Lead generation companies exist to gather the contact details of consumers and company owners to sell on to related businesses, and their owners are, from my dealings with them, absolutely obsessed with SEO. They live, breathe, and feel it—and that passion is their most important weapon.

So how can marketing teams compete with such a daunting adversary? Play them at their own game.

Why lead generation works

Lead generation companies make a lot of money. HomeAdvisor, one of the sites featured in the top results for “house extension cost”, charges up to $75 per lead and they often sell each lead to three different contractors. That’s a cool $225 for a name, address, email, and telephone number. Contractors also have to pay a $28.99 monthly fee for access to these leads too, according to VadaliaRental.

After a reasonably significant initial investment of time and money in keyword discovery, content creation, and backlink building, a lead generation company’s ongoing costs are then minimal.

Contractors put up with the high costs charged by lead gen companies for three reasons. First, they need leads to survive. Second, they often lack the ability to find new leads themselves. Third, each lead is heavily qualified to assess the actual level of interest in each enquirer prior to offering it for sale. A very effective way to get rid of tire kickers.

The secrets of its success

Owners of these companies generally dislike and distrust pay-per-click and they rely almost exclusively on organic search results to generate the leads they sell to clients.

These are the main approaches they take when producing and promoting organic content to win traffic and leads:

• Create super-long, keyword-dense, information-packed articles with tables, images, and external high domain authority links.
• Make sure to place the contact form above the fold.
• Target lower-competition, higher-volume keywords. Spend hours looking for intent-laden keywords on Ahrefs, Moz, and SEMRush which may have been overlooked by other companies.
• Link obsessively—external, internal, and backlinking particularly to .gov and .edu sites for better Trust Flow.
• Create top- and middle-funnel content with the purpose of providing internal linking to the main lead generation pages.
• Never let a hit to any page go to waste—always make sure you do everything you can to get visitors’ contact details.

How to compete against lead generation companies and win

First, find high-volume, low-competition keywords which have the necessary buying intent.

For example, according to Ahrefs, “dog groomers” attracts 86,000 searchers a month in the USA and it needs 123 or more quality links to rank on page one of Google SERP.

A better keyword to target would be “dog groomers near me.” That gets 89,000 searches a month and requires just six quality links to get onto page one. HomeGuide.com did just that and gets 19,000 visits to the page every month.

Before they decide on a course of action, the most successful lead generation companies I’ve worked with first look hard at the SERP for a potential keyword. What results does Google return? Which other sites have decided that this keyword is important enough to go after and what do they want from each visitor they receive? Would finishing on page one for this result make money?

Second, create supporting long-tail keyword blog content which links to the relevant main product or service page for SEO value. Lead gen companies hav the attitude of one chance to impress, mirror that and pitch your heart out to try to get their contact details.

For content, work with an experienced SEO copywriter who has a track record of balancing the need to please Google with the ability to sell in written form. The cost of hiring such a writer may be intimidating for smaller companies but it’s important to put this outlay in context with PPC.

Third, update Google every time content is added to or changed on your website. Compared with just a few years ago, the search engine giant seems to process the results remarkably quickly.

Finally, for national companies, build quality backlinks on high domain rating .com-type sites as well as .gov and .edu sites, but only target 3^rd party sites whose content actually relates to your products and services. For regional companies, localize your content as much as possible and build a formidable Google My Business presence.

SEO experts rightly tell marketers to concentrate on high-volume, low-competition keywords to win traffic. The success of lead generation sites proves them right. But that’s not the only reason they do well. For lead generation sites, buying intent is often just as important as a keyword’s winnability.

After all, what’s the point of spending time and money creating content to get thousands of new visitors if they’re never going to leave their contact details?

The post Using SEO to Compete with Lead Generation Sites appeared first on Contently.

Because of the pandemic, we’re living within the rectangular screens that sit on our desk and in our pockets. But this reality has a silver-lining for creatives—marketing leaders are shifting their budgets into content.

The one thing that keeps me up at night, though, is how marketers measure content success.

In a recent Contently survey, 95 percent of marketers told us they expected their budget to increase or stay the same this year. But just 36 percent said they were satisfied with their company’s ability to measure the success of content.

This is because measuring content marketing is more complicated than performance marketing. Content has a huge impact across all stages of the customer journey, but you can’t capture ROI with a simple attribution model on Day 1. While everyone wants to attribute content directly to revenue, it’s silly to attempt that before you gauge how effectively you built an audience or generated leads.

Since content marketing is at such an inflection point right now, we wanted to share what we learned about tracking success over the years. So, with the help of our team, I published the industry’s first ever Content Measurement Maturity Model. You can read the whole thing here, but I also wanted to briefly walk through how it works.

Our 10-Step Content Measurement Maturity Model

Our Content Measurement Maturity Model consists of 10 steps spread across four stages—crawl, walk, run, and fly. When companies master measurement and optimization in one stage, they’ll be prepared to graduate to the next.

• The crawl stage is strategic to audience building.
• The walk stage is strategic to lead generation.
• The run stage is strategic to revenue generation.
• The fly stage is strategic to revenue attribution.

In the graphic, you’ll notice there’s only one measurement step in the fly stage—multi-touch content attribution—because it’s incredibly hard to do right, and if anyone else tells you different … well, frankly, they’re lying.

Let’s take a closer look at each stage.

Crawl: Strategic to Audience Building

The crawl stage is all about measuring audience building. You need to attract an audience before you can measure the down-funnel actions people take.

1. Audience Reach. Here, we’re looking at tried-and-true reach metrics, as you’ll see in the table below. According to our survey, this is the step most commonly adopted by marketers, with 80 percent tracking audience reach key performance indicators (KPIs).
2. Audience Engagement. AKA how deeply are you engaging folks with your content? It’s not enough to get people to come. You also need them to stay.
3. SEO Effectiveness. SEO is foundational to building an audience. According to Contently Analytics, 67 percent of all traffic to brand sites comes from organic search. Surprisingly, though, only 57 percent of marketers track these metrics.

Walk: Strategic to Lead Generation

Once you’ve started successfully building an audience, you want to inspire people to take actions that’ll create a deeper relationship with your brand—like signing up for a newsletter or virtual event, using an interactive tool, or requesting a demo.

Here we measure:

4. Leads Generated. The number of people taking a conversion action that’s important to your brand.

5. Lead Engagement. Using a marketing automation system like Pardot, you’re able to track how a lead engages with your brand’s content—the emails they open and click through, the pages they visit, the articles they read—and assign an appropriate “score” for that behavior. Similarly, tools like Contently Docalytics and Adobe allow you to see how a lead engages with “big rock” downloadable content like research papers.

6. Share of Voice. This measures not only how effectively you’re inspiring folks to take an action that pushes them into your pipeline, but also how well your content is controlling the conversation and boosting your brand in the market relative to your competitors.

Run: Strategic to Revenue Generation

In the run stage, we cover the areas that’ll get your CMO and CFO excited—content attribution to revenue.

Our model recommends three complementary approaches that will help capture the full picture of content’s impact on your bottom line.

7. SEO Value. SEO Value calculates how much your organic search traffic is worth to your brand. It’s a leading indicator of revenue returns—we launched Content Value in our platform this past fall, and it’s been a revelation for our customers, allowing them to measure the monetary impact of their content proactively, instead of just retroactively.

8. Lead Value. A straightforward approach in which you multiply the number of leads your content generates by the traditional cost-per-lead (CPL) for your marketing team.

For instance, a leading B2B software company that Contently partners with recently launched a large-scale content campaign that drove 22,000 leads. Since the company’s average cost-per-lead was $71, the marketing team was able to attribute over $1.5 million in revenue impact to their content efforts, a 7x return on their investment.

Ex: 22,000 x $71 = $1.56M

9. Single-Touch Content Attribution. A single-touch attribution model gives 100 percent of the credit for a sale to one marketing effort. The downside of a single-touch model is that it’s limiting, particularly in a B2B cotext, when there are many touchpoints across the buyer’s journey. The upside is that it’s relatively simple to implement, as most marketing automation systems and customer relationship management systems (CRMs) make single-touch attribution easy to track.

Everyone wants to jump to this step off the bat, but remember: It only makes sense to focus on attribution once you’ve built an audience and started measuring your ability to drive and engage leads.

On their own, each of these approaches has gaps, but when factored in together, they provide a holistic picture of content’s impact on revenue.

Fly: Strategic to Revenue Attribution

In the “Fly” section of our maturity model is the final step: Multi-Touch Content Attribution.

A multi-touch attribution model factors in all actions a customer takes over the course of the sales cycle, often divvying up the credit on a weighted scale. For instance, it may give double credit to the first and last touch in the cycle, but equal weight to all other touches in between.

We made this the final stage in our model because it’s so difficult to implement—especially inside enterprise organizations with poor data hygiene. It’s the white whale of content measurement—much discussed and desired, but rarely captured, even after a long odyssey.

If you’re still at the crawl or walk stage—you’re not alone. And you can still produce really impactful work there. Less than a third of marketers we surveyed measured are currently looking beyond lead generation.

The good news is that our maturity model is designed to help you reach the next stage and get comfortable with these content marketing ROI metrics. After all, the whole point of content measurement is to make smarter decisions.

Check out the full model here. And to evaluate where you stand right now, take the interactive assessment below.

The post Measure Your Content Marketing ROI With These 10 Steps appeared first on Contently.

“We came with the attitude that this was a sacred ground,” Joe McCambley, who helped create one of the first banner ads, told Fast Company. “The rest of advertising had been ruined and dammit, we weren’t going to let that happen this time.”

If only.

Depending on your study of choice, click-through rates clock in around 0.2 percent for banner ads these days—and most of those clicks are accidental. They’ve become digital mosquitos hovering over the sacred ground—painfully annoying things that follow you around wherever you go.

But what if we were thinking about them the wrong way? Contently’s marketing team recently placed some banners on our site as an experiment, and they actually worked. In this case, however, we made one important tweak that might seem counterintuitive: We used the space to promote ourselves.

