Content Marketing for Lead Gen: How to Get Started
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Think of the brands you know and love. As you read this, they're all doing it. Content marketing, that is. Without content, there is no marketing. Creating and distributing valuable information to a target audience is essential to bringing in new customers and building loyalty. The world's biggest corporations, including Coca-Cola, have adopted content marketing as a core part of their engagement strategy for the coming years, but have you? Join Nicole Capelo, Marketing Specialist at Marqui, and Dan Biggs, Digital Strategist at Station X, in a live webinar that takes the guesswork out of content marketing, showing how companies like yours can use it to drive measurable returns. This webinar will provide you with: • An understanding of the pivotal role content marketing plays in demand generation and sales efforts • Ideas and inspiration - which companies are doing it right • Tools to develop your own forward-thinking content strategy
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Content Marketing for Lead Gen: How to Get Started
- 1. Content Marketing for Lead Gen: How to Get Started
- 2. • Click the button with the arrows to minimize your GoToWebinar controls. • Type your questions for us into the box at the bottom and press Send.
- 3. Introduction Marketing Services at the Next Generation CMS software, intersection of art and science. combining web content management, email marketing and multi-channel Integrated offering including: campaign management. • brand development • digital strategy All delivered in the cloud. • website redesign Over 200 customers in industries • social media including software and technology, • advertising and communications higher education, healthcare and • analytics and optimization sports and entertainment.
- 4. Introducing Nicole Capelo Marketing Specialist at Marqui Expertise: • Content marketing • Web marketing (blogs, social media engagement, email marketing) • Copywriting • Communications
- 5. Introducing Dan Biggs Digital Strategist at Station X Communications Expertise: • Web analytics • User experience • Information architecture Clients: • Sleeman Breweries • Mercedes-Benz • 7-Eleven • Corix
- 6. 1. What is Content Marketing and How Does it Work? Definition, History and Guiding Principles 2. Gating Strategies 3. Real World Examples 4. Kick-Starting Your Content Marketing Program 5. Q+A
- 7. Content Marketing…In 20 Words or Less Content marketing involves creating and distributing educational content, or content of value, to attract new customers and maintain loyalty.
- 8. There’s no marketing without content.
- 9. The Infinite Power of Story
- 10. “The History of Content Marketing”, Joe Pulizzi’s blog at Content Marketing Institute, 2012.
- 11. “A Brief History of Content Marketing”, MarketingProfs, 2011.
- 13. A Changed Buyer • B2B buyers are turning to the web to research purchases. Buyers may evaluate up to 10 sources of information before even speaking with a potential vendor. * This means: • Longer sales cycles And • Increased emphasis on accessible web content that guides prospects through the purchase funnel * Corporate Executive Board’s Marketing Leadership Council research, 2011.
- 15. How Does It Work? Some Principles
- 17. “Gating” content is the practice of exchanging premium thought leadership content for a prospect’s contact information.
- 18. Tier 1: Paid content $ “Gating” content is the practice of exchanging premium thought Tier 2: Gated Content a prospect’s leadership content for contact information. Tier 3: Non-gated content $
- 19. Gated Not Gated • Whitepapers • Simple case studies • Webinars/Events • Promotional videos • Instructional videos • Simple product demos • Newsletters • Blog posts • Detailed case studies • Infographics • White papers
- 20. Non-gated content should be used for: • Generating viral spread and shares on social media networks • Generating interest and establishing a presence in the market • Traffic generation through SEO and incoming links • Establishing trust in your brand, company or products • Establishing value of your thought leadership content
- 21. Gated content should be used for: • Custom research • Software tools • Providing solutions about how your product can solve client pain points
- 22. Real Examples
- 23. General Electric: The GE Show
- 24. General Electric: The GE Show
- 25. General Electric: The GE Show
- 26. SolarWinds: Free Trials and Training
- 27. SolarWinds: Free Trials and Training
- 28. Marin Software
- 29. Marin Software: Co-branded Webcasts
- 30. Kickstart Your Content Marketing Program What content do you already have? • Auditing your content • Auditing your buying process • Refreshing old, creating new and remapping content
- 31. What Content do you Need to Make? • Gathering market intelligence • Create material around your company’s solutions • Why mediocre content doesn’t work • Letting data drive content development
- 32. Your Content Development Team • Developing a process • Create content calendar • Assigning a “storyteller” for your organization • Finding and briefing subject matter experts
- 33. Different Channels, Different Purposes • Email: Great for nurturing prospects • Social media: Fostering a two way conversation • Paid Search • SEO: Great content will generate organic search results
- 34. The Essential Toolset for Content Marketing Next Gen Content Management System (CMS) • Agility of putting content on the web quickly and easily • Ease of distribution of content over multiple channels • Measuring the success of content’s effectiveness Analytics System • Measuring the traffic and conversions of channels • Testing lead generation forms • Understanding content demands of prospects Social Media Tools • Monitoring conversations and questions on social networks • Synch messaging over social media channels • Tracking social media shares
- 35. Want to see Marqui in action? Join us for a live product demo. Click the link in the GoToWebinar chat window to register.
