How to Skyrocket Your Lead Generation With Content Upgrades

Source: Neil Patel

Many businesses struggle with attracting high-quality leads.

Even if you have a large email list, how do you know if your leads are qualified or where they fall in the sales funnel?

A lead-generation form on a landing page can help you collect email addresses. However, more targeted forms of lead generation — such as content upgrades — can help you attract not only more leads, but also win over better-quality prospects.

An email list populated with people who will never buy from you doesn’t have any value at all.

You probably already know that you should target your blog content to specific buyer personas and to prospects at particular parts of the sales funnel.

You might also know that free downloads, such as lead magnets, can help you build your email list.

But what if you combine the two to create a highly targeted, expertly qualified list of leads?

Combining lead generation with content upgrades can save you time, money, and headaches. But how does the process work?

What are content upgrades?

A content upgrade is a piece of content that you offer as a bonus to your readers in exchange for their email addresses. In that way, it’s a lot like a lead magnet.

It’s just far more specific.

Your lead-gen strategy might encompass lots of different marketing angles, from PPC to cold calls.

Using your content to generate leads can become an integral part of that strategy.

Imagine this:

You write a long-form blog post with lots of meaty content.

Instead of publishing the entire thing on your blog like usual, though, you add an opt-in form on the post and invite readers to provide their email addresses so they can “unlock” the rest of the content.

It’s kind of like a paywall. The only difference is that readers don’t have to part with their hard-earned cash. They just hand over their contact information.

You can see a prime example of this type of expandable content on the Media Shower blog:

This CTA comes after a long, value-rich blog post. If readers want to get a worksheet to help them maximize their content marketing campaigns, they have to fork over their email addresses.

If you’ll notice, there’s some blurred text just below the opt-in form. It visually represents the content upgrade.

Vertical Response uses a similar strategy on an article about email list building:

It’s a slightly different format, but it can work just as well.

In this case, Vertical Response put the CTA in the middle of the blog post. There’s an introduction, the CTA, and the bulk of the actual article.

MarketingProfs does something similar. Instead of using a generic opt-in form, the company asks readers to become members — for free.

Membership suggests something exclusive and valuable by itself. The fact that readers don’t have to pay for membership removes some of the objections that prospects might have about signing up.

Again, you can see the blurred-out text underneath the CTA. This is strategic. It suggests that valuable, juicy content awaits the reader.

Another option is to create a standard listicle. Provide the first few steps or items in your post just like normal but use an opt-in form to allow readers to unlock the content upgrade.

Why are content upgrades better than standard lead-gen forms?

So far, content upgrades sound pretty similar to lead magnets, right? And they are.

There’s a catch, though. A lead magnet is usually pretty generic. You create it for your entire audience.

For instance, if you visit the Butcher Box website and try to click away, you get presented with a popup:

The lead magnet consists of recipes, special offers, and other attractive incentives. But you’ll notice that it isn’t very specific.

The same goes for the popup at Digital Photography School.

You get free weekly tips and tutorials when you sign up. However, the subjects of those tutorials aren’t clear.

There’s also a more traditional lead magnet, in the form of a downloadable e-book, at Give Good UX. It’s called “The 10 Commandments of UI Design.”

That’s more specific, right? It’s tailored to a large segment of the company’s target audience.

However, you can get even more specific with content upgrades on specific blog posts. Best of all, you can use the same content upgrade for multiple posts as long as they share intended audiences.

Let’s say that I wanted to add a content upgrade or expandable content to my article on increasing social media fans through user-generated content.

I’d want to get very specific about the type of content upgrade I include:

• Scripts or templates for soliciting user-generated content
• A case study on a trusted brand’s use of UGC
• An audio recording of the post itself

You’ll notice that all of these proposed content upgrades deal specifically with the topic of the blog post. I’d stick to content about social media and UGC.

Later, if I write a follow-up post on either one of these topics, I can use the same content upgrade. However, if I want to offer expandable content on a post about PPC, I’ll need to create new material.

If you think content upgrades aren’t worth the effort, consider some of the latest data points. Content Upgrade Pro aggregated a few telling statistics about content upgrade performance.

Conversion rates between 20 and 60 percent are incredible. Even if you experience slightly less impressive conversion rates, you’ll still get a chance to beat the competition.

What content upgrades should you create?

There are lots of different types of content upgrades you might use. Before you settle on the type, though, consider the answers to these three questions:

1. Where is your reader in the sales funnel?
2. What pain point or problem is the reader experiencing?
3. What information…

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