seven ways that content marketing improves lead generation results

An Informative E-book from the Marketing White Paper Series Sponsored by

WinGreen Marketing Systems

An Informative E-book from the Marketing White Paper Series Sponsored by

WinGreen Marketing Systems

Seven Ways That Content Marketing Improves Lead Generation Results

The Marketing White Paper Series from WinGreen Marketing Systems

Contents

Introduction .......................................................................................................................................3

Content Marketing ..............................................................................................................................4

White Papers .................................................................................................................................4

Web Seminars (“Webinars”) ............................................................................................................5

Podcasts ........................................................................................................................................5

Video ............................................................................................................................................5

Adobe Flash (and other) Animation ..................................................................................................5

E-Newsletters .................................................................................................................................6

Other Media ...................................................................................................................................6

Exclusions ......................................................................................................................................6

Seven Ways That Content Marketing Improves Lead Generation Results .................................................7

1. Alignment with New Buyer Behavior ............................................................................................7

2. Significantly Better Economics .....................................................................................................8

3. Broad Reach ..............................................................................................................................8

4. Built-In Quality Control................................................................................................................9

5. Ability to Nurture Prospects that Are Not Ready to Buy ................................................................10

6. Performance Tracking and Measurement ....................................................................................11

7. Ease of Testing and Changing Campaigns and Content ................................................................12

Summary .........................................................................................................................................14

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particular need. Buyers can stealthily learn about products, evaluate them, solicit previous buyers’ opinions, and determine pricing on their own – all without your sales people knowing that they’ve begun to consider a purchase. In this new world of buyer empowerment, your marketing and lead generation activities have to adapt to the new realities.

One of the most effective and cost-effective methods of reaching and influencing potential buyers and convincing them to identify themselves as prospects is content marketing. One definition the authors like is from Junta42 : “Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience - with the objective of driving profitable customer action.”

In this white paper, the authors will list seven ways that content marketing improves lead generation results. If you’re a marketing professional hoping to justify investment in content marketing, this paper will help you. If you’re a sales leader seeking more effective lead generation and pipeline building from your marketing department, this paper will provide you with the background information you need to discuss content marketing with your marketing leadership.

Introduction

What methods are being utilized by your marketing department to generate leads for your sales pipeline? There are plenty of ways for today’s marketers to reach potential buyers and identify new sales prospects. Traditional tactics are still effective for building pipelines. Direct mail, trade shows and conferences, and telemarketing continue to yield lead generation results, albeit expensively. Digital marketing methods like email marketing, search engine optimization, and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising have grown in sophistication and popularity as their exceptional economics have allowed companies of all sizes to cost-effectively reach millions of potential prospects with the click of a mouse.

The World Wide Web has changed the way your buyers engage with you as well. The old “interrupt” methods of advertising and lead generation are no longer tolerated by buyers and influencers, as evidenced by new federal mandates like the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 (limiting unsolicited commercial email) and the “Do Not Call” Registry (limiting commercial telemarketing). Instead, your buyers are the ones who decide which companies to evaluate and when. The typical technology purchase now begins with a Google search for products or services that fit a








in your offer and to ensure that that content is directly relevant to the products or services you are trying to sell, without being “salesy” or explicit advertisements. Effective content marketing requires content that meets both criteria: compelling and related to your product. Here are some of the more common media used in online content marketing.

White Papers

Certainly the most common of the content marketing media, white papers (or “position papers”) are extremely effective when used as marketing premiums in content marketing campaigns.

The ideal white paper for content marketing purposes should be about 2500 to 5000 words in length. Topics should be related to the products the paper is intended to support. For example, if your company sells network security software, your white papers should present interesting topics – but never sales pitches – about the benefits of securing networks, the financial returns to be expected from better security, and perhaps tips and techniques for assessing security. The objective of the white paper offer, as with all content marketing offers, is to uncover new prospects for your products by finding people who are interested enough in topics related to your products to take the time to fill in a form and identify themselves to you in return for the interesting content you’ve offered.

Content Marketing

First of all, let’s take a minute to provide a bit more definition of what content marketing is (and isn’t). As we noted in the introduction, content marketing is a method of lead generation that offers “relevant and value content” to a well-defined target market with an objective of attracting those targets and inducing them to identify themselves as interested in the topics in your content offers. When your targets fill out a form or dial your 800 number or email you in response to your content offer, you have a “lead” or a “responder” who you know has some level of interest in the topics you’ve offered, and therefore, ostensibly, in your products or services.

