Building a quality pipeline is a challenge, and Google isn’t making it any easier.
Changes in the way traffic, and leads, are coming to your site has probably shifted, yet lead generation is still a top priority.
Watch this on demand webinar to learn about channels and tactics that are working, and some of the common missteps we see brands making over and over.
Grab a pen and take notes on the importance of customer journeys, how to build a customer-centric culture across all teams, and what to expect when working with third parties.
Get an insider’s view into lead generation campaign successes and failures for ourselves, and our sponsors.
And, get an exclusive peek behind the curtain and see how we approach product promotions using a holistic, consumer-centered strategy that pays off time after time.
Key takeaways:
The best ways to attract and nurture your leads through every step of their journey.
How to support your team, or an agency, to execute these strategies effectively.
What to do after the lead hits your workflow. Pitfalls to avoid, what’s working, what’s not, and how to set up effective nurture campaigns.
With our very own Heather Campbell and Brent Csutoras, we’ll explore how to shift your strategy to attract and retain quality leads.
If you’re looking to create a holistic and consistent approach that will grow your lead generation efforts to new heights, check out the full webinar.
This is an excerpt from the B2B Lead Generation ebook, which draws on SEJ’s internal expertise in delivering leads across multiple media types.
You must communicate with leads correctly to provide a good experience and move toward a sale. What that looks like depends on what problems they face, their proximity to readiness to purchase, and how they became a lead.
It helps to start from your end business result and work backward toward your lead.
You need to know exactly what information you need from leads and how to use it to provide them with a good experience.
This helps you understand how to treat leads based on how they first interact with you – and which next steps you can reasonably ask for.
Starting this way also helps you build content that is attractive to leads in the first place. Pushing this line of thought further eventually gets you to SEO content, where it’s helpful to understand people’s specific problems and the intent behind their searches before you begin writing.
The critical distinguishing factor between successful and unsuccessful content is whether you complete the journey from your business goals to your audiences and do the research to understand the situations they’re in, what they need, and what success looks like for them.
“The time to think about business goals is at the start of your content strategy. It’s really easy to fall into the trap of creating content that grabs a lot of eyeballs but contributes nothing to your return on investment (ROI),” says Curtis del Principe, Sr. Marketing Manager at HubSpot.
He adds, “And we’re not immune to that either. We’ve got an old blog from the early days of content marketing (that will remain nameless) that still generates over half a million views per month but nearly zero conversion. And it’s not even in our niche, so you can’t make the argument of brand awareness, either.
But we’re stuck spending time and resources on this blog because if we ever stopped, it would absolutely crater our traffic key performance indicators (KPIs).
The lesson we learned is that you have to start from your business goal – whether that’s leads, sales, signups, or even just brand awareness.
When I’m working on content strategy, I’ll look at what products or offers we want to prioritize this month and then analyze the conversation around them. What questions do consumers have? What comparisons are they making? What pain points are they looking to solve?
Then, you draw a line between those questions and a conversion goal that’s appropriate for that question’s decision stage. Maybe it’s downloading a whitepaper, maybe it’s scheduling a demo, maybe it’s making a sale.
And I find that the act of drawing that line often shows me what shape a piece of content will take. It makes you think about how you’re going to scratch that itch.”
There are many different sources of leads; not all rely directly on content marketing. Platform ads like Google Discover and social media ads can be very helpful sources of leads. And, of course, there are the old-fashioned but still relevant direct lead generation techniques, like conferences, cold calling, and direct referrals.
You have many options for targeting and building ads to generate your desired leads. You can usually “qualify” them easily as marketing qualified leads (MQLs) or sales qualified leads (SQLs).
Leads from direct interaction or referrals often communicated with a sales professional already. These are likely sales qualified leads, although they may not always be.
The more direct the lead process, the easier it is to move people in your desired direction.
Generally, you would handle those leads differently than a relationship that begins with organic or gated content.
People coming to you through a content conversion or download can have less predictable journeys, so it’s critical to map their intents and needs to the types of content you create.
For example, at SEJ, we have different types of lead generation products. Here’s a breakdown of two of them:
Webinars
When someone signs up for a webinar, they invest their time into an experience to learn about something specific.
They’re looking for an interactive experience. They might actively have questions about the topic for which they’re seeking a direct answer from an expert.
These make great leads because they’ve already interacted with you after attending a webinar.