Making some changes

Every month or so, we host a webinar. We set a date, schedule a few announcement emails leading up to it, and a bunch of people register. Along the way, we also mix in social posts on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn that link to the registration page and dedicate a spot to it in our weekly newsletter.

For years, that encapsulated our promotion strategy, which meant webinar leads were both predictable (which is good) and flat (not as good). We came to expect around 600-700 leads per presentation, give or take a few depending on the topic.

In 2019, we decided to add a thin banner to the top of our homepage to promote upcoming resources and webinars. No image, just one line of text and a call-to-action button.

Our aim was to fit the design in with the rest of the site. We hoped it would be a tasteful alternative to the chunky ads that take over the top of most media sites. Sure enough, e-book downloads increased and webinar registrations gradually started to jump to 700-800 on average. All without needing to do any extra outreach over email or other channels.

Next up, we decided to put the same banner on our blog homepage and test out a vertical banner on the right rail of our individual article pages. The potential here was huge because most TCS readers come directly from search or email. We went with a more traditional style on the vertical banners so we could add a visual element.

The move generated immediate returns. Our latest effort, The 2021 Content Checklist, brought in 1,276 registrants, and became our most popular webinar to date. Here’s a breakdown of registrants by source:

That’s 630 leads from the banner ads on the homepage and blog, or 49.4 percent of the total. Not bad for promoting a webinar that covers complex marketing issues.

Rethinking your website real estate

Truthfully, we didn’t expect to double our webinar audience with a few tweaks. Aren’t people supposed to be blind to the spots designated for banner ads around the web?

The answer really depends on the content.

In 2018, the Nielsen Norman Group ran an eyetracking study to see exactly where people looked on the page when encountering ads. Unsurprisingly, users ignored all the typical ad placements on the top and sides of pages.

However, brands have an opportunity to rethink all the available space on their sites. On The Content Strategist, our audience comes to us for content marketing expertise, and they’ve never seen ads for other outlets on our site, so the banners probably caught their attention in a good way.

It’s a tactic I’d strongly recommend, especially if you have a trusted blog or resource center. By putting owned content and relevant links there, you can significantly increase website conversions and, in some cases, direct revenue.

Take Marriott, one of our clients, which uses this approach on its Marriott Bonvoy Traveler magazine. Traveler covers 87 destinations around the world, and each section blends local tips with in-depth features and profiles. Marriott doesn’t plug itself in the content, which could turn off potential customers. Instead, the company recommends where to stay and what to do in the spots typically reserved for ads.

As our head of marketing Joe Lazauskas put it: “Once you finish reading, Traveler makes it very easy to book a room or a Marriott Rewards experience with a module at the bottom of the page. Marriott essentially acts as the advertiser of its own high-quality editorial content.”

The strategy made an immediate impact as Marriott’s content led directly to millions of dollars in new bookings.

It’s a good reminder that you should aim to make it as easy as possible for people to convert on your site. For marketers wondering how to drive more leads from their ungated content, this is one easy way to do it.

Banner ads may have hurt marketing in the past, but there’s still time for us to clean up the sacred ground online and benefit in the future.

The post How We Doubled Webinar Leads By Becoming Our Own Biggest Advertiser appeared first on Contently.

Some marketers expect content revenue to have a linear path. You make content, people click on it, and then—BOOM—they immediately buy something or fill out a demo request form. After all, if our search ads work that way, shouldn’t content work that way too?

It doesn’t, but that’s not a bad thing. Content is all about building trust and loyalty with people so that when they’re ready to buy something, you’re their first choice—driving continuous demand and making the sales process much easier.

This is why we invest so much of our marketing budget in content at Contently. The vast majority of people don’t just read an article like this and request a demo. But they do come back and read something a few days later, then sign up for our newsletter or attend a webinar. When the time is right, they request a demo to learn how we can help.

While content conversion doesn’t follow a linear pathway, you can chart these stages to tie your content to revenue.

The 3 stages of content ROI

I’ve found it’s easiest to tackle content marketing ROI when you chunk it into three stages. The best place to start is at the upper half of the funnel, where you can map how your audience turns into sales-ready leads.

1. Audience growth

At this stage, you’re trying to make a damn good impression on your target audience in hopes of converting them to the next stage. You want to build awareness, trust, and an overall positive brand sentiment through helpful, entertaining content.

Most marketers are comfortable with the key metrics at this stage—they’re the ones Google Analytics shows you default: unique visitors, return visitors, time on site, pages/sessions, and scroll depth. Social metrics—shares, comments, likes—come into play here too.

We’ll talk about how to maximize audience growth in a bit, but some content marketers tend to stop here. That’s a mistake because if you want to drive revenue from your content, you need to inspire people to take an action.

To drive more action, you want a strong SEO strategy that’ll bring in the right type of readers. For instance, we focus on ranking for keywords like “best content marketing platforms,” “how to write a white paper,” “enterprise content marketing,” “content marketing for banks,” and “b2b content marketing funnel.” These keywords are likely to attract people who are good customer fits for Contently.

You also shouldn’t be afraid to use paid distribution to reach more folks who fit your ideal customer profile. It’s a great way to grow the top of your content marketing funnel. It’s getting more effective, too, since paid content distribution costs are down 34 percent since March.

2. Content leads

A lot of marketers call anyone who downloads their e-book or attends a webinar a “lead,” but I find that misleading—particularly to your sales team. Just because someone downloads an e-book doesn’t mean they’re ready for a sales call. It’d be like if you downloaded Tinder and immediately got a passive aggressive voicemail from a wedding planner. These things take time.

I prefer to call these folks a “content conversion” or “content lead.” They’ve taken an action that’ll allow us to build a deeper relationship with them. Trust doesn’t magically build after one article. But if someone starts reading your newsletter every week, or attending hour-long webinars, or takes an educational course you made, that person is much more likely to become your customer in the future.

Your job is to make it as easy as possible for people to convert into content leads. Give them a few different options. For instance, we’ll offer free content resources each week on a blue bar across the top of our blog. Right below it, there’s a sticky button to subscribe to our newsletter.

Once a month, we’ll also target each visitor with a prompt to sign up for our newsletter using Sumo, which converts at almost a 3 percent rate.

We also include a content offer unit on the right rail. We’re a tech company, so we don’t need to sell ads, but we can still put that white space to good use.

If you want a B2C example, Marriott does a great job of using smart UX on its popular travel mag, Marriott Bonvoy Traveler, to maximize conversions.

(Disclosure: Marriott is a Contently customer.)

Here, you want to track both the number of content conversions as well as the rate your visitors convert to one of your content offers. Google Analytics conversion goals are a great tool to do this. (Check out Andy Crestodina’s guide for more.) And you need to properly nurturing content leads through a marketing automation platform until they become sales-ready leads.

3. Sales-ready leads

Next, you want to nurture your content leads until they become sales-ready. What is a sales-ready lead? Someone who’s raised their hand and asked to learn more about your product, usually by filling out a form on your website.

At this stage, you want to nurture your content leads with a drip campaign of relevant content. If someone signed up for a webinar on content marketing ROI, follow up with additional articles, case studies, and product videos that cover the topic. Feel free to include a call-to-action to talk to sales. You want to make it easy to convert—but only after you’ve delivered valuable content.

Once those leads hit sales, you can drive a massive amount of additional ROI through a strong sales enablement strategy. That’s the topic of a whole other blog post, which you can read here.

Making your own map

To tie content to revenue, track your conversion rates at each of these three stages and map how content flows downstream until someone becomes a sales-ready lead.

Say we drive 100,000 unique visitors at the audience growth stage. Based on our conversion goals, we know that 1 percent will sign up for a webinar or another content offer, while another 2-3 percent will sign up for our newsletter. This translates to 1,000 webinar sign-ups and 2,000 newsletter sign-ups.

Next, via our marketing automation platform, we look at the rate at which our webinar attendees and newsletter subscribers convert to demo requests. Our model shows that for every 100,000 visitors to our blog, we’ll generate 80 demo requests.

Then, to get all the way to revenue, you just need to understand how much each sales-ready lead is worth to your business. Say that your average deal size is $100,000, and each lead converts to a sale at a 5 percent rate. In that scenario, each demo request adds $5,000 in weighted pipeline, and those 80 demo requests are worth $400,000 to your business.

The compounding returns of the content marketing funnel

The great news about content marketing is that when it’s done well, you’ll see compounding returns over time.

Most marketing is fleeting. Spend $500 on ads today, and you’ll have to spend again tomorrow to see the same results. But spend $500 on a piece of great content today and it will drive continuous traffic and leads for free—by ranking well for search, getting shared on social, engaging website visitors, and increasing newsletter engagement.

As I wrote last month, this phenomenon is called the compounding returns of content. Even as your monthly investment in content remains flat, the results will compound over time. And if your content marketing funnel is set up correctly, that audience growth will translate into sales.

There’s never been a better time to build your audience. Engagement with branded content is up 16 percent right now, and people are eager for insights and thought leadership that will help them overcome new challenges and do their jobs better.

Help them overcome those challenges while following the guidelines here, and you’ll build a content marketing machine that’ll deliver compounding revenue for years to come.

This article is based off my webinar, How to Make the Case for Content Marketing: Compounding Returns and ROI. Watch it on demand here.

The post How to Map Content Marketing to Revenue, in 3 Steps appeared first on Contently.

I was fresh off running a failed news site—one of those late 2000s editorial ventures that sounded cool in theory, but didn’t actually have a stable business model. Working for a software company brought a bit of a learning curve.

“We need to do some industry-specific e-books to drive leads,” my boss told me.

“Totally,” I’d reply, nodding aggressively. “Let’s drive those leads … to the bank!”

Even if I didn’t totally understand the funnel yet, I did know how to research and write. So, I’d compile as much first and third-party research as possible, interview smart people, and write reports with pun-heavy titles like “Banking on Content.”

