Using Content Marketing to Grow Your List

According to the Content Marketing Institute, Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.

So, how do you take someone from reading content to making the leap to give you their email address? Here are some tips for growing your email list using content marketing…

Create Great Content

We realize this sounds like a no-brainer. It isn’t. Creating great content can be a time-consuming, challenging endeavor. You have to work hard to make your content entertaining and valuable to the consumer so they want to consume it and in turn tell others about it.

Great content can come in many different forms, but one way to get people added to your email list is through offering a free digital product. Whether it is a blog article, report, free guide, checklist, eBook, video or some other type of free download. Having something to offer in exchange for their email information is always worth the effort.

Share Your Content

Another aspect of your content marketing strategy is how you plan on sharing your content. Sharing it across your social platforms allows more eyes to see your content and potentially sign up. If your social media channels don’t have many people engaging with your posts, Facebook ads offer cost-effective options when it comes to boosting your content posts in order to reach a larger audience that would be interested in your content.

Optimize Your Content

Once you draw people to your website to access your content, make sure that you give them plenty of opportunities to subscribe to your newsletter, or download one of your free guides. Our partner, DigitalMarketer, does this very well. On one of their blog posts I counted six opportunities to sign up to their mailing list via products or free content they offer.

Don’t Be Afraid to Ask

You’ve spent a lot of time creating valuable content for your audience; so don’t be afraid to ask people to sign up! Many sites downplay email signups in favor of social media icons. But those fans, followers, and likes are not quite as valuable as getting them on your email list. Place your email sign up form prominently. And better yet, create a popup box or lightbox to really grab the attention of your reader.

One great example of how a lightbox can help your email signups comes from SocialMediaExaminer.com. Between January 2011 and January 2013, the site’s email list grew 375% to over 190,000 readers. While most of this success comes from the high-quality content they provided, founder Mike Stelzner attributes nearly 70% of signups to the site’s popover opt-in form.

 

The key to growing your email list with content marketing starts with providing great, quality content. People will never subscribe to or download your content if it doesn’t benefit them. Once you have a base of content, it’s just a matter of getting people to see it via social media and providing them with plenty of ways to sign up to your list.

If you need help with content development or growing your email list, contact Sales & Marketing Technologies by calling (407) 682-2222 or using the contact form below.