Back
The following guest post was written by Jonathan Nimrodi, Vertical Lead – B2B Global Marketing Solutions at Facebook.
Content marketing serves many purposes, including brand awareness and thought leadership. But if you’re a startup marketer, then your primary aim is growth, so if your content isn’t generating serious traffic and leads right from the start, then you may not see truly meaningful results from the the hard work you put into creating quality, SEO-friendly content for a very, very long time. If you approach content marketing like a growth hacker, however, and apply some of the hacks I’m about to share with you in this post, you should be able to see immediate results from your efforts to acquire and convert new leads.
The sad truth is that most startup marketers might end up waiting for the ‘long term’ benefits of content marketing forever (literally). Chances are that out of all the blog posts and whitepapers you’ve created, maybe one or two will go ‘viral’ (or somewhat viral), create an immediate spike in traffic, and potentially increase your user base. I’m personally not impressed by this sort of activity because I feel that there’s no hack in writing compelling content. Sorry guys, but there’s a big difference between writing good content and growth hacking because content on its own, isn’t scalable.
To give you an example from my work as Performance Marketing lead at Playbuzz (a playful content creation platform whose website currently boasts 80 million monthly visitors), we found that the time invested in creating content is scalable only when you empower your community to generate buzz for your content rather than relying solely on your own promotional efforts. Even as a content creator and promoter, you should think like a growth hacker and always ask yourself if you can repeat this successful process again and again. If you use the right tools and R&D time to make it happen, then content can become a legitimate growth engine for your startup.
So, how do you leverage your content for lead generation, like, right now? Here some suggested steps to follow:
Step 1: Acquire traffic (via free and paid methods including LinkedIn, Reddit and Facebook Ads)
Step 2: Convert the traffic (via landing page and blog optimization, A/B testing and retargeting)
Step 3: Use a personalized trigger-email to follow up and seal the deal
Step 1: Acquiring traffic via both free and paid promotion hacks
Let’s skip the part where I tell you it’s important to post stuff on your well-branded social media channels, and move straight on to the good stuff:
Free Promotion:
1. LinkedIn groups
The Challenge:
If you’re a B2B marketer, you’ve probably already tried LinkedIn groups as a platform for free, highly targeted content promotion. What’s important here is not to spam the groups. Think about it, if you’re posting the same piece of content to 3 different groups within your niche, chances are that some of your prospects are also members of those 3 groups. Naturally you wouldn’t want them to potentially see the same post in 3 different groups because this may be seen as spammy and not do you any favors at all.
The Hack:
What you want to do is create different posts that are relevant to each group, get as many different people in your organization to post them, and then be quick to ‘like’ every post they publish because this will help to ‘up-vote’ the post and send it to the top of the feed.
Also:
Don’t publish early in the week: The highest traffic days on LinkedIn are Tuesdays and Wednesday, and 70% of the traffic is mobile – so it’s crucial to be mobile optimized.
Publish between 15:00-16:00 PM EST if you want a chance to be included in the LinkedIn Daily Digest emails, sent by LinkedIn automatically to all group members.
2. Spy on what your competitors are doing on Reddit
The Challenge:
You may already know that if you trend on Reddit, you might enjoy a HUGE spike in traffic. But how do you go about trending? If you over-post on sub-reddits, there’s a good chance that your post will get lost in the feed, or worse – you might be kicked out of the community for being spammy.
The Hack:
A good way to get started is check out what your competitors and other niche websites are doing on Reddit. To do this, use this example link:
http://www.reddit.com/domain/domain.com, and change the bold part (“domain.com”) to the domain of the competitor you want to check out, to see which sub-reddit they’re posting their content on.
Paid Promotion:
1. LinkedIn Sponsored Updates:
The Challenge:
So you’ve crafted a wonderful blog post or eBook, and now it’s time to share it with the millions of clever people on LinkedIn.
The Hack:
LinkedIn Ads, even with its frustrating UI, has targeting options that surpass those of Facebook, Twitter and Google by enabling targeting based on ‘role’ and ‘skills’, making it the most effective option for B2B targeting. It also allows you to target members of specific LinkedIn groups (similar to the “free promotion” LinkedIn hack, but on steroids). For content, LinkedIn sponsored updates is the best solution. The highly targeted, narrow audience allows you to filter out potentially irrelevant clients right from the start, so you only acquire traffic that might actually convert into paying customers down the road.