Coming from a digital media background, I hated the PDF—a format that’s only optimized for one thing: printing. So, I’d repurpose each e-book into formats that were actually readable. I’d make three or four different blog posts out of excerpts from the report and include CTAs to download the full report. Whenever possible, I’d offer one or two of these excerpts as a guest post to another marketing blog, to widen our audience.

I’d also turn the key findings into infographics, and turn that infographic into 5-6 new social graphics to engage our audiences on Twitter and LinkedIn. Over the long run, these divisible pieces of content drove way more e-book traffic and leads than the original landing page.

It turns out there was a name for what we were doing: the hub and spoke strategy. As we explain in the lead gen section of our content strategy course, it’s a smart strategy to turn your meaty research and reports into smaller pieces of content, tailored to your various distribution channels. These divisible pieces of content are the spokes that drive traffic back to your “hub” content.

So how do you figure out what your spoke content should be? To help, we created this Hub & Spoke content strategy worksheet to complete with your team via a silent brainstorm, followed by a team discussion.

To make this all super meta, this post is actually a “spoke” piece, intended to inspire you to sign up for our lead gen content strategy course. So please do that. It’ll help you drive more leads, and it’ll make me look good.

The post How the Hub and Spoke Strategy Can Help You Drive More Content Leads appeared first on Contently.

This speaks to two things: my crippling inability to maintain work/life boundaries and, more importantly, the ubiquity of annoying lead generation content. Land on most tech blogs, and you’re immediately hit with a passive-aggressive prompt to download a Guide to Marketing Automation. The only way to make it go away is it is to click “I’m a weak parasite on society and don’t want to generate more leads.”

As more downloadable e-books, guides, webinars, and reports flood the web, it’s harder and harder to get people to convert. That’s because most lead gen content isn’t very good, and people are wary of falling into the marketing funnel of hell.

You should only gate content if there’s a real purpose behind the gate. The main use cases: webinars (because you need to send invites/reminders), educational courses (because you need to send the next series), and exclusive subscriber content.

Even more important than the format of your lead generation content is its originality and impact. Most lead generation content is generic and boring. So how do you come up with great ideas?

Our favorite lead gen exercise

To start, you need a structured brainstorm. Traditional group brainstorms where everyone sits around and throws out ideas are proven to be extremely ineffective. With my team, I love to start with a silent brainstorm, in which everyone spends the first 10 minutes writing down as many ideas as they can on Post-Its. The only prompt I give is that the idea should be original and help our target audience see the world differently or be better at their job.

Then, as a group, we map each idea onto four quadrants, with one axis representing originality and the other representing impact. We agree as a team on where each idea falls. Usually, the best ideas land in the upper right hand corner because they’re very original and likely to make an impact.

One of the ideas that came from this process is our free content strategy course. You can sign up for the lead gen module here to access free lessons and tools, including this brainstorming worksheet.

We hope it helps, and if enough people take the course, who knows—those free e-book offers might just stop haunting my dreams.

The post How to Brainstorm Great Lead Generation Content appeared first on Contently.

The latest seminal research from Les Binet and Peter Field, titled Effectiveness in Context, analyzes hundreds of campaigns from the IPA Databank (with a focus on marketing effectiveness) and clarifies the dual model. I want to focus on the role of content strategy within an overarching marketing strategy, and how content will contribute to a common alignment across the different natures of marketing.

The last few years have seen short-term sales activation become the first priority of most enterprises, especially in the B2B domain. Enterprises invest most of their money into short-term, bottom funnel campaigns driven mostly by online paid media programs and related content, in the hope that they’ll lift sales for the next few quarters. I had a similar priority when I led marketing for a division of a large enterprise in the energy industry—brand was simply a minor focus. I keep seeing this appear as a common practice in many of the enterprises I advise. Short-term activation campaigns and sales programs were successful in most of the cases. At least, this is what I—and most marketers—thought.

According to Binet and Field, marketing effectiveness is in decline and “short-termism” is, in many ways, the mother of all marketing problems. What exactly happened? As I have mentioned, marketers have become increasingly short-term in their focus. They spend money on immediate sales activation rather than longer-term brand building. But in one of the most important sections of their research, the two authors demonstrate that over the longer term, this short-termism will rapidly deteriorate the overall impact of marketing.

Too much time spent picking the low-hanging fruit means less time watering the tree. Eventually the tree stops growing.

In most cases, a solid and documented content strategy was not even requested nor was it ever put in place. You don’t need a content strategy for executing short-term sales activation campaigns.

But things are changing—marketers are beginning to adopt an integrated model. “Brand communications create enduring memory structures that increase the base level of demand and reduce price sensitivity,” Binet said in the report. “Sales activation triggers these memories and converts them efficiently into immediate sales.”

Brand building and sales activation are not choices or alternatives—they are mutually interdependent and both are essential to long-term success. Sales activation marketing is best served by tight targeting and relevant messages, and it should focus on building your customer’s physical, tangible understanding of your brand. In contrast, brand awareness building is about increasing a consumer’s internal conception of your brand, and it is primarily driven by content that expands audience reach through stories, educational and informational content, inciting emotions, and making associations.

I have seen this play out with the clients I consult and work with, which are mostly large enterprises in the sectors of tech, finance, and energy. While in the past my strategy workshops were mostly attended by brand and content leaders, I’ve found that my audience has expanded to a vastly diverse crowd of marketers from many different domains: performance marketing, paid media, social media, and PR teams. They all share a primary challenge: securing alignment across a common audience and buyer journey.

I’ve found that this audience of professional communicators also shares the following across their different industries:

• Business and marketing goals – Marketers may pursue different micro-goals (eg. brand lift or number of leads), but they always share common macro-goals
• Common audience – They’re targeting the same people, but their approach targets different phases of the buyer journey. Brand and content focus mostly on awareness, and performance marketing targets consideration, decision, and inspiring purchases.
• Common buyer journey – Again, marketers target different stages and they clearly have different needs. Marketers focusing on brand/content need to design a centralized audience-centric content strategy. Performance marketers need to understand what resonates with their audience in the decision/purchase phases of the journey, and use good content for their activation campaigns. Field marketers need sales enablement content which spans across different stages. Social media & comm marketers need to secure alignment with the previous functions in order to lend support with solid content distribution.
• Common strategy – Built around audience and buyer journey, top funnel content and storytelling will fuel brand awareness and build enduring memories. Medium and bottom funnel content will feed the immediate need for sales activation programs.

Overall, the role of content marketing is evolving. What was once an individual and isolated rebel approach when Joe Pulizzi wrote his first books is now a consolidated mainstream role within the overarching marketing strategy.

The post How a Common Content Strategy Unites Marketing’s Different Natures appeared first on Contently.

It was incredibly frustrating to hand someone a cupcake and deliver my spiel about the play, only to have them say, “Oh, that’s cool” through a mouthful of icing and walk away. “It took forever to mix that icing. It’s vegan buttercream,” I’d grumble, not realizing that I had botched lead generation and had only barely spread brand awareness.

Infographics, as we all know, are the vegan buttercream of content marketing. If data is your sugar, then your visual metaphor is your coconut milk, and any imbalance in your ingredients will come out unappetizing and strange. Each infographic takes a lot of time to produce. Once copy has been delivered to the design team, your marketing department is in for several rounds of tweaking little details.

If you’re hoping to use your infographic as a lead generation tool, you don’t want your audience to simply look at it and walk away. The digital marketing blog Spiralytics just released a pretty meta infographic about crafting lead generation infographics, and it’s full of statistics and tips that we shared below.

Among other things, notice that LinkedIn is your optimal spot for gathering leads from infographics. According to data from Hubspot, the Content Marketing Institute, and five other sources noted in the infographic, 65 percent of marketers see leads coming in from the professional platform.

If you use all this data to optimize your infographics, you’ll hopefully nab a few interested parties when you share your visual content online. Don’t just let them take the cupcake and walk away. After all, you have a show to promote.

The post Infographic: How to Use Infographics for Lead Generation appeared first on Contently.

The fact that 100,000 people voluntarily signed up for a brand newsletter may surprise some. For GE, however, it’s the culmination of a decade-long commitment to content marketing. The company sits at the intersection of some of our most crucial sectors, like technology, energy, and transportation. As a result, the brief brims with journalistic rigor, pulling in stories from GE Reports, the brand’s main content hub, where employees across the globe explain new research and innovations by focusing on ideas instead of products. But the newsletter also contains worthwhile content from around the web that has nothing to do with the brand.

In other words, spam this is not.

“The time your audience spends with your content is really a transaction,” said Tomas Kellner, editor-in-chief of GE Reports. “You have to give them back something of value. If the content becomes too promotional, too self-serving, you will lose your audience very quickly.”

GE has managed to take brand awareness to the next level, turning its distinct point of view into something that every company wants: leads.

Building a database of 100,000 people doesn’t happen by accident. Chances are your company already has a newsletter or some e-books. But like brand awareness, lead generation requires a comprehensive plan. You can’t just slap a form on your website and expect thousands of potential customers to fill it out.

As the stakes increase, the value your content provides needs to rise as well. A great blog post can establish trust, but is it really worth someone’s contact information? Probably not. Inspiring your audience to take action calls for more substantial content.

Taking the lead

In our first playbook for marketers, we covered how brands should develop a content strategy to build awareness and establish thought leadership. We also went over the top of the marketing funnel, typically reserved for blog posts, infographics, and other types of shorter content meant to educate and entertain.

As a prospect moves down the funnel toward the engagement and consideration phases, the same strategic principles still apply. You still want to study your audience to understand their preferences and pain points. You still want to refer to your gap analysis to see what content topics and formats are fresh. And you still want to develop a distribution plan to increase the chances your work gets the attention it deserves.

Now, however, you have to do it on a bigger scale.

A lead is anyone who shows interest in your brand by taking a deliberate action to hear more. This could mean filling out a form, signing up for an email newsletter, or answering a survey. Lead generation is just the practice of influencing those people on a regular basis.