- 36. Q&A Dan Biggs, Digital Strategist Station X Dan.Biggs@stationx.co Nicole Capelo, Marketing Specialist Marqui Nicole.Capelo@marqui.com DM us on Twitter www.twitter.com/Marqui_CMS or www.twitter.com/therealstationx
Editor's Notes
- Good morning everyone and welcome to the latest in Marqui and Station X’s series of web marketing webinars, my name is Nicole and I’ll be one of your presenters.Today’s webinar is all about content marketing – it’s really seen an explosion over the last few years, and we wanted to provide a practical guide on how you can use it to drive leads for your business.
- Just a bit of housekeeping before we begin: If you have any questions, and please do ask them since they make the webinar more interactive, you can use the GoTo webinar interface. You’ll see a field at the bottom where you can type your question.We’ll try our best to answer questions as they make sense throughout the webinar and at the end, but if there are questions we don’t have time to answer, we’ll address those in a blog post later on today.Oh, just a quick note: we’ll be emailing a copy of the presentation slides and the recording by end of day today, so stay tuned for those.
- I wanted to begin by introducing the two companies that are behind the webinar today - Station X and Marqui.Marqui is actually the software brand of Station X. Station X is a marketing services company, and we pride ourselves on operating at the intersection of art and science.If you want to understand who Station X is - we’re a hybrid between a creative agency and a web shop. It’s our belief that since the world is going digital, effective campaigns are those born from integrating traditional and digital media. We also know that compelling campaigns are the result of art and creativity, along with the science – so, execution and measurement.Station X offers a range of services, including brand development, digital strategy and social media, and Marqui is the software that enables a lot of what Station X does. Marqui is a next generation CMS – CMS is a content management system, for those that may not know. Marqui allows marketers to manage and measure content across their website, email, social media and mobile, and it really works to weave all those channels together. Marqui is cloud-based, so you won’t need help from your IT team, it’s a solution that lets marketers take control of managing their own content.
- Wanted to take a moment to introduce myself and then my colleague Dan. My name’s Nicole and I work in the Marketing team here at Marqui. A large portion of what I do here at Marqui is content marketing, so it’s a topic I’m very passionate about, and I’m hoping to pass some of that on to you today I was previously part of the Digital Marketing team at Loblaw Companies Ltd, and my background is again, in content marketing, so I’m really involved in writing email content, blogging, executing email campaigns, web content management, social media, social contests, and lots of copywriting. My role at Marqui is to find a way to tell the stories that help web marketers do their job better, and grow their business.
- Enough about me – we’ll move onto our next presenter, Dan Biggs – Dan is a Digital Strategist at Station X.Dan has been marketing and building websites for over 12 years. He’s an expertin web analytics and online marketing campaigns with a focus on user experience and info architecture. Dan has abackground in a wide range of web marketing disciplines, including paid search, email and affiliate marketing. He’salso engineered mobile websites and social media applications for custom and existing platforms. Over the course of his career, Dan has held the role of Online Marketing Manager at 1-800-GOT-JUNK, as well as Website Production Manager at WH Smith, which is one of the U.K’s leading news, magazine and stationery retailers.So, welcome Dan! Thanks for being with us today.
- Now, I’m going to run through the agenda for today – I’m going to start with a more conceptual discussion of what content marketing is and how it works. I’ll define it, give some historical examples and explain some of the guiding principles behind it.Then, Dan’s going to take the floor, he’ll run through gating strategies, and examples of companies that are doing content marketing well. Then, he’ll finish with a more practical guide to help you kickstart your own content marketing program, so just taking everything you’ve learned here today and applying it.
