Whether you’re in the B2B or the B2C space, content offers are a great way to attract potential customers. A content offer is an educational resource such as an eBook, a checklist, a pricing guide, case study, etc that your best customers (buyer personas) will find valuable enough to download. Although content offers typically don’t cost any money, they aren’t necessarily free.
How to generate more leads with content offers
“We have too many leads.” - No business owner ever.
Content offers need to be incredibly educational, and tailored toward your specific buyer persona, because in order to gate your content, someone has to find it valuable enough to share some of their contact details with you. The amount of information required varies depending on what stage of the buyer’s journey your content offer falls in. For example, if you developed a high-level checklist, you should only be asking for the visitor’s name and email address. If you’re offering a pricing guide, you should ask for more details such as job title, phone number, company name, etc.
What’s it matter?
A content offer is more than a blog post, or an industry specific landing page. If you ask for too many details, and don’t give enough in return, the visitor is likely to bounce (literally and figuratively). However, you put a lot of time and effort into making an awesome content offer and you shouldn’t just waste your efforts by giving it away for free. Ask for just enough and you’ll see better conversion rates for your content offers.
They filled out the form, now what?
This is where the magic starts happening. Once a visitor converts on one of your content offers, they should be immediately entered into your CRM, automatically placed in a workflow, and then directed to a Thank You page where they can download a PDF of their offer.
Whoa! Slow down. Workflow? CRM?
A workflow is a sequence of events put in place once the triggering event is completed. In this case, the triggering event would be that a visitor fills out a form on a landing page. There are both internal and external workflows.
An internal workflow might be once someone downloads the offer. Their contact record is immediately sent to a sales rep or a marketing specialist with a task to follow-up via phone. This type of workflow should be set aside for decision stage offers, meaning, someone who is clearly ready to purchase.
An external workflow uses marketing automation for lead nurturing. Here’s a look at that process:
- Visitor fills out form
- Visitor receives immediate email containing the offer
- Delay, a few days
- Visitor receives lead nurturing email #1
- Delay, a few days
- Visitor receives lead nurturing email #2
- Delay, a week or so
- Visitor receives final lead nurturing email
- Workflow ends, but you get to keep their contact info for future opportunities
Depending on what CRM or marketing software you’re using, most of this process can be set up ahead of time. For example, if you’re using HubSpot, you can setup a campaign containing all of the items above and it will trigger automatically. Softwares, such as MailChimp and Constant Contact, do this as well, but it makes it a bit more difficult to keep it all in one place.
The Ultimate Goal
The ultimate goal with any marketing effort is sales. If you’re creating incredible content that your personas are finding valuable, you will be generating new leads in no time. The best part about all of this is that you can set up workflows to automatically nurture leads, so you won’t necessarily hear from someone until they’re almost ready to buy. Additionally, it limits the resources needed to work leads, and also ensures your sales team is getting more qualified leads leading to warm calls.
Give us a call…
If all of this sounds like it’s too good to be true, feel free to give us a call. We’d be happy to talk you through the process and how it may be a good fit for your business!