That definition may sound simple, but generating quality leads is complicated. (We’ll explore how to judge the quality of leads later in this playbook.) The experts and practitioners we spoke to for this series pointed to lead generation as the toughest part of their jobs. Brands get excited about flexing their creative muscles with awareness content, and they’re usually comfortable talking about their products and services at the bottom of the funnel. But balancing both of those instincts in the middle is where things get tricky.

“We work really hard to set a standard in terms of quality and voice,” said John Fox, athenahealth executive director of content and communications. “There’s a sense of integrity and credibility. Pivoting from that into more of a sales message requires some art so you don’t lose that. You don’t want to lose them on the next click.”

[Full disclosure: athenahealth is a Contently customer.]

On athenaInsight, the brand’s main publication, creators explore healthcare trends, speak to issues affecting physicians, and unpack the latest medical data. The content carries a helpful tone, breaking down complex topics into blog posts that fall under 1,000 words.

For lead gen content, other members of Fox’s team work on webinars and longer whitepapers that run upwards of 10 or 20 pages. Take this paper on replacing electronic health records (EHR). It’s stacked with data and sidebar panels that incorporate reporting and storytelling. Over 12 pages, there are only a handful of brand mentions woven into the narrative.

At GE, Kellner operates with a similar philosophy. He makes sure every newsletter is “not all about GE.” By focusing on topics instead of sources, GE conveys authority without puffing out its own chest too much. Subscribers can come to learn about robotics or machine learning without feeling the pressure of product placement. According to Kellner, that’s one of the key reasons the GE audience comes back for more.

“The content universe has exploded over the last five, ten years,” he said. “It’s getting bigger and bigger, it’s like the big bang happening in the content space. Individual people, brands, and old media companies are all producing content. But the day is still only twenty-four hours.”

This is an excerpt from The Content Marketer’s Playbook: Lead Generation. Click here to read the entire e-book.

The post ‘Give Them Back Something of Value’: How to Start Your Lead Generation Program appeared first on Contently.

As marketers and publishers become more sophisticated, companies have looked beyond the click for something more meaningful. Brands and publishers don’t just want you to go to a page, they want you to stay on site and remain there.

You can see that gradual shift all over digital media. In 2018, Quartz redesigned its site, specifically to improve time spent. The New Yorker ranked its 25 most popular stories by time, not readers. Reddit started wooing brands as it topped Facebook in time on site. YouTube creators even started posting longer videos to increase time metrics favored by the platform’s algorithm.

In December, it was clear the industry was shifting toward deepening relationships with audiences and keeping them around. The Nieman Lab at Harvard University noted that many publishers had set pageviews aside in 2018, opting instead to focus on quality time and time on site.

For all of those reasons and more, the metric of the year is time.

Time is money

Every marketer should find a way to tie content to revenue. But getting there requires a gradual process, and there are different checkpoints to hit along the way. Time-bound data offers marketers a path to the hard ROI they crave.

Time your audience spends on your site is an indicator of a deepening relationship, which you can’t capture if you’re just focusing on gathering readers or their impressions. As Contently’s head of strategy Joe Lazauskas is fond of saying, if content doesn’t help the user enjoy their lives more or do their jobs better, it probably sucks. Bad content is relative, though, so the tricky part is knowing what to measure.

Let’s say 100,000 people visited a brand blog last month. You might look at that big, shiny number and conclude that you’ve created something fantastic. But if most of that traffic comes from one piece of content that took off, odds are time spent will be down relative to your average post. Also, most of those people probably won’t come back if they’re coming from a wave of social momentum or a press mention. You can bet your site’s engagement metrics won’t seem as sexy the next month.

Now let’s look at a different brand blog that gets 50,000 readers per month. A lower aggregate number, but with a better balance of traffic. The audience comes regularly, and they spend more time with the content than the first company’s audience. This team is actually closer to proving ROI, but there are some people who will fixate on the big number and think otherwise.

When your data shows that people stay with your content and come back for more regularly, that signals they may be ready to progress from the top of the marketing funnel to the middle. Some brands new to content aren’t ready to get to this stage yet. However, based on what we’ve seen from our customers and the market at large, many of them are actively tracking and reporting engagement metrics that get at the quality of the content.

Time metrics you can measure

If you’re concerned with the amount of time users are spending on your site, or you want to measure the quality of the time they’re giving your content, here’s a short list of metrics on the rise that you can evaluate.

Average time spent

This—also known as dwell time to some—is simply the amount of time a visitor spends actively reading, watching, or engaged with your content. For example, your audience may spend an average of three minutes with your content. (According to Taboola, the average page session duration on publisher sites was a shade under two minutes by the end of last year.)

Google also uses the metric to rank search results, which means it presupposes that users are trying to answer a question or learn about a subject they’ve typed into the search bar. As John E. Lincoln writes for digital marketing agency Ignite Visibility, “Longer dwell times are better for business. The more time a visitor spends on a page, the more likely they are to have read and understood your content. It’s a signal that your content strategy is working and appealing to your intended audience.”

Average finish/scroll depth

To truly gauge time spent data, you’ll want to check it against this companion metric. Average finish or scroll depth is how far down the page a person gets when looking at your content, with 100 percent being the perfect score.

This metric is a great way to study the quality of your users’ site visits, especially if you publish more short content than longform. If you publish a 4,000-word article that takes 20 minutes to read, then an average time spent of four minutes isn’t all that great. Conversely, if people spend 90 seconds with a short piece, that could be a great sign that your team is giving the audience what they want.

Bounce rate

This is a pretty simple metric that measures whether or not people visit other pages once they arrive on your site. A 50 percent bounce rate, for instance, means that half of your audience leaves your site after looking at one page. Users who bounce could be responding to bad UX, misleading headlines, or lackluster information.

The lower the bounce rate, the better. And if people are looking at other pages on your site, odds are their time spent will increase as well. However, a high bounce rate doesn’t necessarily mean the apocalypse is coming—especially if you’re just starting a content program. As Contently strategist Felicity Blance explained on this site: “All marketers want a user to read one article and immediately convert. But that rarely happens. More often than not, brands have to build trust with their audience and nurture them along.”

Time between visits

This metric is a little tricky. It’s not just a case of increasing or decreasing time between visits, but studying the metric can tell you quite a lot about your audience. If you have a pretty good return rate, but users often let weeks go by between site visits, the audience may be telling you that they find your work useful at times but don’t trust you as a go-to source on a consistent basis..

For example, I’m a Marvel nut, which means I’m constantly on the prowl for new information about Disney’s superhero movies, and more often than not, I get my updates from The Hollywood Reporter’s nerd blog, Heat Vision. If there’s no news, however, I don’t tend to spend any leisure time on the site. My time-between-visits probably looks pretty erratic, and bursts of activity can be pegged to trailer releases, casting news, and announcements from Disney and Marvel.

On the other hand, I read superhero content on io9 more regularly, especially on slow news days, because the site’s editorial team publishes evergreen work too. I know from experience that every day, io9 will post something related to my interests, so I type in their URL regularly, and my time-between-visits is usually less than 24 hours. Adobe would say that low time between visits suggests a site’s stickiness. If users engage with a site every day, something is compelling them to search for updates.

The quantitative approach to quality

All the metrics above can be combined into a comprehensive study of quality of time, and statistics can be very persuasive when framed correctly. However, marketing hasn’t been completely taken over by artificial intelligence and Google’s algorithm, so it’d be a mistake to ignore the human element.

Shifting your brand’s focus from clicks to quality of time spent with your content nudges you closer to thinking about conversions. After all, a high number of monthly uniques doesn’t mean that all those readers have committed themselves to your brand. On the contrary, an audience of regular readers is more likely to engage with your brand deeply and purchase something, even if your total readership is smaller. Time spent on-site supports lead generation, because an audience that depends on you for interesting content values what you have to say. And value, of course, is the name of the game.

The post 2018’s Content Metric of the Year: Time appeared first on Contently.

That question was lobbed at me—politely—by Contently’s senior sales director when I sat in on his departmental training. In his defense, I had been tucked in the corner of the conference room while he doled out advice to our newest sales development representatives (SDRs), scribbling ominously in my notepad. I looked up, alarmed to have been directly addressed, and realized the sales trainees had all turned toward me. They all wanted to know why someone from marketing and editorial was creeping on their session.

“Well,” I said, “the marketing department thought it would be benefit me to sit in on some of the SDR on-boarding process. When I write for our sit, I’d like to be able to draw from a knowledge of what your team needs.”

“So you’re going to work on content that drives lead generation?” our sales director asked.

I nodded, circling that phrase in my notebook. This was one of the terms I had picked up in my first few months in the job—marketing qualified leads, sales enablement, top of funnel—and I had come to learn that the concept acts as connective tissue between two departments that need to be in alignment.

So, yes, I wanted to learn how to support the sales team more in my writing. In addition to listening to our sales managers training new recruits, I sat down with Dillon Baker, the product marketing specialist on Contently’s marketing team, to capture some of his top rules for good sales enablement content. He told me the processes of writing and creating needs to evolve as content travels down the sales pipeline.

Here are the most important insights about sales enablement contentI learned along the way.

Before you start, ask the sales team

Before brands create content, they should know their audience. That’s non-negotiable. For sales enablement content, you may not be able to survey or interview leads directly, but you can talk to the next best audience: your sales team.

Too many content marketers put precious time and resources into creating the works they assume sales reps are going to use. That wasted effort could be avoided if marketers approached their sales teams for input before plotting out their editorial calendar full of case studies and product marketing assets.

Companies of all sizes tend to struggle with marketing and sales alignment when they’re launching content programs. And once both teams are set in their ways, it’s hard to catch up. But there are a few simple ways to start this conversation: Sit in on a sales meeting sometime or invite sales people to weekly editorial meetings.

