When a lead-generation campaign performs poorly, the main culprit often is an irrelevant or non-compelling offer – an industry-analyst report or follow-up phone call offered in exchange for the recipient’s contact information. In a rush to launch lead-generation campaigns, brands mistakenly repurpose content from sales-enablement or product marketing, creating a gap between the offer and what their targeted audience wants.
Sales-enablement and lead-nurturing collateral is valuable, but it is meant for prospects familiar with the brand’s solution. Content for sales enablement is focused on closing the deal. In contrast, lead-generation campaigns are focused on getting contact information. Successful lead-generation campaigns exchange useful, relevant and compelling content for permission to contact a qualified individual.
Paid-search campaigns are effective because brands have the opportunity to reach users at the point of intent – when they are actively searching for a solution. Brands waste this opportunity when they direct users to a contact-us form or some tangentially relevant on-demand webinar. Take the paid-search campaign opportunity to offer them content that provides a solution that is highly relevant to their search query.
Let’s look at this what-not-to-do example – BambooHR’s lead-generation campaign for its human-resource software. Bamboo’s offer (below) of a white paper, Stop Using Spreadsheets, requires visitors searching keywords relevant to HR software to make a jump in relevancy. (The offer is a better fit for a lead-nurturing campaign focused on reinforcing the Bamboo solution.)
For a lead-generation campaign, Bamboo would have done better by offering information that would help the user select an HR-software solution, such as an HR-software buyer’s guide or an industry-analyst report reviewing top HR-software vendors.
In social advertising, you know key details about your target audience. You may know job titles, to which user groups they belong, or the skills they include on their LinkedIn profiles. In a Twitter campaign, you may know what technology they use or publications they read. Use this information to dictate the content you create, such as an informational guide around software your target customers use.
Identify content gaps
Create a table that includes the lead-generation campaign in one column and the offer(s) in another. Highlight campaigns where the offer is not directly relevant to the keywords or audience targeted. Here’s a hint: Product features, case studies, and on-demand webinars tend to perform poorly in top-of-funnel lead-generation campaigns. Industry-analyst reports (e.g., Gartner, Forrester, SiriusDecisions), buyer’s guides, and strategy guides tend to perform well.
Measure the campaign’s success because underperformance is a good indicator of a content gap. Using the lead-generation campaign table, highlight the underperformers – the campaigns with low click-through rates (below 1% in search campaigns, below 0.02% in display campaigns) or low conversion rates (generally below 5%).
This example shows the table of lead-generation campaigns for an enterprise resource planning software company. Offers highlighted in orange are underperforming, indicating where new offers should be created and tested for these campaigns.
Create new content to fill gaps
Once you have identified the offers that need to be replaced, prioritize new content based on impact – those areas with the greatest opportunity for new qualified leads or cost reduction. Look first at your lead-generation campaigns with the highest click volume and highest cost because they have the largest impact on performance.
With your priorities in place, brainstorm content ideas. Again, pay special attention to your targeting options for the ad network. If you are running paid search, the new offer needs to be highly relevant to the targeted keywords. Similarly, audience-targeted campaigns need to be highly relevant to the audience you are targeting. Be confident that the new content is beneficial and useful to the user by considering the buyer persona and the stage of the buying cycle. In addition, evaluate how a new offer may be used effectively across multiple campaigns to maximize its value.
Test new content
Determining whether your content is compelling can be tough without testing. Making pilot offers in social advertising is a powerful, inexpensive evaluation method. Run LinkedIn Sponsored Updates and Twitter Sponsored Tweet campaigns testing multiple offers. I recommend running a test of four sponsored updates or tweets – the click-through rate (CTR) will indicate whether your audience is interested in your content.
In a recent test, Obility offered a different strategy guide in four LinkedIn Sponsored Updates campaigns: Targeting Competitors, SEO for the AppExchange, Online Marketing with Marketing Automation, and Promoting B2B Events. After a month, we found that Targeting Competitors significantly outpaced the other guides’ CTRs by four times. The message was clear: Our target audience of online marketing managers was most interested in reaching competitors’ prospects and customers. After the test, we continued to run the Targeting Competitors offer in our LinkedIn campaigns and maintained a high CTR with low cost per lead.
As you fill the content gaps in your lead-generation campaigns, you will see notable improvements in click-through rate, conversion rate, and cost per lead, and those gains can be quite substantial. By identifying content gaps and creating more relevant, compelling offers, you can more effectively reach your target audience.
Want more insight into how to improve the content for your sales funnel? Check out all the fantastic CMW sessions that are available through our Video on Demand portal.
Cover image by Benjamin Miller, Free Stock Photos.biz, via pixabay
