When it comes to B2B
content marketing,
lead generation is the holy grail, and the content
marketer's job is to keep that sacred chalice full, so your knights of the sales roundtable
can drink the glorious waters of eternal revenue.
Having said that, content marketers cannot be reckless or impatient in their quest for leads.
Shortcuts must be avoided, lest that glorious revenue be endangered.
So What Exactly Is Lead-Gen?
Lead generation is the final (i.e., the bottom) stage of the
content marketing funnel.
Awareness (content that talks about problems your customers face) and consideration
(content that talks about you) sit above it.
The defining quality of lead-gen content is that it explicitly asks for contact details, or
explicitly prompts you to go to another page to give contact details.
This might be
gated content (which is a type of
lead magnet),
but it doesn't have to be. The ask can also be at the end of the content. It doesn't matter. And
the topic or type of
content also doesn't matter.
What matters is the ask for contact details and it must be explicit.
There can't just be a link to another page that doesn't indicate contact fields await you.
That isn't lead-gen, it's just cowardly.
Why Is Lead-Gen Done?
Lead generation is generally done for two reasons. And it's important we distinguish them
because the types of content best suited to each can be quite different.
1. Intelligence Gathering
When a lead-gen opt-in form contains a lot of fields about you, your job title, your company,
and your industry, that information isn't collected solely to personalize the follow-up email.
It's a good way to find out who your marketing is reaching and who's responding to it.
And if that's all you really need to know, pair awareness content with this, perhaps a broadly
appealing whitepaper.
2. Revenue Gathering
This is what we usually do lead-gen for. We want to know who to sell to. And when we do it
for this, we should do it in a way that establishes a strong likelihood of current buying
intent (i.e., that the prospects are currently in market).
One way to do this is to pair it with consideration content. The other way is to pair it
with selective awareness content where the topic strongly suggests current buyer intent (like
a guide to shopping for what you sell).
And lead-gen for sales is what we'll be talking about for the rest of this article.
Content Marketers Must Not Take Shortcuts
Content marketers love leads because for a lot of us, they represent the end of the road.
Leads are as far as we go. We lead the horses to water. We don't make them drink. There are
usually too many other factors that influence a sale for us to really take credit for it.
And when we have quotas to meet in terms of marketing qualified leads (MQLs), we're often not
on the hook for their quality (that's someone else's problem). So naturally we're inclined to
transform prospects into leads as quickly as possible. But this is not a great way to do things,
for three reasons.
1. MQL Refinement Might Not Be What You Think
According to an ancient (2011) but oft-quoted statistic from
MarketingSherpa,
61% of B2B marketers send all leads directly to the sales team.
And according to a couple of different sources, the percentage of those that are qualified is only
in the twenties. Which means sales may be wasting their time wading through a shitload of
valueless leads, which is bad.
Not only does it waste sales time and resources, you can also annoy your prospects by trying to
sell to them prematurely (which may damage your chances down the road).
2. In-Market Prospects Can't Be Hurried
Speaking of annoying prospects and wasting resources, a recent study has shown that B2B buyers
contact vendors when they're about
70%
of the way through the buyer's journey.
And reaching out to buyers earlier makes very little difference.
In other words, if you do lead-gen email outreach and the prospect is at or near 70%, you've got a
shot (though this will only be a tiny chunk of your market).
If you hit them too early, you've got very little shot of getting an immediate response (though
they might contact you at 70% if your brand is memorable and tantalizing).
If you hit them after 70%, you're a long shot at best (the same study shows the first-contacted
vendor winning 84% of the time).
Anyway you slice it, the odds of such outreach yielding the types of leads you want are not
good.
3. Education Is Usually Better Done Through Content
Even when some in-market qualified leads do get through, when content marketers "fast-forward" the
journey down the funnel by going from awareness directly to lead-gen (say by gating an ebook),
skipping over consideration (which educates prospects about what you sell) shifts a sizable (and
critical) percentage of those education duties away from your marketing content to your
salespeople.
Pushing the work to sales might sound like an absolute good, but what happens when a salesperson
tells a prospect something about what you sell that's a dealbreaker? The prospect leaves, giving
their business to a competitor, which wastes your salesperson's time, and does some of that
competitor's work for them.
Congratulations, you've just spent a chunk of your sales budget serving up a nice juicy lead
to the opposition.
But if the prospect had learned that dealbreaking fact while consuming a piece of consideration
content, that salesperson's time wouldn't have been wasted at all. And your only cost would be
what you spent on the content, instead of the salesperson's time (which is usually more
valuable).
And what's more, B2B buyers are preferring to
educate themselves and delay
talking
to sales. So B2B
vendors should probably do more to adapt.