Don’t be afraid when it’s time to talk product

Content marketers are usually most comfortable crafting compelling narratives, offering insights from experience in an industry, driving engagement, and building trust with an audience. That’s why the idea of sticking selling points about products and services into our content can give writers hives.

But there’s a point in the customer journey when avoiding your product starts to sound awkward, misleading, or even dishonest. All parties involved, given enough time, understand why they’re in the room talking. Granted, it’s tricky determining where the line in the sand exists, but eventually, potential customers traveling through the funnel want to answers to direct questions. How much will the product cost? Do you have proof that it works? Do you have clients with similar goals that have succeeded?

The answers to those questions need to exist in your sales decks, one-sheeters, and case studies. Sales reps want punchy, clear examples to give their prospects, which means their ideal case study format is simple, relatively short, and stocked with a few key statistics relevant to the buyer. For example, here’s a recent case study we did about Marriott Traveler.

If your prospect is so far along in the pipe that they’re actively comparing options and preparing to commit, your content needs to explain why your solution will help them the most.

Figure out how much you need to explain

B2C companies often have the benefit of selling recognizable goods, but B2B companies—say, content marketing software brands—often require content that explains what they’re selling in addition to why it’s useful. If you’re looking for a new refrigerator, you don’t need to read a long explainer video on the history of refrigeration when you’re shopping online.

On the other hand, you may not know how to decide between Slack, Google Hangouts, Skype, Zoom, Workplace by Facebook, ooVoo, or WhatsApp when you determining how your team at work will communicate.

If you’re creating sales enablement content at a B2B company, don’t worry! The knowledge gap give you room to get a little more creative. It frees you up to write thought leadership articles, coax stories out of your executives and experts, and use content to stake out your place in a complex industry.

There’s ample room for a B2B brand to define best practices through content and publish instructive series and original resources. For instance, Hubspot launched Hubspot Academy, which provides instruction on inbound marketing for customers. Leads can take courses that show the tools in action and offer tutorials for getting that most out of the solution.

Keep creating even when the deal closes

I didn’t learn about the importance of retention and upsells until I made the switch to Contently earlier this year. It seems simple, but it’s easy to overlook that brands need persuasive content even after a contract gets signed.

A sales rep here may secure the interest of an executive in one department at a Canadian bank, but that doesn’t mean the relationship stops there. For larger companies, there are other departments that could be ideal customers. So the rep can’t sit idly while that manager tries to convince other bank executives to invest as well. It’s the sales rep’s job to send over supportive content to grease the wheels: project proposals, internal presentation deks, and tutorial demos all come in handy.

If you’re a B2B content creator, you should have a suite of proposals, presentations, and training templates that your sales team can tailor to each prospect. When done right, your sales enablement content should communicate that your brand understands a client’s problems and has developed a unique path to solving them.

The post The 4 Basic Truths of Good Sales Enablement Content appeared first on Contently.

Sorry, I’m getting word from my team that’s not what we’re doing with this column, and that if I really want to write 1,000 words on patriotic rompers, I should just suck it up and take that $20,000 per year editorial assistant job at GQ.

Instead, in the spirit of Contently’s accountable content series, let’s talk about something much more practical: how to use B2B content to drive leads. And instead of answering a series of reader questions like usual, I’m going to share an exchange I had over email with one of my good friends, who recently took over a B2B content operation. I’ve lightly edited our exchange.

So, how do you—or others—use article content to influence leads in the B2B process?

—Joe’s Friend, New York

First off, it’s critical to have fleshed out buyer personas so that you understand the audience you’re going to reach. You’re marketing team should already have these. If not, get working on it! You can’t start planning a content strategy without understanding the audience you’re serving.

Then, leverage content analysis tools (something we can help you with) and persona interviews to figure out which types of content will be most useful to those personas at each stage of the funnel. The top of the funnel might require articles, videos, and research papers. The middle of the funnel may include calculators, tools, and case studies. And the bottom-of-the-funnel will need product videos, product information, sales decks, and other content that’ll help your buyer get approval for the purchase internally.

A lot of short-sighted marketers don’t see how top-of-funnel content like articles and videos drive leads. But your funnel is going to be pretty damn empty if you don’t have enticing content to capture your audience’s attention and start convincing them that you’re the right solution.

Obviously, this all breaks down if your personas aren’t fleshed out. At Contently, we actually just finished refreshing our personas. (Shoutout to our content strategist Caerley Hill for leading the charge!) This slide from analyst firm Sirius Decisions provides a solid framework for what your personas should include.

Things like initiatives, content preferences, and decision drivers are often overlooked, but it’s really important to understand them if you want to create content that drives business results.

I know blog articles are often used as lead nurturing similar to the way we do with B2C—like an e-newsletter. But is it ever used as acquisition tool, and if so how do you get it in front of the right audience?

Articles can absolutely be the first touchpoint with a prospect. After all, that’s the whole idea of top-of-funnel content.

On the organic side, the goal is to create content that’s discoverable via SEO and social. It should be optimized towards the target keywords your buyers are searching for, and compelling enough to earn backlinks (boosting SEO) and shares (reaching new folks for free). Shares are often overlooked in B2B marketing, but they’re crucial. If the right people are sharing your content, the network effect will allow you to reach hundreds or thousands of similar buyers for free.

On the paid side, it’s a golden age for B2B content distribution. Facebook targeting has gotten incredibly granular (job title, company, income, lookalikes based on your customer base, etc.) and is still very cost-effective. LinkedIn is more expensive, but delivers content in an environment where folks are looking for work-related content. Outbrain also recently introduced a lot of advanced targeting options that mirror Facebook’s offerings, including look-a-like audiences.

You can also distribute content via paid search (expensive, but worth it in some cases) and other partnership programs, like when we partner with Hubspot to create and co-promote a joint webinar. The key here is finding a partner with a similar audience so you’re reaching the right persona. (Sensing a theme?)

If someone consumes said article content as a first touchpoint, what happens next? Unless we’ve bought a list, we don’t have any contact info for said person. So is retargeting based on their cookie information the only possible next step? Or is there something else?

If you’re retargeting, what would you follow up with? More article content, video, or visual content for where they are in the journey leading up to a “premium content” moment (webinar, ebook, event) which is gated?

Right on again: it’s cookie-based retargeting until you get them to opt-in to a relationship with you.

The most common stream is: They read an article, you retarget with an e-book offer, they download the e-book, then you retarget them with more product-oriented ads (demo requests, free trials, check out our solution, etc.), while also nurturing them via email now that you have their email address. You can use marketing automation software to stop serving ads to them at this point, particularly if they’re responding to your emails, have talked to a sales person, etc.

There’s also an argument to be made for retargeting them with more content to deepen the relationship. I think this is a valid strategy, but if you’re going to do it, you want to hit them with mid-funnel content (case studies, ROI calculators, etc.), not more top-of-funnel content.

It really depends on the product you’re selling and your sales cycle. Is this an expensive enterprise solution with 9-month sales cycles, or a $50/month offering that’s a much easier close?

Does article content get scored lower than other kinds of content in lead scoring? Why or why not? (This one feels like an essay question.)

Looks like you’re conflating lead scoring with lead attribution, which is a common mistake. Lead scoring is when you score the lead based on their profile. For us, a director-or-above marketer from a Fortune 500 finance company is an A lead, while the marketing manager at a small CPG startup is a D lead, since the customers who get the most out of Contently are enterprise finance and B2B companies.

Lead attribution is when you assign credit for a lead to a piece of content or marketing program. At that point, it just relies on your model, but articles usually don’t get dinged as lower. This is a pretty simplistic explanation of one way to think about multi-touch attribution.

Who owns the decisions on the previous two questions at most companies? It doesn’t seem like it should be me—it seems like it should be data-backed traditional marketing, but just want to confirm my gut.

This is usually owned by the demand gen or “revenue marketing” team. Just make sure they know what they’re doing, and that your teams are as aligned as possible.

How do I convince the relevant stakeholders that article content has value in the process?

I think there’s a lot of research that backs up the value of top-of-funnel content like articles; Sirius Decisions, for instance, has found that articles are the third-most impactful type of content for B2B C-suite buyers, and make an impact at all three stages of the funnel.

And the average buyer consumes over 17 pieces of content before they make a purchase:

It’s universally accepted that B2B buyers do a ton of research before they ever fill out a form or get in touch with you. And if you’re not present in the research phase to influence their decision, you are totally screwed. So how do you avoid being totally screwed? Articles that get shared a bunch and rank highly on key search terms and perform well in top-of-funnel paid campaigns.

You’ve said you think B2B marketers gate too much stuff. But at some point you have to gate something to get the lead. So can you explain what you mean?

What I’m arguing for is opt-ins. Give people an awesome 2,000 word e-book ungated, but then have offers (trials, demos, events, webinars, etc) that show up as ads mid-stream in the content.

To be clear, I do think that webinars should be gated. You want to send reminders and follow-ups. They’re more like an event.

As for what’s good enough to be gated, it’s important to ask whether you’re offering a fair value exchange. Is this e-book so good that it’s worth it for someone to give up their email address and opt-in to being potentially contacted by your company?

It’s also worth considering the trade-off. Let’s say that a piece of content would get 1,000 readers ungated. If you gate it, maybe only 250 people will download it. Assuming you email the report to them, maybe 30 percent of those 250 will actually end up reading it. So then it becomes a question of having 1,000 people read something versus 80, and whether those 250 email addresses are worth the readers you lose.

Ultimately, you have to pick and choose your spots. Gating is a very effective lead gen technique, but you need to use it only when it’s appropriate. If you’re unsure, always lean in the direction of providing value to your audience.

Joe Lazauskas is Contently’s director of content strategy and editor-in-chief of The Content Strategist. Ask him your most pressing content strategy questions here for a chance to be included in his next mailbag, or email him at lazer@contently.com.

The post Ask a Content Strategist: How Do You Use Articles to Influence B2B Leads? appeared first on Contently.

