资源描述
The Content Marketers Playbook Lead Generation Written by Jordan Teicher Illustration by Andrea Ucini Agoodson Copyright 2018 Contently. All rights reserved. contently2 Table of Contents I. Introduction 3 II. Taking the Lead 5 III. How to Set Up Your Lead Generation Program 9 IV. Lead Generation Metrics You Should Track 29 The Lead Generation Checklist 31 V. Conclusion 32The Content Marketers PlaybookLead Generation 3 EVERY WEEK, MORE THAN 100,000 PEOPLE receive The GE Brief. The digest arrives in their inboxes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, offering subscribers in-depth stories about NASA wind turbines, power plants in Iraq, immortal machines, and more. The fact that 100,000 people voluntarily signed up for a brand newsletter may surprise some. For GE, however, its 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. I. IntroductionLead Generation 4 I. Introduction As a result, the brief brims with journalistic rigor, pulling in stories from GE Reports, the brands 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. 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 doesnt 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 cant 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 someones contact information? Probably not. Inspiring your audience to take action calls for more substantial content. If the content becomes too promotional, too self-serving, you will lose your audience very quickly.” “Lead Generation 5 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 II. Taking the LeadLead Generation 6 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. (Well 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 II. Taking the Lead CONTENT Awareness Engagement Evaluation PurchaseLead Generation 7 awareness content, and theyre 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. On athenaInsight, the brands 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 Foxs team work on webinars and longer whitepapers that run upwards of 10 or 20 pages. Take this paper on replacing electronic health records (EHR). Its 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. We work really hard to set a standard in terms of quality and voice,” said John Fox, athenahealth executive director of content and communications. “Theres a sense of integrity and credibility. Pivoting from that into more of a sales message requires some art so you dont lose that. You dont want to lose them on the next click.” “ II. Taking the LeadLead Generation 8 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, thats 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. “Its getting bigger and bigger, its 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.” In the next section, lets go over how to generate leads who want to spend their finite attention with you. II. Taking the LeadLead Generation 9 ACCORDING TO RESEARCH FROM RING LEAD, 85 percent of B2B marketers say lead generation is their most important content marketing goal. However, 68 percent of companies are still struggling with lead generation, per CSO Insights. The reason for this disconnect is a lack of strategy. As soon as lead forms become part of the equation, marketers start falling back on old habits which lead to the self-promotional content that turns audiences off. III. How to Set Up Your Lead Generation Program10 III. How to Set Up Your Lead Generation Program “When its an ad, nobody cares. When its a piece of content, you can make somebody feel,” said Jay Acunzo, founder of Unthinkable Media and author of Break the Wheel. “They can feel smarter or feel deep, moving emotions of some kind. When you have that level of passion and emotion, all of a sudden they want to talk about you and stick around for hours instead of seconds.” To convert your general audience into leads for your business, make sure your content program follows these nine steps. Brand Awareness & Thought LeadershipLead Generation 11 Establish an ROI model How much is a lead worth to your organization? $10? $100? $1,000? Thats the big question you should ask before you invest a single dollar in lead generation content. Because the answer will inform every move you make. To be clear, landing on an ROI model is different than setting goals. You dont necessarily have to try to predict how many leads you expect to generate from an e-book. Rather, this is about setting up a system that shows precisely how your content impacts the bottom line when the results come in. The most basic way to do this is to divide your revenue by the number of leads in your database. If you value a lead at $5 and your next webinar brings in 200 leads, the ROI of the webinar is $1,000. This method isnt perfect and your data should be updated regularly, but this is a good place to start. III. How to Set Up Your Lead Generation Program When its an ad, nobody cares. When its a piece of content, you can make somebody feel.” “Lead Generation 12 Now, the marketers tasked with creating content probably dont have the skills or expertise to calculate revenue data. Thats okay, as long as you can consult with a revenue marketer or business analyst who does. Work with this person to find the right formula for your company, keeping in mind that the end goal should be to track the amount of deals or dollars sourced from your content. For instance, using this method internally, we realized that content directly impacted $418,000 in new deals for 2018. (This number doesnt include retention, something well cover later in this series.) As a final piece of advice, youll need software in your marketing stack to pull regular reports on these numbers. We use Marketo for capturing and organizing leads. Then our revenue marketing team uses Salesforce to see how many leads viewed our content on the way to becoming Contently clients. We use Tableau and Looker to view all data in one