- Wanted to start off with a basic definition of content marketing, I think it’ll be useful to keep this in mind as we go through the slides.Content marketing involves creating and distributing educational content, or content of value, to attract new customers and maintain loyalty. Just as a sidenote, content marketing is sometimes referred to as custom content, branded content or even custom media – it’s all referring to the same thing
- There’s no marketing without content. What this really means is that although the term content marketing is relatively new (it’s only gained momentum in the last few years), the actual practice of content marketing is not new at all.New technologies have helped to evolve the practice of content marketing, so now it’s easier and more cost-effective to deliver your content to a wide audience. In this sense, the Internet has really enabled marketers to become publishers and storytellers. In my opinion, it’s one of the most exciting times to be a marketer – technology and market competition have really demanded that wefind better ways of communicating with our prospects,ways that resonate with them and benefit them.
- If we’re going to talk about the power of story, what better way to illustrate than with a story! Personal anecdote here…I once spoke with a senior marketing executive who told me that if you want to be a good marketer… you need to go back to kindergarten. Good marketing is about harnessing that same feeling you’d get at storytime, those 5 minutes when you were 100% engaged and attentive. You didn’t care that Bobby just stole all of your dinky cars, because it was storytime. And when it was storytime, nothing else existed, nothing else mattered. You were excited, you were enthralled, you were hanging on every word – you just didn’t. want . that. story to end. For me, it’s a very powerful way of thinking about marketing, and I’ve never forgotten it. Good marketing is about telling the stories that resonate with your audiences in some personal, maybe emotional way. Sometimes B2B marketers in particular tend to downplay that human, emotional aspect. There doesn’t need to be a dragon or a magic cauldron for it to be a compelling story that strikes an emotional chord with your audience. The tendency is sometimes to forget that you’re writing for people first and foremost, and I would caution against that.
- Just shifting gears a bit, I wanted to move onto a couple of examples of how companies have used stories in the past to market their products. The Furrow --this is often cited as the first example of “corporate storytelling”, or what we now know as CM. The Furrow is a publication from John Deere and it dates back to 1895. The magazine wasn’t a product catalog, but a manual meant to educate farmers on new technology. The Furrow is now circulated in 40 different countries and 12 different languages, so it’s an obvious success story for content marketing.
- Now, here’s a examplemost of you will instantly recognize…GI Joe!Hasbro launched the first GI Joe in 1964, and in 1982, they wanted to revitalize it, bring it back to the market again. The problem was that they need to find a way to get young kids excited about the toy. What they did was re-launch the toy line, but came up with a whole backstory about the soldiers, and featured this story in comic books, an animated TV series, and videogames. Obviously, it was a complete success.Interesting to think that this toy, this iconic brand, wouldn’t have had such a lasting cultural impact if it wasn’t for content marketing. That’s pretty powerful stuff.
- Brings us to the state of content marketing today. I wanted to share a snapshot of the present to show what types of content B2B and B2C marketers are finding most value in. The bar graph here captures some research from eMarketer in 2011. Blogging, unsurprisingly, came in on top for both B2B and B2C companies. Webinars and virtual events came in 2nd, with whitepapers in 3rd place, showing more significance for B2B marketers. User-generated content was found to be quite useful for B2C marketers in particular.Really, the point that we’re trying to drive home is that there are many different types of content, some types are ideal for B2B marketing and other types are ideal for B2C. It really comes down to your business type and the industry you’re in, you need to test out which content types are going to be most effective.
- This slide is giving some content around changing buyer behaviour and how it affects content marketing. Research has found that B2B buyers are turning to the web to research their purchases– as a result, sales cycles are lengthening. In addition, buyers are putting off getting into contact with potential vendors until much later in the process, so a lot of the research that they’re doing during the selection phase is self-directed. What this means for marketers is that there needs to be an emphasis on accessible and informative web content that will help guide your prospects through the purchase funnel. This will ensure that by the time a prospect is ready to engage with a sales rep, they’re already well qualified, already familiar with your product or service, and they already have an idea as to how it can help solve their business problem.
- So, how does it work – Content marketing hinges on the idea of a value exchange (so it’s a far cry from the one-way “push” messages of traditional advertising). With an exchange, the ideais that both parties, the marketer and the consumer, are each receiving something of value. Consumers will get a useful piece of content that will help them do whatever it is they’re doing, better. In return, marketers will get the attention of their prospect, maybe they’ll get their contact details, they’ll get some insight into that prospect’s preferences, insight which can then be used to try and sell to them.Exchange. Very important.