What was it? Beyonce? Bono? Michelle Obama? The Pope? No. To the crowd of marketers at Day 2 of the Sirius Decisions Summit in Las Vegas, it was something far more exciting: a new SiriusDecisions Demand Waterfall.

By the 10:20 networking break, the new waterfall was the topic of nearly every conversation I heard. It set the theme for the day: next-level marketing frameworks that have the potential to transform the way you work.

Here are the biggest insights you need to know about.

1. The New SiriusDecisions Demand Waterfall

Ever since it was introduced in 2006, the Sirius Decisions Demand Waterfall has been the bible for thousands of B2B marketers.

The waterfall is basically the funnel on steroids—a much more sophisticated way of thinking about lead management. Sirius hadn’t updated it since 2012, so the new framework was big news to the point that it quickly trended on Twitter in Las Vegas.

And people were hyped. Real hyped.

That moment when the newest #demandwaterfall is revealed to a room full of marketers #SDsummit pic.twitter.com/MqT0mUFra3

— Stephanie Guttman (@saas_stephanie) May 17, 2017

There’s a lot to unpack in the new waterfall—Andrew Gaffney of DemandGen report has a great summary here. But the simple yet powerful idea at the center of it is viewing opportunities as buying groups, not as individuals. That’s because very rarely does the decision to buy a B2B product come down to only one person.

These groups are “demand units,” and the theory is that viewing them as such enables you to qualify opportunities better and market to them accordingly. This, in turn, boosts sales efficiency and enables you to measure conversion rates more effectively. For instance, if 10 marketers from the same group come inbound, and you sell to one, your conversion rate should be 100 percent rather than 10 percent. Viewing disconnected teams within large organizations as different buying groups has huge benefits as well. Dig into Gaffney’s write-up for more details.

2. Content marketing software is now “non-negotiable”

One thing I love about SiriusDecisions is that the company is not afraid to put its stake in the ground on key marketing issues.

On Day 1, content strategy researcher Phyllis Davidson’s did just that by defining content marketing as ToFu (top-of-funnel) inbound marketing. (A logical opinion that I don’t necessarily agree with and will tackle in an article soon.) On Day 2, Davidson, along with research director Christine Polewarczyk, made the bold declaration that content marketing software is now non-negotiable.

.@christine_mktg: Content mark software is now a prerequisite. Evaluating options? Here are 10 Qs to ask #SDsummit https://t.co/lzsIu4WR3X pic.twitter.com/WC0H6fUOxc

— Contently (@contently) May 17, 2017

According to Davidson and Polewarczyk, content marketing software is central to solving two problems. First, you need a central platform to help you access the 60-70 percent of content that goes unused. Second, you need to measure both production and performance metrics in one place. That’s the only way to have a true view of how your content is performing.

The presentation also featured live polls through the SiriusDecisions app. Fittingly, attendees ranked the lack of content marketing software as their biggest pain point. (I couldn’t help but shill Contently’s solutions page.)

#sdsummit attendees pinpoint content marketing software as their biggest pain point. Check out @contently! https://t.co/RL2YeSgBBb pic.twitter.com/nHJCcC65eV

— Joe Lazer (@JoeLazauskas) May 17, 2017

Lastly, when the presentation showed several different dashboard set-ups, I wanted to stand up and scream AMEN. Simple dashboards like this will definitely be the key to the rapid and continuous optimization of content marketing programs:

3. The gated content backlash is coming

This vibe was palpable throughout several sessions at SiriusDecisions. We know that most B2B buyers conduct extensive research before raising their hand and becoming a lead. We know that less than 10 percent of our potential market is going to raise their hand and become a lead. And we know that B2B buyers hate filling out forms. So then why the hell do we keep our best and most useful content hidden behind a wall?

Yep. Biggest problem in B2B marketing. #SDSummit pic.twitter.com/3GU31q3PSo

— Joe Lazauskas (@JoeLazauskas) May 17, 2017

Over the past six months, I’ve grappled with the pros and cons of gated content. (So have a lot of other marketers.) On one hand, I’ve created nearly 100 different gated e-books, webinars, and interactive features at Contently, and it’s certainly delivered a ton of inbound juice for us. But on the other hand, I hate filling out forms and abandon content all the time because I don’t want to do so. Deep down, I believe that the best long-term strategy should focus on making it as easy as possible for your target audience to engage with your content.

We’ve been shifting strategies at Contently and gating a lot less content this year. As we move through the rest of 2017, don’t be surprised to see a growing anti-gating wave.

The post The New Demand Waterfall, and Other Next-Level Marketing Insights You Need to Know appeared first on Contently.

1. I have a catalogued list of my favorite content marketing SlideShares.

2. There’s one that’s my most favorite, and I reference it all the time.

I’m talking about Why Content Marketing Fails, by Moz founder Rand Fishkin. It tackles the biggest content marketing mistakes with the help of clip art and some pretty bad fonts. (Also a bunch of pictures of Rand looking like a railroad baron.) There are two slides that I love in particular because they explain the biggest misconception in content marketing: that content is just another direct-response marketing tactic.

Preach! If you’re hoping that your content is going to directly lead to sales on a consistent basis, you’re going to be sorely disappointed. The consumer journey is just much more complicated than “click-read-buy.” And yet, content marketing does have a huge impact on the sales funnel. Per HubSpot, companies that publish content 16 times per month generate 4.5x more leads than those who publish less than four times per month, and 93 percent of B2B marketers say that content marketing generates more leads than traditional marketing strategies.

But for many marketers, demonstrating the long-term effect that content marketing has on lead generation and customer acquisition can be a daunting task, especially if you’re not a Marketo and Salesforce wizard.

While multi-touch attribution is the most accurate approach to demonstrating content marketing ROI, there’s a simpler metric that can get you started: leads influenced.

Time for a definition!

Leads influenced: The number of people who engaged with a piece of content and converted into a lead within the next 90 days.

Let’s look at an example. Say that I publish this post and 5,000 people read it. And amongst those 5,000 people, 65 become a lead for Contently in the next 90 days—they fill out a demo request form, ask to talk to a sales person, download an e-book, or some other conversion event. Then, that piece of content would have 65 leads influenced.

This metric is an easy way to show the impact that content has on the top of your funnel and can be tracked with a simple conversion pixel placed on various conversion event points, like the aforementioned demo request form or e-book download. It’s one of the metrics that we bake right into our analytics platform, and helps us optimize our distribution strategy to ensure that content pieces that generate a lot of leads get prioritized in both our paid and organic campaigns.

We also measure something called lead impact score, which pinpoints content pieces that influence or generate a lot of leads relative to the number of people who read the piece. So say that 100 people read a story, and 70 of them end up becoming leads: We’d give that piece a lead impact score of 70, and likely prioritize pushing it out in our distribution campaigns since it’s so effective.

Ultimately, there are a lot of reasons that content marketing fails. But having a good handle on how content impacts lead generation definitely isn’t one of them.

The post This One Lead Gen Metric Will Help You Show Marketing ROI appeared first on Contently.

Twenty-four years ago, the PDF, or portable document format, was released. In the digital timeline, that’s practically the age of dinosaurs. Yet the PDF, which is the go-to downloadable format for most businesses, has barely changed since its prehistoric beginnings.

When Contently acquired Docalytics two years ago, we knew it had the potential to change how businesses use downloadable content. But I’m not sure we were aware of just how much it would become our secret weapon.

Nowadays, Docalytics is used across departments—from sales to accounts to marketing—to perform a variety of functions thanks to its unique feature-set. Let’s go over a few of them below.

1. Sales enablement

In the past, when a salesperson sent downloadable collateral to a prospect, that was the end of the process. The salesperson wouldn’t know if prospects read it, what they read, or if they even bothered to download it in the first place.

Thanks to Docalytics, however, our sales team can track all of this—and more. For example, here’s the engagement report for a pricing deck one of our salespeople recently sent to a prospect. (Each green vertical bar represents one page in the deck.)

By using Docalytics, we know that the prospect only spent about 40 seconds with the collateral and skipped right ahead to pages five and nine. Page five includes the pricing outline, so it’s not surprising that a user would jump straight there. But take a look at what the person did on page nine:

Ah ha! It looks like this prospect wanted to know more about our pricing for additional publications. Now armed with this information, our salespeople can tailor the next call with this prospect knowing this was a main point of interest, a huge advantage they otherwise would not have been able to access.

2. Embedding and SEO activation

If you’ve ever tried to embed a PDF in an article, you know how much of a headache the process can be. Major content management systems (such as WordPress) don’t come with the ability by default, requiring you to download and install third-party plug-ins before you can even think about including your latest whitepaper in a relevant article.

Docalytics makes the process easy. Every Docalytics file comes with an automatically generated iframe embed code you can copy and paste into your CMS’s HTML. Here’s an example using one of our e-books:

And yes, Docalytics still captures the same analytics from an embedded document as it does a normal document page. One more key activation feature: Docalytics also allows you to customize the domain URL, meaning our SEO team can easily make our documents SEO-friendly.

2. Consistency and control

Let’s face it, a lot of companies have trouble keeping track of all their digital assets. The decks, brochures, e-books, and one-sheets just keep piling up. And over time, some of those assets need to be updated. Without any sort of organized library or system, it’s a strain on everyone’s time to send out new versions whenever there’s a tweak or major change.

Docalytics has eliminated that headache for our team. Thanks to version control, when a file in Docalytics is updated, every single version of that file gets updated as well. We don’t have to worry about Cyrus on the account management team sending an outdated version of a product one-sheet.

Docalytics also allows for sharing control. So if there is a sensitive file that needs to remain private, we can easily restrict the ability of users to post on social or print it out.

3. Content optimization and strategy

There are plenty of tools out there that analyze the performance of articles and infographics. But when it comes to downloadable assets like white papers or e-books, trying to gather useful data can feel like going back to the dark ages.

That’s why Docalytics has been such a valuable resource in our ideation process. When evaluating e-books and other big projects (which are often the most expensive to create), we get to see deeper levels of engagement.

