How to Bring Qualified Prospects to Your Website with Content

It's safe to say that the number of site visitors is a KPI (Key Performance Indicator) for most businesses with a website. And yes, it is important to attract visitors to your website, month after month, but what's even more important is attracting qualified prospects to your website. These visitors are more likely to convert into leads, sales opportunities, and customers because they're the right fit for your product or service.

What can help you attract qualified prospects instead of an average Joe visitor? It's all about your content. Here's how to get started: 

Define "Qualified Prospect"

Before you can start to communicate with prospects and attract them to your site, you need to clearly define who they are. In defining who these qualified prospects are, you are actually creating buyer personas, or archetypal representations of ideal customers. Buyer personas define who you're talking to - and who you're not. Developing buyer personas should involve asking some questions to your sales, marketing, and customer support teams and also interviewing and surveying customers. When you're done, your research should be compiled into a detailed description of each persona. 

Create Content

It's hard to attract prospects with content if you don't have any content published. Fortunately, there are many kinds of content to get started with, including blogs, eBooks, infograhics, videos, white papers, and case studies. Everything is content, and the content you can create is endless. 

One strategy for getting started with content creation is to create a series of blog posts that answer your qualified prospects' frequently asked questions. Each post can answer one question (or a few if they're related). When new prospects have this question and see your post on a search engine results page, they can click through, bringing traffic to your website.

Keep Creating Content

It's not enough to create content once and call it quits. Especially in the eyes of Google and for search engine optimization, you need to continually create unique content about a topic. This benefits your goal of attracting qualified propects to your website in a few ways:

1. Google likes websites that are "fresh" or frequently updated. When you're publishing new blog posts or site pages, Google can tell and rewards you for it by improving your search ranking. Better ranked results are more likely to be clicked on.
2. Google wants to make sure it's delivering authoritative results to users. Among other things, an authoritative site is one that covers a topic extensively, which means having more than one page about that topic. Again, Google will rank more authoritative sites higher.
3. You'll help your prospects again and again. Beyond the algorithms and computers, creating attractive content is about solving a problem. With that in mind, your content should always help prospects, without a sales pitch. When you help them, you're building a relationship with them. When they're ready to buy, that relationship will help you close the deal. 

Promote Your Content

Attracting visitors isn't just about publishing some thoughts and sitting back, waiting for organic traffic to pick up and leads to come pouring in -  you have to work for it. Content promotion through social media helps you grow your reach and attract more website visitors. Just be sure you're promoting to relevant social channels, based on your buyer personas. If your community doesn't spend a lot of time on Pinterest, it doesn't make sense to spend a lot of time promoting content there. That said, you do want to take the time to test and measure different social sites and strategies. 

Don't Be Afraid

Above all else, don't be afraid of putting words down on paper (or, in this case, on a computer screen). It can be hard to get started with content creation, but once you do, you'll start to see an increase in website visitors and qualified leads... all the way through your sales funnel to prospects. Start with a small goal, like publishing 1 new blog post a week for a quarter, then expand your calendar to include more frequent blogging and lead generating offers like eBooks. Once you get started and start measuring results, you'll be hooked!