customers?
- What other issues do they have in the same topic area?
You already know the answers to these questions. The first answer sparked the creation of the lead magnet in the first place.
The second is part of your constantly evolving ideal customer profiles. Don’t overcomplicate it – just keep all that information at the forefront of your mind as you consider these 6 headings:
- ‘Problems with…’
- ‘7 benefits of…’
- ‘5 steps to…’
- ‘Common myths about…’
- ‘12 top tips on how to…’
- ‘Biggest mistakes people make when…’
Of course you can change the figures to suit your content and include other titles that you know perform well with your audience like ‘The truth about…’. But just take those 6 headings and consider how easy it is to come up with ideas for each of them that all directly relate to your lead magnet.
Imaginary example content burst
Lead magnet: Quiz ‘Get your full sleep improvement report by answering these quiz questions’
6 key articles:
- Problems with sharing a sleeping space
- 7 benefits of good sleep hygiene
- 5 steps to decluttering your sleeping space
- Common myths about getting a good night’s sleep
- 12 top tips on how your diet affects your sleep
- Biggest mistakes people make when they can’t get to sleep
Signposting your lead magnet
Your quiz lead magnet connects to every one of the specific audience problems discussed in your 6 key articles. It makes complete sense to include it as a call to action because anyone reading any of these articles can see that taking the quiz is their next logical step.
If everything aligns with your lead magnet, your burst of content funnels traffic directly to its landing page. This applies to any lead magnet, not only a quiz but includes:
- Webinar: Live or recorded webinars are a powerful way to build connections with your audience
- Free downloads: Like an eBook or PDF checklist
- Waitlist: In the run up to a new product, feature, service or event launch asking your audience to subscribe to your waitlist really adds to their feeling of exclusivity and anticipation.
- Video mini-course: Providing the answer to one pain point in a 3 video mini-course
The launch, or re-promotion, of your lead magnet needs to be surrounded by the supportive structure of carefully scheduled content.
Whatever type of lead magnet you’re promoting, you’ll meet your prospects on their customer journey with exactly the right information they need to smoothly move to the next stage of your sales funnel.
Creating these specific content bursts as the guides to your lead magnets means that you get more prequalified leads and have the opportunity to disqualify people who aren’t right for your product or service.
By this stage, they’ve engaged with detailed content and your superb lead magnet – which, in turn, helps them self-select even further. Leaving your sales team with prospects that are more educated about your offering and in a more certain
Best practices for a successful content burst
As part of your content burst strategy, use this checklist to optimise your success. If you include all these factors at the planning stage, you know everything’s taken care of:
- Quality first: Not only does your audience look for quality in their content to consume, so does Google (other search engines are available!). The more top content you publish on the topic of your lead magnet, the more keywords you’ll rank for in that area. This brings more people to your lead magnet AND builds your authority on that subject matter with Google. Content bursts prove your E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness) credentials to Google. The way to maximise your content investment is to prioritise quality.
- SEO: You need to deploy all your usual SEO weapons for your content bursts, such as keyword and longtail key phrases research – including their difficulty and volume, internal linking, and avoid duplicating content that’s already on your website.
- Social sharing: You already know where your ideal customers hang out online – make sure you don’t just create the content burst, get it in front of their eyeballs! Share links to it wherever they are, to make sure their path to purchase is paved with pearls of wisdom that negate concerns and amplify benefits. If you have relationships with key people of influence that your audience already rate, tag them too – or arrange a mutual content sharing moment.
- Use your analytics: Measure your user engagement and use its insights to make data-based decisions about your current content and lead magnet – as well as using the analysis to inform future content bursts.
- Repurpose: Adapt the actual articles themselves to repurpose in different contexts, like pulling out quotes for socials, or condensing articles into LI posts.
ScoreApp: Not just for magnificent lead magnets…but also for comprehensive lead generation support.
ScoreApp is launching a brilliant Lead Generation Toolkit. It’s overflowing with assets to support your overall lead generation strategy – not just the lead magnet for your content bursts. You get all kinds of invaluable time-savers and thought-scaffolders, like:
- In-depth checklists – don’t forget anything, ever again
- Video scripts – for creating a video mini course as your lead magnet
- Social media swipe files
- Promotional tools and graphics – hugely reduced design time
- Blog post templates – no faffing around here, either!
- Email templates and prompts – nurturing your audience all the way to the checkout
That’s just some of what you get in the toolkit and new tools are being added all the time.
Astonishingly, you get this Lead Generation Toolkit FOR FREE with your ScoreApp subscription.
Join the waitlist today and watch your lead generation go through the roof!