There are quite a few forms that your content can take in today’s digital age. From the medium with which most people are familiar, white papers, to new and innovative media like podcasts, video, and Adobe® Flash® animations, there is no shortage of ways to deliver content to your targets in whatever medium they prefer. The key is to create content that will be relevant, interesting, and compelling enough to cause your hitherto anonymous target to self-identify and “raise his hand” as someone who is interested








branding and promotional use rather than for lead generation. Podcasts are also used for many other communications uses, including education, narration, education, entertainment, and news.

When utilized for lead generation, podcasts are promoted and delivered similarly to other media, i.e. the interested target must register and self-identify in order to receive the desired content.

Video

Continuing advancement in compression and Web live streaming technologies is making video more practical, cost-effective, and easy to use for marketers. Uses of video for content marketing and lead generation include streamed video content, downloadable content, and embedded video content made available to interested responders after registration.

Adobe Flash (and other) Animation

The use of animations and interactive presentations is growing in popularity for marketing applications. Animations may be used in the same manner as white papers and videos for lead generation, i.e. the content is promoted via email and the interested responder self-identifies through a registration form that “unlocks” the animated content.

Animations are best utilized to demonstrate complex, technically sophisticated concepts that cannot be practically described in white papers or webinars.

Web Seminars (“Webinars”)

Another very common content offer is the web seminar, or “webinar”. The webinar is similar to the white paper in that its topics are usually related to the products or services being marketed and the offer of the “complimentary webinar” is intended to uncover people who are interested enough to take 30 to 60 minutes out of their day to view your webinar.

Webinars also accomplish two other objectives in the content marketing mix.

1. They typically will show you the prospects that have an even higher level of interest than those who register for white papers. (Those who register and attend a 60-minute webinar are demonstrating a high level of interest by spending more of their valuable time.)

2. They often attract interested responders who prefer to learn through visual and aural means rather than through reading. A single topic, e.g. “How to Assess Wireless Network Security” might get 100 registrations for a white paper and another 100 different registrations for a webinar, simply because different people prefer different media for learning.

Podcasts

A podcast is a “digital audio or video file that is episodic; downloadable; program-driven, mainly with a host and/or theme; and convenient, usually via an automated feed with computer software.” Podcasts for marketing are typically utilized for








Other Media

The potential uses of other media for content marketing are limited only by technology and the imagination. For the purposes of this paper, the authors consider the definition of content marketing to be further limited to digital or online content marketing.

Exclusions

Based on the authors’ limitation to digital or online content marketing, the best way to think of effective content marketing is that it exists entirely outside the physical world. In other words, online content marketing is made up of content, promotion, distribution, response, and engagement that all take place in bits and bytes, and never in the physical world. This definition means that these traditional methods of marketing and lead generation are specifically excluded from the scope of this white paper:

• Trade shows

• Direct mail (even with business response cards)

• Telemarketing

• Print advertising

• Billboard advertising

• Television and radio advertising

E-Newsletters

Another very common content marketing medium is the e-newsletter (or email newsletter). E-newsletters present multiple articles, graphics, charts, etc. in an easy-to-read, quick-to-digest format delivered to readers’ email inboxes. E-newsletters are most effectively used for list-building (e.g. “Click here to subscribe to our

monthly newsletter!”) or lead nurturing. While e-newsletters may occasionally have click-through calls to action (including the promotion of other content marketing offers such as white papers), they are not typically used primarily for lead generation.








through “interrupt” marketing like advertising, cold calling, and even door-to-door selling because the buyer had no other way to engage in a buying process. Today’s buyers have Google and the entire World Wide Web at their fingertips, and the engagement process is driven by them, not by sellers any more.

The new seller-buyer paradigm looks more like this:

• The vast majority of purchase decisions begin with a Google search

• The seller-buyer power relationship has been upended completely. The traditional marketing assumption that the seller must find buyers has been replaced by a new model where the buyer has all the power, all the information at his fingertips, and will find the seller before the seller finds him

• The willingness to be sold to has decreased to almost zero, while the desire and ability to actively research sellers and choose who may “be invited to” sell has become the norm.

Content marketing is aligned with the new seller-buyer paradigm. It doesn’t interrupt with an advertisement or telemarketer’s call. It doesn’t rely on a prospective buyer getting on an airplane to travel to a trade show. And when done correctly, it delivers the “right information” to the “right target” at the “right time” (i.e. when they are beginning their evaluation on the Web rather than when they’re already selecting vendors).


Online content marketing has a number of advantages over traditional lead generation and marketing techniques.

