1. FIVE STEPS TO CREATING A
CONTENT STRATEGY THAT
GENERATES LEADS
Presentation by Carole Gunst for ProductCamp
Boston

2. The Five Steps
1. Identify your customer
2. Understand the Buyer’s Journey
3. Audit your existing content
4. Strategize new content to create
5. Run lead generating programs and measure
everything

3. Identify Your Customer
 Who are you selling to?
 Purchasers
 Influencers
 End users
 How are they different?
 Build Buyer Personas for each
 Use buyer personas to build your content

4. Understand the Buyer’s Journey
The Marketing & Sales Funnel The Buyer’s Journey
Source: Web Strategies, Inc. Source: Forrester Research

5. Audit Your Existing Content

6. Strategize New Content
 What do you need?
 Look a year out at your goals and plan for that
 What are your prospects and customers looking for?
 What content has been downloaded the most?
 Which pieces do your sales reps use the most?
 What are your top competitors using?
 Maybe you need to offer what they are offering at a level that you can support
 Who are your industry influencers?
 If your biggest industry influencers are writing articles, papers, and doing
webcasts, maybe you should too.
 Are the content distribution firms (think TechTarget) you’ll be using? What
do they recommend that will pull the best for your audience?
 Do you have subject matter experts (SMEs)? If so, what types of content are
they best at creating?

7. Run Lead Generation Programs
 Inbound:
 SEO
 Pay-per-Click
 Social media
 Outbound:
 Cold calls
 Direct mail
 Advertising
 E-mail marketing
 What are your goals?
 Awareness
 Education
 Lead generation
 Convert to sales
 What is your budget?
 What resources do
you have?

8. You Can’t Manage What You Can’t
Measure
 Starting out, you need to measure:
 Total number of leads generated
 Leads generated per sales person/territory
 Number of sales accepted leads
 How are leads coming in? (website, email, events, etc.)
 Down the road, look at:
 Leads-to-close conversion ratio
 Cost per lead
 Cost per sale

9. Resources
 Hubspot Academy
 The Buyer's Journey: The Marketing Funnel Evolved
 Forbes
 The Role Of Influence In The New Buyer's Journey
 Forrester Research
 B2B Marketing’s Big Data Myth: It Only Applies to B2C
 The Dummies Books
 Content Marketing for Dummies