place. For some of our clients, Domo and Google Data Studio are also popular alternatives. III. How to Set Up Your Lead Generation ProgramLead Generation 13 Set up lead scoring Leads are not created equally. However, many companies, especially those new to content marketing, go after all of them the same way. Thats a recipe for dangerous expectations. A Kissmetrics report found that conducting a lead gen program without clean data wasted an average of 546 hours per year for every sales rep. So if an e-book gets thousands of downloads but doesnt impact any deals, prepare to have some tough conversations with your boss. From 2015 to 2016, we created dozens of content marketing e-books on granular topics. We developed separate industry e-books for finance, insurance, energy, travel, and retail. We started breaking down e-books for different audiences in the UK and Europe, with plans for more to come on Asia and the region surrounding Australia. Eventually, our small editorial team spent half their time producing and publishing these assets. But then the e-books stopped converting. The problem had nothing to do with quality. We just werent properly scoring our leads. So when a new CMO joined the company in 2017, she told us to press pause. We crunched the lead data and simultaneously conducted in-depth research on our audience. It turned out that our target readers had changed and our intuition was off. III. How to Set Up Your Lead Generation ProgramLead Generation 14 Once you have an ROI model in place, your next step should be to score your leads. By assigning point values to different factors like title, industry, and company size, you can quantify how “good” your content is as sign-ups and downloads come in. Tracking these numbers after an e-book release will help the sales team prioritize leads when they come in. Then, your company can go after the leads with the highest scores instead of crossing your fingers and hoping all of your leads will convert. With third-party research in tow, we gradually started planning more lead generation content. We pursued a few e-books and webinars targeting decision-makers like VPs and directors instead of just marketing practitioners. And we planned for roughly one lead gen asset per month, not one per week. III. How to Set Up Your Lead Generation ProgramLead Generation 15 Map out the UX After all this talk about e-books and emails, its easy to forget about one of the most underrated parts of content marketing: design. How your site looks and functions matters just as much as your word choice and storytelling chops. Unfortunately, plenty of brands treat design as an afterthought when they could be optimizing their site for more conversions. While youre planning story ideas, think of how you can maximize real estate on your site without overwhelming the audience. You want to encourage people to become leads. So treat the content and pop-up modules on your site like breadcrumbs on the path to an action. Marriott (a Contently client) does a great job of this in the travel space with its Traveler publication. Marriott runs the site with a committed editorial perspective, educating people on what to do when they travel across the globe. That could mean avoiding tourist traps in Manhattan or shopping in Salt Lake City. Regardless of the topic or location, Marriott removes friction from the purchasing process with prominent buttons and links to related products. III. How to Set Up Your Lead Generation ProgramLead Generation 16 As Contently director of content strategy Joe Lazauskas pointed out in a column on The Content Strategist, context is key: “Even though Marriott Traveler doesnt push product, it drives millions of dollars in direct revenue for the hotel giant. How? The site does a really good job of recommending related products and experiences to the story that youre reading.” B2C brands have it a little easier than B2B brands, but the same approach should work. You may not be able to place a “Book a Room” button at the top of your content, but you can use the space for an email capture box or a demo button. III. How to Set Up Your Lead Generation Program Think of how you can maximize real estate on your site without overwhelming the audience.” “Lead Generation 17 Develop big rocks Marketers love metaphors. Jason Miller, head of content marketing and social media marketing at LinkedIn, coined one that stuck: the big rock philosophy. A big rock is a substantial piece of content that helps you own a particular topic or conversation. (The e-book youre reading right now is a big rock.) As Miller told us a few years ago, a good big rock will “start with one remarkable piece of content that you researched the hell out of, that tackles the topic better than anyone else.” The goal of content marketing is to help people, not publish a blog post. Sometimes, marketers forget that if they get stuck churning out content that will be forgotten by next week. When done right, a big rock conveys authority that drives both lead generation and brand awareness. For that reason, they have to offer significant value compared to your average piece of content. In this case, size matters (as does quality.) III. How to Set Up Your Lead Generation ProgramLead Generation 18 One of Millers most successful lead generators is “The Sophisticated Marketers Guide to LinkedIn.” The original version was published in 2014, dispensing clear advice so people can get “the most value from LinkedIn for themselves and their company.” But the asset has evergreen appeal, and every year, LinkedIn relaunches it with new material to reach new audience members. “The beautiful thing is that we just revive it every year,” Miller explained. “Maybe change the cover, change the creative. We change the creative quite a bit because we do so much testing on everything to see what really resonates.” III
展开阅读全文