You’ve probably heard that quality content will serve as a magnet to attract visitors to your website. Once on your site, the visitor will (ideally) provide minimal information in order to download your valuable content.
If you’re not sold on the idea of content marketing, often called inbound marketing, you might consider our experience with a single blog post, two Calls-To-Action (CTAs) and two Landing Pages.
Strategic Content Marketing or Dumb Luck?
Support for product launches is an important service we provide clients. Our blog post, “Product Launch Plan & Communication: A Guide,” posted on July 1, 2013, is right in line with our experiences with customers. The product launch post gained early traction and continues to be popular today – producing 27% of total website traffic and over 50% or our web leads over 14 months.
In addition to the blog post’s continued lead generation, we have been able to consistently rank in the top 5 for a set of primary keywords and long-tail keywords, providing an on-going supply of new prospects via organic search (which has the lowest lead acquisition cost).
Landing Page Views: A consistent performer
Conversion Rate: A 50+% conversion rate validates content quality
Inbound Marketing Best Practices
As a HubSpot client and certified partner, our team is well-practiced and many are certified in inbound marketing best practices. To further reinforce the notion that inbound marketing isn’t dumb luck, let’s look at some blogging and lead follow-through best practices:
- Identify Target Personas –We were going for launch managers, program managers, product managers.
- Relevant Topic to Target Audience – Ours is product launch communication strategy leveraging best practices, along with practical advice the reader could apply to their own launch. The post and related downloads are educational and meaty enough to be valuable.
- Clear & Relevant CTAs – This post has 1 primary CTA and 1 supportive CTA and download. Both are directly referenced in the blog post. When the CTA is clicked, the viewer is directed to a landing page with a form. This page also provides more information on the download.
- Optimize Content – Using HubSpot’s built-in blog optimization tools, we optimized the post for search, targeting a set of keywords and adjusting as required.
- Promote Content – Aside from simply creating a blog post, we’ve regularly promoted the post, and separately the Product Launch & Communication Guide download, on social media, in email marketing, and in other targeted channels.
- Email Nurture – It’s important to follow-up with prospects and continue to guide them toward seeing your company as a solution to their problems. We promote blog posts and other downloads that might be of interest through a series of emails sent at set intervals and triggered by particular actions.
- Pick Up the Phone – Within the past 60 days, we have sorted through all of the leads and warm-called those that best fit the profile for our company (about 250 high quality prospects). Preliminary calls to this group resulted in 7 further exploratory calls and 3 immediate opportunities to pursue. While only a portion of inbound leads will be highly qualified – compared to leads you might obtain through a networking event, for example – you have a good chance of finding those opportunities if you pick up the phone.
- Track and Review Metrics – HubSpot makes it really easy to track and review the performance of blog posts, landing pages, and CTAs. This keeps us focused on optimizing based on what’s working.
There’s no magic here, just really solid best practices and a very helpful platform from HubSpot. You can achieve the same inbound lead generation success with your business. Talk to a PLS principal to learn how. Or request a demo or free 30-day trial of HubSpot.