Attributes of the traditional methods of lead generation included:

• Interrupt driven

• High activity, low response

• High cost per lead

• “Spiky” results

Within the context we’ve laid out above, here are seven ways that content marketing improves lead generation results. (Want to add more? Email the authors at [email protected] or send us your comments to www.wingreenmarketing.com/contactus.aspx. You may find your suggestions published in a future white paper, attributed to you.)

1. Alignment with New Buyer Behavior

The seller-buyer relationship has shifted since the advent of the World Wide Web, and even more so since the emergence of Google. Before 1993, sellers used to be able to promote their wares






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3. Broad Reach

The economics of online content marketing allow the marketer to broaden the reach of the company’s campaigns to include many more targeted contacts. Using the previous section’s economic analysis, one could spend the same $337,500 that reaches 50,000 targets with direct mail to broaden the reach to 350,000 targets with content marketing. The economic advantages of content marketing have given the marketer (and the CFO) significantly more flexibility in the marketing budget.

By definition, lead generation campaigns deliver better results when they reach more potential prospects and influencers. Reaching 100,000 people that meet your target profile will obviously deliver more leads than reaching 5000 people (with all else equal).

Content marketing allows you to deliver a personalized email, offering interesting, useful, free content to hundreds of thousands of people, all of whom match your target profile, with the click of a button. Compare to a trade show, where your entire reach is bounded by the number of attendees. Compare to a direct mail drop, where your reach is limited to your printing and postage budget. And compare to telemarketing, where your reach may be the same number of people, but you can’t possibly call them all in a reasonable period of time.

2. Significantly Better Economics

The World Wide Web and email present a new model of outreach with economics that are orders of magnitude more compelling than traditional direct-marketing or telemarketing. The marketer of 1995 might conduct a direct mail campaign to a list of 50,000 people at a cost of $0.75 per name and address, $2.50 per color printed promo letter, $2.00 per insert, $1.00 for postage, and $0.50 per mailing house drop -- $337,500 for the campaign (without the telephone follow-up, if outsourced) – and get a 1% response rate (500 responses). That’s $675.00 per “interested lead” or responder.

The marketer of 2014 operates in the non-physical world, with PDF versions of collateral, interactive, informative, drill-down web pages, professional quality video and audio, and content marketing assets like white papers, podcasts, webcasts, and animations. Online content marketing allows the marketer to conduct a campaign to 50,000 contacts, deliver them an invitation to download a marketing asset of interest, and receive 1000 interested lead responses for about $50,000 (when campaigns are conducted monthly using in-house email marketing and other sales and marketing software).

Twice the leads at one seventh the cost.








• Titles and roles. Which individuals in your target companies should receive the email offers? Select the job titles that are likely to be decision makers and influencers. Content marketing tends to appeal most to mid-level and lower-level employees, so make sure you include their titles and job roles in your “perfect prospect” description. Content marketing can deliver the technical evaluators, influencers, and “coaches” in accounts very effectively to sales professionals who can work “up the organization” to reach decision makers and “economic buyers”.

Once you’ve created your target lists, all email campaigns sent to those lists are automatically building quality control into the leads you’ll receive. Since only individuals who match your “perfect prospect” definitions for buyers and influencers will receive content offers in their inboxes, your inbound leads and responders are, by definition, from within your target markets.

4. Built-In Quality Control

The first step in creating a content marketing campaign or series is to define precisely who your targets are. The authors like to use the term “the perfect prospect” to vividly describe this tactic.

Ideally, the marketing folks will work closely with the sales folks to agree on exactly what the “perfect prospect” looks like. The target list should define the target population to be emailed in terms of:

• Geography. Where are your targets located? Don’t promote content to St. Louis if you have no salespeople there.

• Industry. Select which industries for which your products or services are targeted.

• Company size. Segment your targets to just the company sizes that your products or services fit. If you’re selling $250 million outsourcing engagements, don’t email content offers to $10M companies. Conversely, if your products target small and medium business, don’t email the CFO of General Electric or any other huge company.








Today’s content marketing and email automation capabilities allow marketing and sales to identify new leads and responders who are interested but cannot begin a purchase process in the near future and easily move them to a new stage of lead generation: nurturing.

Lead nurturing is the process of identifying a content marketing campaign responder as interested in your product, determining their role in a future decision process (economic buyer, technical buyer, influencer, roadblock, coach, etc.), and taking them back out of sales’s hands and into the stage of nurturing. Marketing then uses pre-configured email automation to deliver personalized emails of related and interesting topics to those leads that have been tagged for nurturing.