- Pretty well known fact that consumers today are inundated with marketing messages, and marketers have to make an extra effort to avoid being lost in the noise. We’ve gathered these top 3 principles. If you can hold up every piece of content you produce to these 3 standards and they “pass the test”, you’ll be in a good position. The first one is Relevancy – you need to get into the headspace of your target market and identify their needs, problems and their pain points. This is really where market research comes into play. The next principle is Originality – no one wants to get washed away in a sea of sameness – you need to find innovative, original ways of speaking to your prospects. The last principle is Value – this one’s really interesting because what it really comes down to is your audience’s perception of value. There are things that marketers can do to elevate that perception, and Dan will be reviewing this in more detail when he goes over gating strategies.
- Moving on now to the topic of content mapping. So, good content marketing isn’t just about publishing content, throwing it out to the universe, and hoping that your prospects stumble upon and give you a call. The idea is to map your content to the various stages of the buying cycle – this ensures that your content will be relevant to your prospects at varying stages, and even more importantly, it helps to guide those prospects through the sales funnel. Here’s another way to think of content mapping: if you were to meet someone, for the first time, at a professional networking event – the stories you tell about yourself will be very different from what you might reveal when you’ve known that person for months. Same principle applies to content marketing. For example, different types of content are great to bring in “top of the funnel” opportunities. When a prospect is in the awareness phase, they probably won’t know about your business. At this stage, it’s great to cover more general, industry-related topics. So, blog posts, webinars, whitepapers, and social media – all of these help to share educational content in the early stages of the buying cycle. What’ you need to ensure is that the content is accessible and easy-to-consume. As your prospect moves further down the sales funnel, let’s say they’re in the “consideration” phase – that’s when your content can be more specific and focused on your product or service. Product demos are a great mid-funnel content type. We can even use Marqui as an example - Marqui might decide to publish a whitepaper that compares software-as-a-service CMS to an enterprise-class CMS. Seeing as our prospect would be in the position of evaluating different vendors, this would be a great way to use content to drive them towards taking that next step. After a prospect has been in the consideration phase for some time, you can get even more focused in your content. Case studies, ROI worksheets and product detail sheets would be very useful at that point. To sum up –content is the thread that weaves together all the stages of the buying cycle. Good content marketers need to be very strategic and very attuned to the needs of their target market. Doing so will drive more qualified leads and faster conversions. Now, with that I will hand it over to Dan, who will be introducing the concept of ‘content gating’.
- use “To Gate or Not to Gate” article
- Insert diagram about how gating can create value tiers
- use “To Gate or Not to Gate” article
- use “To Gate or Not to Gate” article
- GE example http://www.ge.com/thegeshow/flight/#ch3General Electric has developed a wide range of content that is generally un-gated. Their content focuses on brand engagement and entertaining ways of learning about GE’s products and services.Pictured here: an aerodynamics simulator game, which helps prospects understand the complexity of designing airplanes.
- This leads through to the a clear call to action to check out what GE is working on in this field.
- Which takes us to the GE Aviation
- Marin software’s approach is mapping their content offers to the sales cycle. If I go to their website, they continue to serve ads to me over the Google Display Network to drive me to the next step in the purchase process that they want me to take, which is downloading a 14 day free trial of their software.
- Marin also partners with related companies to develop valuable content for their prospects, which they gate behind a lead generation form.
- What do you have?What do you need to make?Developing an editorial calendar and strategy
- Customer intelligence – Finding out customer pain points and how your business can provide solutions to these problems.
- Customer intelligence – Finding out customer pain points and how your business can provide solutions to these problems.
- Customer intelligence – Finding out customer pain points and how your business can provide solutions to these problems.
- Thanks so much Dan, that was great! Before we get to our questions, we wanted to let everyone know that Marqui hosts weekly live product demos. So, if you’re interested in seeing first-hand what Marqui’s CMS can do, please join us. We’d love to have you!So. if you have a look in your GoTo Webinar chat window, we’ve just sent everyone the URL. You can paste that into your browser and sign up online. Really quick and easy.Now, onto the questions…
- Ok, and now we’ve got a bit of time to answer some questions…Thanks so much for coming out today everyone – hope you found the content really useful. We’ve got our contact info here, so please feel to touch base with us if you have any questions, or want to know more information about content marketing.Have a great day everyone!