2. Facebook ads (yes, Facebook ads)
The Challenge:
A common myth is that Facebook is solely a B2C network, and that B2B businesses would therefore find it difficult to acquire customers. To some extent, I agree with that, as targeting decision makers can be tricky on Facebook since most of the time when people spend time in Facebook they’re not in ‘working mode’ so they tend to skip hard-sell advertisements. However, appealing content, even professional, still has potential to do well on Facebook, as people will interact with content that’s engaging and educational even while on the go or in ‘leisure mode’.
The Hack:
Before you even start creating your ads, first you need to make sure that the content it’s promoting (and associated download landing pages for that matter) are mobile responsive.
The first step when creating your Facebook ads is to set up the targeting criteria. Simply using the Facebook “Interests” option won’t do the trick for most businesses because the aggregated keywords it offers often too wide, which might result in irrelevant traffic acquisition. That’s why Facebook introduced “Custom Audiences”. Basically it’s a tool that enables businesses to upload a list of their customers’ email addresses or phone numbers and to retarget them within Facebook. Facebook also offers a ‘Lookalike’ targeting, which takes your email list, for example, and scrapes for Facebook users with similar characteristics.
However, most startup marketers who use these Facebook Ads tools usually find that:
1. Their custom audience is too small and therefore Facebook couldn’t match it and create a retargeting list that’s substantial enough.
2. Facebook’s “Interests” didn’t provide results that were relevant enough.
3. The ‘lookalike’ option achieved more or less the same results as the ‘Interests’ option.
So the best way to create a target audience that resembles LinkedIn’s capabilities is to combine all three features.
1. Take your email list from your CRM so that includes only customers rather than your entire email list, because the purer the data you use, the better the chances that Facebook will finds more relevant matches in step #2.
2. Create a Facebook Lookalike of that audience
3. Filter your audience from step #2 by specifying relevant “Interests”.
You won’t believe how focused and targeted your campaign will be!
Step 2: Converting the traffic and the importance of A/B Testing
There’s a popular notion that asking too many questions on landing-page forms or using newsletter popups to encourage signups are a turn off for many users, and that using these tactics results in a lower conversion rate, but that’s not always the case.
Landing page conversion:
Take a look at these two versions of a landing page by Cloudyn for an eBook download. The pages were created with Unbounce – a great tool for building, publishing and A/B testing landing pages.
In the first form (below) there were only four fields to fill in, requiring minimal time and effort from the visitors to complete and allowing them to progress to the next stage quickly, so it’s unlikely that they would find it daunting at all.
A/B Testing Example (B2B): Cloudyn landing page – SHORT form (click to enlarge)
The second form (below) is longer and required visitors to provide a lot more details, such as job title, current vendor, budget, optimization plans etc.
A/B Testing Example (B2B): Cloudyn landing page – LONG form (click to enlarge)
You might assume that visitors would be put off by such an inquisitive form. But can you guess which form had a higher conversion rate?
Results of basic (short) form:
Results of detailed form:
The results may be surprising to some, but as they clearly demonstrate, the conversion rate of the detailed, more inquisitive form was twice as high as the shorter, basic form. Just for reference, the industry standard landing page conversion rate is 2%, and average whitepaper return rate is 5%-6%, so with a conversion rate of 20.54%, the Cloudyn eBook landing page in this example didn’t just exceed industry standards, it also proved that in B2B scenarios, forms that request a few more details from users (which provide data that’s of strategic value to marketing and sales), actually perform better than ‘basic’ forms.
There are most likely several reasons to explain why people responded positively to the longer form. Maybe by asking more questions, the content provider came across as more serious about his intention to attract the user as a potential, valued customer. In a business context, people appreciate the purpose of asking these types of questions so more often than not – as the example of the detailed form demonstrates – they are happy to oblige.
The truth is, I would have kept this campaign running even if the conversion rate was just 5%, because the leads generated by this more detailed form are far more valuable to me than those who are only willing to disclose their name and email. For example, if in this instance, someone indicated that their annual spend on cloud services was $5 million, I’d know right away that they are big players and I’d transfer their account over to the relevant department to be taken care of properly.
Incidentally, it also appears that a larger visual on the landing page also played a role in generating more positive results.
The importance of A/B Testing
When looking at conversion rate optimization, you must always decide on the “one metric or goal that matters”. This will be the metric or goal that’s going to drive your growth and be the centerpiece of your strategy for each campaign, whether it’s total revenue, revenue per lead, shortening the sales cycle, building your email list, etc. Once you have decided on your most important metric or goal, you need to optimize your funnel in order to achieve it.