Typical nurturing emails are very brief, and of the “Hi Jim, I saw this article on network security breaches and thought it would interest you” type. The idea is to steadily “drip” friendly, non-salesy emails to your prospects that keep your name and brand in their inboxes with relevant topics so that they think of you in the future when they’re ready to start engaging in a serious purchase discussion.

Lead nurturing utilizes the same modern email marketing and CRM database technology as outbound content marketing, and enhances lead generation results by keeping your prospects thinking of you.

5. Ability to Nurture Prospects that Are Not Ready to Buy

Research has shown that 70% of the new leads generated by today’s marketing campaigns are “interested”, but are just not ready to make a purchase now. In the past, before email automation was available, sales professionals were trained to simply discard the leads that weren’t ready to buy in a timely fashion, regardless of their level of interest.

Many sales organizations were taught the “BANT” method of qualifying prospects. A prospect could not be considered to be fully qualified until it had met all four BANT criteria: Budget, Authority, Need, and Time, with “Time” meaning that the prospect had to confirm that he or she would be making the purchase decision within a “reasonable” period of time (usually 60 to 120 days, depending on the type of product being sold).

When new sales leads were followed up by salespeople, the most important thing to do (and still is) was to rapidly qualify or disqualify the prospect. The problem was that when a lead indicated that they were interested but not ready to buy yet, there was no alternative for the salesperson except to discard the lead as unqualified. With an estimated 70% of new leads being legitimately interested, but not meeting the “Time” qualification, this meant that over 2/3 of all marketing lead generation efforts were being wasted!








• Relative day-of-week performance

• Deliverability (How many emails delivered? How many bounced?)

• Opt-outs

• Number of emails opened

• Number of click-throughs from emails

• Number of registrations on landing pages

• A/B testing of sender names (Performance of sender name versus sender name)

• A/B testing of Subject lines (Performance of one email subject line versus others)

• Follow-up results

• Time to follow up

• Days since last touch

• Most frequent responders by company

• Dollar and/or quantity value of all prospects by sales stage

• Weighted dollar value of campaigns

• Many others…

6. Performance Tracking and Measurement

Technology hasn’t just made creation and execution of lead generation campaigns easier, more broad-reaching, and more cost-effective. It has also provided measurement and reporting capabilities that allow marketers, sales professionals, and their management to instantly see the results of their lead generation activities.

Content marketing and its associated emailing and CRM systems provide deeper and richer tracking capabilities than the marketers of the 20th century could have even imagined. Whereas the marketer of 1995 only knew how many direct mail pieces were sent, how many were returned to sender (after a week or so), and what the response rate was, the marketer of 2014 can glance at an on-screen dashboard and see:

• Performance of all campaigns over time

• Relative performance of content topics versus other topics

• Relative performance of varying list sorts (by geography, by industry, by title, by size of company)








or shown a different way:

Message A/A:

From: Roy Hinckley <[email protected]>Subj: “Fun With Ferns” White Paper Offer

Message A/B:

From: Roy Hinckley <[email protected]>Subj: Request your white paper: “Fun With Ferns” for biofuel apps

Message B/A:

From: Biofuels Research Papers <[email protected]>Subj: “Fun With Ferns” White Paper Offer

Message B/B:

From: Biofuels Research Papers <[email protected]>Subj: Request your white paper: “Fun With Ferns” for biofuel apps

7. Ease of Testing and Changing Campaigns and Content

The ability to instantly track results and measure the effectiveness of almost any imaginable metric in content marketing also provides the marketer with the ability to test different variables, adapt and change campaigns on the fly, and increase or decrease focus or investment in specific, well-defined target areas.

Online dashboards, reports, and tables allow marketing and sales management to see near real time results of campaign topics, email subject lines, sender names, and other variables. Campaign effectiveness can be increased dramatically by literally doing A/B testing in the morning and changing all campaigns to the top performing variables in the afternoon.

For example, imagine a white paper campaign by a company called “Minnow Inc.” offering a white paper entitled “Fun with Ferns” to chemists, botanists, and engineers in the biofuel industry. The total database of “perfect prospects” numbers 60,000, and the two variables to be A/B tested are “Sender name” and “Subject line” (since these are the only two variable items a recipient sees in an outbound email campaign).

The four different emails that offer “Fun with Ferns” are therefore:

Sender name Subject lineA Roy Hinckley <roy.

