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
Page 2
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

Page 3
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

Page 4
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

Page 5
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

Page 6
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.

Page 7
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).
Seven Ways That Content
Marketing Improves Lead
Generation Results
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 support@wingreenmarketing.
com 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

Page 8
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.

Page 9
• 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.

Page 10
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!

Page 11
• 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)

Page 12
or shown a different way:
Message A/A:
From: Roy Hinckley <roy.hinckley@minnow.com>
Subj: “Fun With Ferns” White Paper Offer
Message A/B:
From: Roy Hinckley <roy.hinckley@minnow.com>
Subj: Request your white paper: “Fun With Ferns”
for biofuel apps
Message B/A:
From: Biofuels Research Papers <research.
papers@minnow.com>
Subj: “Fun With Ferns” White Paper Offer
Message B/B:
From: Biofuels Research Papers <research.
papers@minnow.com>
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 line
A Roy Hinckley <roy.
hinckley@minnow.
com>
“Fun With Ferns”
White Paper
Offer
B Biofuels Research
Papers
<research.papers@
minnow.com>
Request your
white paper:
“Fun With Ferns”
for biofuel apps

Page 13
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.

Page 14
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.

Page 15
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.

Seven ways that content marketing improves lead generation results

Recomendados

Recomendados

Mais conteúdo relacionado

Último

Último (20)

Destaque

Destaque (20)

Seven ways that content marketing improves lead generation results