Get Better Leads Through Targeted Content

Hi everyone, thanks for joining. My name is Leah Hart. I am the Integrated Digital Marketing Strategist at FourFront, and I will be taking you through this webinar today.

So today we are going to be talking about a topic that is near and dear to every marketer’s heart. That is lead quality, or audience quality.

And specifically, I’m going to be talking about how you can adjust the content, both on your website and off, to attract the audience that you really want, the people who are really qualified, who are going to make your sales team happy, while also kind of rejecting and pushing away the people who are not the best fit. So we’re going to be talking about how to move from vanity traffic measures to real sales-ready leads.

Alright, so if you’re like a lot of marketers, you are in this position where your traffic is up but your fit is down.

Now at FourFront, I work with organizations on exactly this problem. Their content maybe performs well on paper, but it isn’t bringing in the right people.

And I’ve actually written about this in before on the FourFront blog. But more leads doesn’t always mean more revenue, but better leads do.

This session is about the mechanism behind that. So by mid to late year, a familiar pattern tends to kind of surface on a lot of dashboards where traffic is climbing, engagement looks healthy, but somewhere inside the organization, someone is still saying, these aren’t the right people.

And that gap is a signal. If you’re optimizing for traffic and treating audience quality as someone else’s problem, this session is going to challenge that, but by the end you’ll have a way to check any page or any content for it for yourself.

Alright, so a lot of times when people are thinking about conversion rate optimization or tweaking things on their site to get more or better leads, kind of the first thing that people think of is, oh, I should make changes to my form.

You know, fewer questions, better questions. But honestly, before anyone fills out a form or books a call or applies, the content on your page decides who’s going to convert long before they ever even look at your form.

And this happens in four distinct steps that align with four distinct theories in marketing or psychology. And what’s fun is that these things are happening whether you’re paying attention to them or not.

So I’m going to spend the next few minutes walking through each one. this concept in cognitive science called information scent, and it describes how people decide whether to keep reading almost instantly based on cues that either match their situation or they don’t.

They’re not evaluating your whole page. They’re scanning the opening for a signal that says, this is either for me or it not You can’t get a read on Now, once your reader is paying attention, the next question is whether they believe what they’re reading.

There’s an economic idea behind this called signaling theory, and it explains why costly, hard-to-fake signals are more trustworthy than cheap ones—in job markets, in evolutionary biology, and in content.

So generic language, especially in the age of AI, costs nothing to produce and could describe anyone. But real specificity—the kind that requires actually knowing a customer’s exact situation—is expensive to produce convincingly.

That takes real time and real experience. And that cost is exactly what makes your content believable. So, what should that specificity actually be about?

A page built around what you sell describes a category, service, a program, a product line. But nobody’s search actually starts with your category.

it starts with the specific situation they’re trying to move through. Content that only speaks to the category keeps pulling in anyone who’s loosely adjacent to it.

Content that speaks to the actual circumstance only pulls in the people living in it. So, when we’re talking about a circumstance, we’re talking about kind of three separate parts.

Functional, emotional, and social. So, let’s think about an example. A purchasing manager choosing a vendor needs their specific parts machined correctly.

That’s their functional need. They also don’t want to feel anxious about missing a deadline. Emotional need. And they want to look competent to their boss for picking the right supplier.

That’s their social need. So, content that only addresses the first part or only addresses one of these is missing two-thirds of why someone actually says yes.

And missing that is exactly what makes a reader hesitate instead of act. Closing gaps is what scent, trust, and circumstance-specific content all build toward.

The term inbound marketers use for it is self-selection. Every unqualified call your sales team doesn’t have to take is a filter that worked upstream.

Most organizations let this happen by accident. The rest of this session is about how to do it on purpose. In content marketing, success is just as much about repelling the wrong people as it is about attracting the right ones.

So, broad, surface-level content answers a question just well enough to hold attention, but it doesn’t give off any distinct scent, it doesn’t earn any particular trust, and it doesn’t ask anyone to self-select.

Every visitor who was never going to convert stays exactly where they landed. Every metric that measures activity goes up, but the metric that measures fit does not.

So, the visitors that inflated volume a moment ago are the same ones that depth and specificity will repel. That’s not really a new cost, it is the mechanism working exactly as it’s intended, and things moving in the direction that actually helps your bottom line.

Now, I wish I could tell you that you’ll keep the same volume of traffic and leads, and that they’ll just simply magically be all better.

That’s possible, but it not the most likely outcome. What’s likely is that you’ll see a decrease in volume paired with an increase in quality.

So, how do we start moving in that direction? page or piece of content, and you can run them in just a few minutes.

Question 1 checks whether you’ve named a real circumstance, not just an industry or a title, that’s strong enough to produce a real scent.

Question 2 checks for the giveaway, a detail that gives a wrong-fit reader a clear reason to leave. And question 3 is the fix, the detail that confirms fit for the reader you actually want to stay.

Now if this feels familiar, it related to something I’ve written about before, fit intent and engagement as three things that separate a good lead from a bad one.

And this is kind the content-side version of that same idea, applied before someone ever becomes a lead. Now, quick plug, but what you’re seeing here is the quick version.

But I created a whole playbook I’m calling the Content Signal Evaluator. I know, that’s a mouthful, which goes deeper with structured prompts for every page on your site.

I’ll share the link a little later on in this presentation, but you can also reach out to the FourFront team for that asset if you’re not seeing it for any reason.

All right, now this is a made-up example. it definitely not real client content. But I’m including it just to show you the check-in action.

So this is a pretty typical line for the category. We provide high-quality manufacturing solutions to meet your production needs. So if we think back to our checks, this line immediately runs into trouble on the first two questions.

What circumstance is this reader in? This could describe any buyer with any part of any volume in any industry. And what would make the wrong-fit reader move on?

There’s nothing here that does that. This line is built to keep everyone reading, which is exactly the problem. So, this is the same idea, now run through question 3.

This version names a specific circumstance—an aerospace supplier—close to a deal or a production run. Not somebody who’s early in general research.

A buyer who needs 10,000 injection-molded plastic units reads this and knows this is not for them and moves on immediately.

A buyer who actually needs low-volume aerospace-grade aluminum work reads the same line and knows that this is built for them.

The topic stays the same, but the filter changes completely. You can pull up your own highest traffic page right now.

Or make a note to check it after the recording ends. You don’t need any tools for this, just your page and the three questions, which I’ll have for you on the next slide.

So here we’re going to ask the same three questions. If you can’t answer what circumstance brought them there, that’s your first finding.

If nothing on the page would make a wrong-fit reader leave, that’s your second finding. And whatever is missing for your right fit reader to know that this content is for them is your starting point for your rewrite.

So you’ll know more about that page in five minutes than most quarterly reports will tell you about your audience fit.

Now, right, friends, here is that playbook that I mentioned.

It really goes into this whole idea in more detail and walks you step-by-step through running this check on your highest impact pages.

Now, like I said, I’ve written about lead quality before, and I have kind of banged on the drum that success isn’t about attracting as many leads as possible, it’s about attracting the right ones. And when you start looking at your pages through this lens, you can really start to hone in on the people who you want to be hitting submit on that lead form, not the biggest number possible.

And this is a problem that we work on with our clients at FourFront all the time. So if you start going through the workbook and you’re running into questions, feel free to reach out.

We can definitely have that conversation. All right, well, that’s it for this presentation. Thank you for watching. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to me via email or connect with us on our website or on LinkedIn and definitely don’t sleep on downloading that playbook.

It’s free and it makes the whole concept easy to put into practice on your site. All right, thank you so much.