[email protected]>

“Fun With Ferns” White Paper Offer

B Biofuels Research Papers <[email protected]>

Request your white paper: “Fun With Ferns” for biofuel apps








In the morning hours, the campaign is released with all four messages sent to 15,000 of the 60,000 total targets (3750 each of A/A, A/B, B/A, and B/B).

By the afternoon hours, results will be visible for “% opened” of the emails. Let’s say that results show:

A/A………………..9.5%

A/B………………..12.1%

B/A………………..7.4%

B/B………………..6.9%

It’s clear that the A/B combination yielded the best results, and it’s furthermore clear that the versions using a real name (Roy Hinckley) outperformed the versions using the “corporate” name. (This is for illustrative purposes only, and is not intended to give the impression that real names always outperform corporate or functional names.)

Armed with this data, the marketer can now adjust the campaign to use only the A/B version of the outbound email to send the offer to the remaining 45,000 individuals. Assuming that all statistics were to remain the same, this will mean that the adjustment will add 1406 more “opened emails” to the campaign than if the same four variants were sent to the entire population of 60,000.

Clearly, the ease of testing and measuring different variables adds an enormous value to all of the lead generation activities.








Here is the list, summarized for your benefit:

1. Alignment with New Buyer Behavior

2. Significantly Better Economics

3. Broad Reach

4. Built-In Quality Control

5. Ability to Nurture Prospects that Are Not Ready to Buy

6. Performance Tracking and Measurement

7. Ease of Testing and Changing Campaigns and Content

Of course, these advantages don’t come easily. Building a content marketing capability in your organization could be a very time-consuming, expensive, and arduous task. Many companies have found that there is a very large advantage in choosing to outsource the content marketing function. These forward-thinking, fast-growing companies simply don’t have time, resources, or in some cases, money to spend on building a brand-new marketing capability in-house. They’ve elected to “cut to the front of the line” by simply plugging in to the function being hosted and delivered by experts.

For an analysis of outsourced versus in-house content marketing, the respective economics, and the pros and cons, make sure to visit the sponsor’s Resource Center at www.WinGreenMarketing.com/ResourceCenter.aspx, and download the white paper entitled Outsourced Content Marketing Part I: Features and Benefits.

Summary

Content marketing has emerged as an effective tool in the tool belt of the 21st century marketing prospector. With benefits and advantages in economics, versatility, adaptability, and alignment with the new seller-buyer paradigm, content marketing is a must-have for the modern-day prospector. The seven ways that content marketing improves lead generation results presented in this white paper are just the most compelling and visible of the many positive impacts you might experience on your own marketing and sales efforts.






www.WinGreenMarketing.com/ResourceCenter.aspx





WinGreen Marketing Systems is a content marketing agency specializing in inbound marketing, outbound marketing, and high-impact lead generation programs for technology companies in the United States and Canada. Headquartered in Downingtown, PA, the company was founded in 2009, and is a business partner of Hubspot, Salesforce.com, Microsoft, Ringlead Inc., and Predictive Response.

WinGreen’s content marketing services include authoring and publishing of client-branded content in all digital forms, including white papers, e-books, articles, blog posts, social media posts, webcasts, videos, and podcasts. WinGreen delivers compelling content that attracts target buyers and influencers across the entire spectrum of buyer personas and buying phases.

The company’s inbound marketing services utilize WinGreen-authored content in its many forms to attract and engage target buyers and influencers to its clients’ websites. WinGreen uses Hubspot’s world-leading inbound marketing automation to manage content, campaigns, and analytics. The combination of content published by WinGreen and inbound marketing supported by Hubspot tools is unbeatable for building pros-pect pipeline and revenue growth.

WinGreen also provides outbound content marketing services for predictable, reliable, cost-effective lead generation. In addition to authoring all required content, WinGreen also builds target email databases, deliv-ers mass email marketing, plans and executes regularly scheduled campaigns, and utilizes its own commer-cial-grade, cloud software infrastructure for all marketing automation. WinGreen’s outbound content market-ing is the perfect way to get immediate lead generation results while building long-term inbound marketing engagement.

Contact WinGreen at www.wingreenmarketing.com/contactus.aspx or call (650) LEAD GEN (650-532-3436). Learn more at www.wingreenmarketing.com.

About the Sponsor

(c) Copyright 2009-2013, WinGreen Marketing Systems, LLC. All Rights Reserved. This document and its contents may not be reproduced in whole or in part without the express written consent of WinGreen Marketing Systems.WinGreen Marketing Systems, The WinGreen System of Marketing, and The WinGreen Systems Architecture are trademarks of WinGreen Marketing Systems, LLC. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.







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