When we analyzed PlayBuzz’s performance, we found that even though we were already viral across most social platforms, the highest ROI in terms of traffic acquisition (which was our “metric that mattered”) came from Facebook, as Facebook’s algorithm loves to promote content that’s as engaging as ours. Before we started to optimize, our conversion from the PlayBuzz site to a ‘Facebook Share’ was at 5%, which was already considered very high compared with the average of 1.5% achieved by other publishers for their content.
So how did we optimize the funnel in order to boost the performance of our “metric that matters”? We A/B tested our social sharing feature.
Here’s what the social sharing buttons looked like on our website content items before we began a/B testing:
A/B Testing Example (B2C): BEFORE optimizing sharing buttons (PlayBuzz)
Resulting in a conversion rate to a share of:
To try and top this result we made a few changes:
We eliminated four of the social network options, leaving only Facebook and Twitter
We enlarged the remaining share buttons
We changed the text on the button from the share count, to a call to action asking people to “Share on Facebook” or “Share on Twitter”
Here’s what the social sharing buttons looked like after we applied our optimizations:
A/B Testing Example (B2C): AFTER optimizing social sharing buttons (PlayBuzz)
Resulting in a conversion rate to a share of:
The main point here is that conversion optimization is an ongoing process. Even if you believe that your conversion rates are high and that there’s nothing left to optimize, both the Cloudyn B2B example above and this PlayBuzz B2C example show that constantly testing different hypotheses and applying even the smallest changes can make a big difference to your overall performance.
Blog conversion:
Hacks for boosting conversions of visitors to your blog:
1. Capture their emails. I use SumoMe as my go-to email-capturing tool. It’s free to use, but its premium version also enables businesses to trigger email signup popups based on behavior and context. For example, you could ask people browsing through your blog if they want to receive your most successful blog post directly into their inbox by submitting their email address. To find your most successful blog post, go to your Google Analytics account; go to the “Behavior” section and select “Site Content” to find your most successful post based on average time on page or website conversions.
2. Create fantastic headlines. Here’s a fun and inspiring tool I use almost every day.
3. Have a sticky, floating form that follows the reader when scrolling down.
4. Add a permanent call-to-action below your most educational, tech-savvy posts asking users to sign up to your newsletter or try your product.
5. Make your blog posts super easy to share. Add a social sharing plugin and place it at the top of you blog posts. If your content is valuable, people will share it, and studies show that some readers check sharing stats on blog posts before deciding whether to read or bounce.
6. Retarget, smartly. Or in other words, retarget your blog readers using ads that correlate to their reading habits. For example, a visitor who reads a blog post that highlights a certain value proposition or product feature should only see ads that are related to that feature. This will help you identify your strongest value propositions and most converting messaging in order to determine your cost per lead, per feature.
Then, wrap up the funnel by creating a dedicated landing page that emphasizes that special feature. I use Optimizely to create different variations of my landing pages, introducing different features based on the content and banner experience that preceded the visits.
So the process should be:
Visitor reads about a cool feature
Visitor sees an ad promoting that feature
Visitor is redirected to a well-crafted landing page all about that feature which includes an irresistible call-to-action
You increase your conversion rate!
Step 3: Use a personalized trigger-email to follow up and seal the deal.
Remember that long form on the landing page example I talked about earlier? Well the lead generation doesn’t end with the user submitting his form. There’s a reason for collecting all that personal information, and now that you have it, you can use it to reach out to your prospects via an automated email, saving valuable sales rep time. Take a look at this automatic drip email that makes use of all the information collected through the long landing page form:
Cloudyn eBook download follow-up trigger email
As you can see, the personalization doesn’t just stop at the user’s name, which is about as far as most marketers can go if they use ‘basic’ forms that don’t return more detailed data. Thanks to the great data that was collected using the more detailed form, I was also able to add triggers for job title, company and annual spend, creating a far more personalized message. This particular email template generated an open rate of 55%, with 35% of openers requesting a live demo.
Summary
You might think that the hacks I mentioned in this post are pricey, but the truth is that they are as lean as it gets. The landing pages were created using a $99 p/month software (eliminating development and design costs completely) and the email automation was created with MailChimp (you need a premium account, but it’s still a very economical option) which as a startup, you’re probably already using anyway for your email marketing.
A good content marketing strategy doesn’t end with SEO-optimized content on your website and promoting your content using free social media channels. To maximize your content’s reach and potential to convert, you’ll have to treat every single piece of content as a standalone campaign within your overall marketing strategy and use a variety of software and tools that are readily available to capture leads effectively.