Last July, for example, we published “Content Methodology: A New Model for Content Marketing,” which has been one of our best performing assets in the last year. We know that, on average, people have spent three minutes and 50 seconds with the asset in the last quarter. Eighty-two percent were engaged (meaning they looked at it for at least 15 seconds). But only 25 percent of readers actually finished the report.

Most intriguingly, we know exactly which pages resonated with readers. In the image below, the purple squares illustrate the mouse activity on each of the report’s 35 pages, starting with page one in the top left corner.

As you can see in the heatmaps, pages 13 and 14 got way more activity than any other pages. Let’s take a closer look at those two.

Both pages have visual elements that directly address our methodology. On page 13, people couldn’t get enough of the visualization of our methodology or the sidebar on the right. On page 14, people loved the table connecting business goals with KPIs.

From this data, we can assume two things: One, people love visuals and “chunky” text like the sidebar. They make for easier reading and can help simplify complicated subjects. Two, our prospects want to know how to tie content, business goals, and KPIs together.

As we brainstorm future story ideas, the edit team now has evidence that points to a need for more visuals, tables, and sidebars when explaining key concepts. And the more we can produce, the more evidence we can gather to test our assumptions.

Our sales team, meanwhile, knows to focus on tying content with business goals when explaining our platform to prospects. And our marketing team realizes it should send more in-depth information on executing a content strategy in any sort of drip campaign.

4. Lead generation

Docalytics has one more tool up its sleeve: the ability to easily embed lead forms within an asset. And because of that heatmap technology I mentioned above, marketers know where to place that lead form in the asset for maximum impact.

Take our methodology report: Since we know most people spend their time on pages 13 and 14, and that most keep reading on from there, it makes sense for us to add a form after page 14. Docalytics makes that easy with our CRM integrations.

Voila, we’ve inserted a lead form—not too early, not too late, but in just the right spot. And that’s the beauty of Docalytics: data, optimization, and integration for a format that has traditionally had none of the above.

Read more about how Microsoft used Docalytics to transform its demand generation strategy.

The post How Docalytics Became Our Secret Weapon appeared first on Contently.

Say you’re walking on the sidewalk, minding your own business on the way back from lunch, when you lock eyes with a street canvasser. The canvasser, dressed in some ill-fitting mesh vest and a visor, gets ready to sell you on a good cause. You want to support the cause, but you also hate the intrusion of the hard sell and don’t want to give away your personal information. She opens her mouth to initiate small talk, but you walk right by, avoiding eye contact and trying to stifle the guilt.

Lead forms are the canvassers of the marketing world. In any exchange of value, both sides need to evaluate whether they’re getting something useful in return. On the street, it’s not worth it for most people to take out a credit card and hand over sensitive information to donate to a charity when they can just do so on the computer in their homes. Perhaps if the canvassers only wanted a name or an email address, they’d have more access. Likewise, when brands and publishers gate their content, the success of an e-book or a video will likely come down to how much they ask for in return.

How many fields should you include in the lead form? What do you prioritize? Should you ask for a phone number? Do you need to care about age? Location? What about placement—do you want the form to be the first thing someone sees on a web page?

Here’s an example of a lead form we use on The Content Strategist:

Despite looking fairly basic, a lead form comes with its own special sort of marketing calculus. Even if you have a brilliant piece of content hiding behind the gate, nobody is going to see it if you turn people away by asking for too much information on a form.

Research from Docalytics, an analytics and tracking company acquired by Contently in 2016, found that forms with only three fields have an average conversion rate of 25 percent, but that rate drops to 15 percent for forms with six or more fields.

“I think the perfect ideal scenario is to start with an email address,” said Jason Miller, global content marketing leader at LinkedIn. “Then keep that person engaged with content and you progress your profiling, taking a little bit of information each time.”

In 2011, Marketo conducted a study on different lead forms and found that shorter forms of five fields outperform longer forms of seven or nine fields. A five-field form had a cost-per-lead of $31.24, while the cost-per-lead was $34.94 for seven fields and $41.90 for nine fields. The shorter form also boasted a 13.4 percent conversion rate while the other two options were both under 12 percent.

If marketers want to maximize how many leads they bring in, then they have to be economical with their forms. Certain third-party tools, like Clearbit, can look up a person’s information off of an email. Others, including Marketo, can pinpoint a user’s approximate location from an IP address, which means you won’t need to ask for an address.

Another way to get more people to fill out a form and download your content is to optimize the call-to-action (CTA). Marketers would be wise to do a little research rather than going off of intuition, because one word can have a big impact on your conversion rate.

Three years ago, Formstack, a form builder software company, surveyed 400,000 people and found that the most common CTA button copy—words like “Submit,” “Subscribe,” and “Send”—weren’t the most effective ways to drive leads. Simply changing a button that read “Register” to “Register Now!” improved conversions by five percentage points.

Image via Formstack

It’s in your best interest to make the process as simple as possible for anyone who comes across your lead form. Add an auto-fill functionality so potential leads don’t have to waste time typing in their names and contact information. Perhaps you can offer an external log-in option, which lets your audience fill forms with social profiles on networks like Facebook and Twitter. These may seem like minor tweaks, but when you’re making that hard sell, each second matters.

This is an excerpt from “The Content Marketer’s Guide to Lead Generation.”

The post How to Build a Better Lead Form appeared first on Contently.

I also found out that you can learn a lot about marketing while working on the front lines for a big retailer. We were instructed to ask shoppers for email addresses or zip codes as they checked out, and I noticed that many customers seemed taken aback. They were hesitant to give away any type of information, even something as innocuous as a zip code.

This was one of the first times I realized that for consumers, any exchange of information with a brand is a transaction.

No such thing as a free e-book

Just like my customers buying the latest dad fashion, B2B consumers have become wary of giving away their email address for an e-book, checklist, or guide. They know that if they enter their email address, they’re going to end up in a drip feed (or, worse, a sales call queue) for a product they may not need.

That’s not exactly a customer-centric experience.

But can you really blame marketers? They’ve been tasked with building audiences and delivering leads to hungry sales teams. Eighty-five percent of B2B content marketers report that lead generation is the most important KPI for their organization. Can they reliably hit their goals without lead forms?

Drift, a business-centric messaging app, made headlines this summer when it ditched email forms on all premium content, and the digital marketing community reacted in a big way. The announcement became one of the company’s top posts as it burned up the charts in marketing discussion groups. Drift has been perhaps the loudest voice in this movement—spurring others to experiment as well—but companies like MailChimp have been quietly giving away their best content for years.

New or not, these experiments have spurred a much-needed discussion (and a few hot takes) about the ubiquitous email form: how and where it’s used, and what could be gained (or lost) by adjusting the strategy.

The problem

Digital marketers seem to have wised up when it comes to relying on social media distribution platforms. Marketers got fat on free traffic from Facebook and Twitter, only to see the organic reach of those platforms collapse as social networks began to monetize their user base.

Email came back in vogue, and with it a hunger for ever-growing lists.

This could be seen on the front pages of discussion sites like Inbound.org and Growth Hackers, where hundreds of articles bragged about how marketers could growth-hack their way to thousands of email subscribers in a matter of weeks.

But lost in all this was whether the content itself was actually effective. After all, “lead generation” isn’t a measure of content quality.

“If someone gets this big promise on a landing page and converts into a subscriber, but the piece they then open is terrible, why would they want to hear from you again?” said marketing writer, speaker, and podcast host Jay Acunzo. “So many marketers lose sight of treating people like people instead of leads.”

Just because a visitor converts doesn’t mean your content delivered value (not yet, at least). Without value, is that reader likely to buy? Lead forms may drive an increase in email addresses, but they can cause a decrease in the overall quality of leads.

“You may grow your email database faster with gated content, but you’re probably getting a lot of leads that are going to churn right away,” said Luke Kintigh, global content and media strategist at Intel. “It comes down to quality versus quantity.”

Many marketers point to lead scoring as a way to help their sales team focus their energy on high-quality leads and sort out the duds. But lead scoring doesn’t fix another big problem that gated content can present: Some strong leads may bounce from landing pages, wary of giving their email address to yet another brand. Everyone knows what to expect when they fill out a form on a squeeze page, and it’s often not the kind of brand experience marketers idolize.

In his influential post about lead forms, Dave Gerhardt of Drift invokes Apple’s brand experience (a surefire way to get a marketer to listen) at the Apple Store. The company meticulously designed the store to get people inside to play with the latest products. Apple knows a vast majority of visitors aren’t going to buy anything, but it doesn’t matter. The Apple Store has become the most popular shop in nearly every mall it enters, driving an experience central to the brand’s marketing plan. Employees aren’t jumping in front of you, asking you to subscribe or fill out a form to learn more about your interests. They just deliver a great experience and trust that you’ll remember it when you need a new phone, laptop, or tablet.

No amount of ad retargeting can overcome a poor first impression brought on by a bad brand experience.

A shift in motivations

The ungated content movement isn’t about ditching email signups altogether. Email marketing has survived dozens of ballyhooed threats in the past and will likely play a major role in content marketing for years to come.

Ultimately, ungating content shifts the motivation from a promise to satisfaction.

“There’s a ton of research that goes into buying one of Intel’s products, both on the consumer and enterprise side,” Kintigh said. “We know we’ll need multiple touch points. To ask for an email address right away would be going from chapter one to chapter ten of the story.”

An immediate email gate on e-books, webinars, and white papers hooks leads with the promise of delivering on an expectation. Readers don’t know if the piece will actually answer their question, just that the landing page copy and headline were enticing enough to give it a shot.

“Oftentimes users are underwhelmed by the content,” Kintigh added. “And this hurts the chances of returning.”

Measuring success, sans form

Instead of hooking prospects on the anticipation of value, the ungated strategy hooks them with delivered value.

At Intel, Kintigh explained success hinges on building relationships. New readers come in from paid and organic channels, who are then retargeted with increasingly specific content based on previous behavior. From there, forms exist to move subscribers from paid acquisition channels to an owned channel like email.