Content Marketers Need More and Better Leads
Content folk need to be getting more of the good and less of the bad in terms of leads. One
way marginal leads get generated is through gated content. Marketers often love gated content.
But content people tend to hate it, for two reasons.
One, gating decreases your reach, a lot. Exactly how much is hard to say, but there's
data
out there suggesting it could be in the 50-70% range. Many people just aren't
comfortable giving out contact details, with a recent survey of medium and large business
buyers (same source as the just-quoted stat) indicating that 25% won't give out contact
details for gated content under any circumstances.
And the second reason is that people lie. A lead for Seymour Butts at seymour@butts.com is no
lead at all, with that same survey suggesting that 25% of buyers will do something like this
(I know I do).
I'm not saying don't gate at all. There's always a balance of factors to consider. But
on the whole, I tend to think B2B marketers should gate with discretion. Keeping most of your
content ungated will drive more leads in the long run.
What Content Types Are Likely to Attract the Right Leads?
We've already established that consideration content is generally better to do lead-gen
with than awareness. But you don't want to do this with every consideration piece you create
(you'll look too eager this way).
You want to do this with content that suggests a buying decision is coming soon. Or content
that suggests prospects are interested in you and just need a little push.
Case Studies
Nearly
80% of B2B buyers say
they reference case studies as part of their buying research.
They're generally considered the single most important type of B2B content you can have.
Which means you want them out there where people can see them. So whatever you do, don't
gate them. Put the contact fields at the end of the page. Or have a prompt and a link
sending prospects to your Contact Us page at the end.
RoI Calculators
Return on investment (RoI) calculators are not common yet, but I think they may eventually
replace case studies as top dog in the B2B content pack. And given the heightened scrutiny
B2B purchases are facing lately, I think every business that can should get these babies on
their website as quickly as possible.
And these you can gate. Otherwise you risk your RoI calculator becoming a toy for the
world to play with.
Consideration Podcasts/Webinars
This is when an in-house
subject matter expert (SME) or
outside influencer gets on camera
or behind a mike and talks about what you sell. This is a good option for prospects who've
already read everything you've written but are still hesitant (maybe because they don't
know your brand).
But a live webinar can give them a chance to see a live human face and have their
questions answered, giving them that extra little bit of confidence they need to get the
ball rolling officially with your brand.
Forum Content
Having a well kept presence on LinkedIn can certainly create awareness of your B2B brand. But
mainstream
social media channels are pretty much one-way
experiences these days, which may
not be enough.
If you really want to convince people that you're experts who know how to solve customer problems,
you might need to send an SME who can mix it up with other experts on Reddit or in other forums.
For two reasons.
One, some industries are very tribal (software developers, blockchain, etc.) and are best reached by
one of their own. And two, it is not enough to merely be where prospects are. You need to be
where they talk about work. And that isn't always LinkedIn.
Brand Is Everything When It Comes to Lead-Gen
Roughly
90% of B2B
purchases are won by vendors that were on the buyer's day-one list. Put
another way, without prior brand awareness, lead generation is largely a waste of time.
You can do everything right and everything well, but if buyers don't know you, it simply won't
work.
I can recall plenty of times when I've received cold emails or DMs that weren't half-bad.
That actually sold something I might have a use for. That were well done enough to actually
tempt me for a minute. And I simply never answered them. Because I'd never heard of these
people and couldn't trust them.
This means a lot of small and relatively unknown businesses are probably wasting too much
effort on lead-gen and should be focused more on creating awareness, and building their
brand strength instead of expending it to excess chasing leads. After all, strong brands
don't chase or ask for leads all the time, they attract them.
If you ask for contact details at every interaction, you don't actually have a content
marketing funnel, you have a
straw, and straws
suck.
But Lead-Gen Is Not Brand's Opposite
Many B2B marketers make the mistake of thinking that all marketing activities outside of
lead-gen build your brand. And that brand and lead-gen are somehow opposites. But this is
not true
at
all.
What is true is that the act of filling out an opt-in form in order to obtain a piece of
content costs some of your brand equity. Because it's an ask for business. Because it's
annoying. And if Seymour Butts still gets the content after filling in a false email
address, it makes your brand look stupid.
You'll also lose even more brand equity if the content ends up
disappointing
your prospects.
But if the content is good, you'll win that brand equity back. And if it's great, you'll
come out ahead. In other words, a great piece of content will build your brand, even if
it's gated.
But not every piece of content can be great, which is a big reason why you shouldn't do
lead-gen too often.
So, that's it for lead generation. If you want to learn more about the
awareness and
consideration
stages of the content marketing funnel, follow those links.