So the email form hasn’t disappeared, it’s just re-contextualized to be more customer-centric. Rather than force users to give up an address before reading, proponents of this ideology can simply place subscription forms within the piece itself, trusting that readers who find it valuable will opt in to hear more from the brand.

(Editor’s note: This is a strategy that clients such as Microsoft use through Contently’s Document Analytics technology.)

“In the long run, it pays off more than trying to collect email right away from a reader,” Kintigh said. “That hard sell can turn them off.”

Adjusting your strategy this way also requires you to modify success metrics. Top-line audience and marketing-qualified lead (MQL) growth will likely still be the main goal, but ungated content could result in fewer conversions. However, these conversions should align more closely aligned with your desired leads, simply because you eliminate people who are really there to just read a gated piece of content.

What you stand to lose

Any shift in strategy will likely come with positive and negative consequences. An ungated approach takes the power out of the marketer’s hands and puts it squarely in the palms of the consumer. This could result in lower numbers of new contacts as well as a slower timeline for converting readers into email subscribers.

But, again, more leads are only good when those leads are all qualified.

“Many marketers have slipped into gaming systems or get-rich-quick schemes for some kind of false god metric, like leads or subscriptions,” Acunzo said. “When we do that, we lose sight of what content marketing is actually for: solving a problem or fulfilling a desire for your audience.”

So what does an ungated strategy look like in practice? Here are three primary areas for you to consider before experimenting:

1. Retargeting: Just because we’re trusting leads to voluntarily subscribe when they’re good and ready doesn’t mean we’re leaving it completely to chance. Instead, think of it as a “rent-to-own” strategy. To get non-converted readers back to a site, an ungated strategy relies on well-planned retargeting campaigns. Visitors who bounced from a piece of content without subscribing can be retargeted with related topics, bringing them back until they’re ready.
2. Rethinking the form: The risk with ditching gated content is people will just consume all of your work without ever converting. Combat this by making it easy to subscribe, request a demo, sign up for events, and more. You can offer optional lead forms. Just because you’re no longer putting premium content behind a gated form doesn’t mean you need to hide the form altogether.
3. The post-conversion approach: After putting so much consideration into the pre-conversion relationship, it’d be a waste to fall back into standard digital marketing practices after someone subscribes. Have a plan in place to use the data you’ve collected on new subscribers from their previous visits to deliver relevant content focused on their interests. The ungated strategy is customer-centric, from the start of the relationship to the finish.

As a teenage Gap sales associate, I learned that “retail is detail.” I’d translate that for the content marketing world to “content is contextual.” Why take that context away from users by hiding your best work behind a wall?

The post What You Gain (and Lose) With Ungated Content appeared first on Contently.

The most effective way to generate leads changes over time and is different for every business. Even some of the lead generation strategies most often employed by marketers can lead to problems if executed incorrectly. Salespeople and marketers are taught certain techniques for a reason, but it doesn’t take much to blur the line between being an outstanding lead generator and asking for too much information.

Mistake #1: Not collecting the right info

Collecting the right information from prospects requires a delicate balance. If marketers ask for too much, prospects will likely abandon your form. Alternatively, asking for too little brings its own concerns; a lack of information makes it difficult to classify leads and market to them after the first download.

Marketers often overlook a simple rule: Only ask for information your business intends to use. If you follow up with every prospect via email, then there’s no reason to ask for a phone number. And if your business can collect locations via IP addresses, then don’t ask for a mailing address—doing so will reduce your conversion rate by 4 percent.

So how do you decide what information to ask for? The obvious information, such as names and email addresses, is universal and should be collected by everyone. Since it’s common for gated forms to include these fields, prospects won’t be scared away. But when you ask for more, readers wonder what you’ll do with it. Consider these options:

Job title: You can use the information to decide if this person is the right contact at the business and understand how to talk to them based on their status in the company.

Industry: Does your business operate in multiple verticals? Ask leads to identify their industry so the leads go to the right salespeople. Use a multiple-choice layout to get clear responses.

Questions: Dig into a prospect’s intentions by asking clarifying questions before your sales team even gets involved. Ask questions related to your content. This technique will help sales and marketing decide whether the prospect is right for your business. For example, if your prospect is downloading an e-book on common lead generation mistakes, you might ask a question tied to how their businesses generate leads, or how many pieces of information they try to collect during their first engagement with your content. Again, make sure you give a multiple-choice answer to make answering easy as possible.

Collecting the right information from prospects requires a delicate balance.

Also think of questions that address pain points, which can shape the entire sales conversation. But make sure these questions are specific so they don’t scream “sales pitch.” Instead of asking “How many new sales leads does your business capture each month?” try “On average, how many readers choose to provide contact information to access your content in a given month?” A slight change in phrasing makes a big difference.

Some readers won’t even know they are struggling in an area; your question will get them thinking about whether there might be a better approach. Once a prospect indicates they struggle in a particular area, it opens the door for sales to call and start discussing how they can help.

Mistake #2: Treating every lead equally

All leads are not the same, so for marketers and sales teams to go after each one in the same way doesn’t make sense. Marketers should tailor their messaging to what interests and engages each individual prospect. Savvy salespeople are then able to understand the messages that have already resonated with the prospect and hit those pain points again.

Keeping track of what interests a prospect can be done in a multitude of ways—from compiling a list of what stories a prospect downloads to the nitty-gritty details of what the prospect reads (or doesn’t read) within an individual document. Being able to hand sales more than just download data is key to deciding which leads should be kept warm and which should be acted on immediately.

Lead scoring, which involves systems that assign a ranking to leads based on how qualified they are, goes hand in hand with tracking. Leads should be scored in a way that makes the most sense for your business. One common tactic involves assigning points to different interactions that a prospect has with your business. For example, if a lead downloads a piece of content, he receives one point; if the lead is a decision maker, two points. Then, go after the leads with the highest scores first to increase the odds that sales has success closing deals.

Mistake #3: Gating all content

Gating content with a lead form is one of the most common lead generation tactics marketers rely on—and also one of the most common mistakes. Gating some content is appropriate, as long as it’s the right content and is gated correctly.

Exactly how valuable is your content?

Exactly how valuable is your content? Gated content should teach the prospect something important. Marketers sometimes make the major mistake of gating material that plugs their business. This content does not belong hidden behind a form. Prospects shouldn’t have to “pay” for information about your business.

And when they do pay, give something valuable back. Has your company produced reports or other research that correspond with the topic of your content? If so, offer these documents to prospects in the lead form. They’ll be more likely to submit other valuable information if they believe they’re getting something important in return.

The post How to Overcome 3 Painfully Common Lead Gen Mistakes appeared first on Contently.

For marketers, this issue is most prevalent when we talk about lead generation.

Let’s say you check the results of an e-book campaign on Facebook and notice it’s driving hundreds of leads at a low cost per click. Your ad is great, right? Possibly. But chances are your chief revenue officer will want more information. The success of the ad will depend on the quality of those leads and whether or not you were able to account for ROI.

According to “The State of Lead Capture in 2016,” a new report from online form builder Formstack, 46 percent of marketers cannot confidently tie marketing ROI to specific lead-generation campaigns. This is a huge problem. When marketers can’t tie lead quality to individual campaigns, sales teams waste valuable time researching and tracking leads that should never have been pursued. Editorial and marketing teams, meanwhile, can’t tell if their content and ads are relevant to their target audience.

In this report, Formstack investigates why marketers are struggling to measure the ROI of their lead-generation campaigns and what can they do to remedy the problem. Here are the key takeaways.

Align metrics with goals

When marketers have KPIs and metrics that don’t match up, it can often lead to poor lead quality. According to the report, this misalignment is more common than you’d think. Fifty-four percent of marketers ranked driving higher quality leads as their main goal, but when asked what to identify their key metrics, 48 percent pointed to conversion rates and 47 percent to volume of leads.

Via Formstack

Based on this data, marketers are relying on quantity metrics even though they set out to gauge quality. If you bake a cake for a party and want to figure out if your recipe was good, it’s only vaguely helpful to know that guests took 20 out of 24 slices. You still don’t know how many people ate the cake or how much they enjoyed it.

As the report states, “More than half of marketers surveyed rely on high-level metrics (like web traffic) to prove ROI, as opposed to more results-oriented ones like new sales.” As with cake, high-level metrics don’t satisfy questions about quality; they can’t tell you with precision if a particular investment was worthwhile. It should come as no surprise that 64 percent of marketers admitted they’re having trouble proving ROI because they either don’t know where to start or which channels are misaligned.

Via Formstack

Organize data

“Marketers are overwhelmed by data,” said Lindsay Johnson, Formstack’s demand-generation team lead. “They don’t know how to get the data all in the same place or [somewhere] they can actually use it to optimize their campaigns.”

For example, while top-funnel traffic numbers might be important to judge the effectiveness of campaign ad artwork or call-to-action text, engagement metrics tell marketers what happens after the click—like how much time a user spends with a piece of content. Lead scoring (what happens after the download) tracks how well that lead was nurtured and follows the buyer from the first touchpoint through the sale.

Marketers need to build a technology stack that will allow them to track and nurture their relationships during the entire customer journey.

Track customer relationships

Formstack found that one hundred percent of marketers who tracked customer relationship metrics reported feeling confident in their ROI.

This is where content comes into play. The more high-quality content you provide, the more opportunities customers have to engage with your brand. And the more they interact with your brand, the more data you can collect about their interests and behaviors.

Marketers can then use these metrics to figure out which content or offers will best nurture leads. For example, they can set up an email newsletter to follow up with people who want know more about a particular topic or industry, or they can retarget these customers with relevant social media campaigns. This way, if the customer wants a purchase, the sales team can use all of these touchpoints to personalize the final stages of the customer journey.

Because when you take data back to your CRO, you want to be proud of the quality of leads on your arm.

The post Study: Marketers Are Measuring Their Lead Gen All Wrong appeared first on Contently.