Ebooks
Ebooks at SEJ are a little broader. Depending on the scope and topic, an ebook might serve as a teaching tool, a reference guide, or an assistant in setting a strategy.
Someone downloading an ebook could seek a more self-directed experience, and their needs might be less immediate.
These also make great leads because they are invested in learning new things or are seeking help making impactful decisions.
Principe shares, “One of my favorite methods is to mention your offer/tool/product organically within a larger educational topic. For me, that often means discussing how our products or services are used to accomplish our readers’ goals. Here’s an example of that:
Screenshot from blog.hubspot.com, June 2024
Or, it might look like an offer presented as a “pro tip.” In other words, I’m telling you how to do X, Y, and Z … Oh, and pro tip: HubSpot users can do exactly that by going here. Here’s an example of that:
Screenshot from blog.hubspot.com, June 2024
When done right, this tactic helps to give a viewer valuable context for your offer that you simply can’t include in a traditional call to action (CTA). The caveat is that, when done wrong, you end up sounding like a bad 1950s product placement.”
He further explains, “The secret is to forget your marketing vocabulary and talk like you’re explaining it to a friend. If I’m telling a colleague about a great feature, I’m not going to say, ‘Sales Hub’s unique prospecting features enable businesses to optimize your pipeline for conversion,’ right?
The benefit of this tactic is that you tend to get high-intent, low-funnel leads who know exactly what they’re there for. But I will warn that it gets lower overall clicks than a traditional CTA, so you’re definitely trading conversion rate (CVR) for clickthrough rate (CTR).”
This is where you might want to start thinking about software. If you’re just getting started with a lead generation strategy, you might be able to get it by sending lead form responses into spreadsheets and organizing them yourself. If you don’t want to do in-depth lead scoring and only have a couple of different sources of leads, this can work fine.
But even if you’re not engaging in advanced scoring functions, volume will be an issue sooner or later. There’s much to be said for the integration power and quality of life improvements that come with software services.
For now, write down the sources of leads you want to engage with and do the work of understanding what people using those channels want.
Setting Up Your Lead Database
To generate leads using content, you need:
SEO and social media content to attract interest and generate subscribers.
Lead generating content that provides value in exchange for information.
Forms to capture leads. These could be on landing pages that gate off lead generating content or appear alongside/after the content for users to engage with as they read.
Integration from those forms into the software you choose to manage your leads, whether you’re taking the hands-on approach with spreadsheets or purchasing a service.
Decisions about how you will categorize and follow up with your leads.
Again, it helps to work in reverse order here. Clarify your process and how you plan to handle leads first.
How you categorize leads and what information you need will guide how you prepare your database. In B2B, some lead sources like referrals and content or LinkedIn ads are likely more valuable to you. A lead from signing up for a free trial of your software is likely much closer to a sale than a lead from downloading a white paper.
Your database is where you will apply qualifications and scoring. It’s also where you decide who should contact a lead and how they should do it.
Depending on the scope of your project, you can run a lead database by hand using a spreadsheet, or use one of many customer relationship management (CRM) software solutions on the market. The advantage of CRM software is automation, especially when it comes to integrating with different potential lead sources.
If you’re running an experiment or just getting started, investing in software may not make sense, but setting up may require more technical skill and a greater ask of your web development team.
Qualifying a lead tells you who should reach out to the lead.
Using what you understand about a lead and how they entered your pipeline, you determine how to best engage with and nurture them. They might be ready for sales outreach, or they might only be ready to review more content via an email campaign.
Lead scoring is particularly important for B2B sales. It’s deciding which leads are relevant and how valuable they are. You assign numerical scores to leads based on a variety of attributes and use the numbers to prioritize marketing and sales activities.
This goes hand-in-hand with qualification and helps you prioritize time and resources.
This process alone deserves its own book, but Alex Macura wrote an excellent lead scoring model for us.
We can’t tell you which tool or system to use, but if you know clearly what you want to accomplish and what information you need, you can select the right software more easily.
The core of your model is tags and scores. You should know what specific information you need, and how each piece of information is weighted.
Is There Such Thing As Too Much Information?
When it comes to leads – yes, absolutely.
Some people might balk at that. Today’s marketing advice is full of people saying you must provide tailored and personalized experiences. You must build authentic relationships. And to do that, you need to know as much about people as possible.
Data is power.
To that, I say, sure! That can be true. Sometimes.
But a lead is a transaction. The more information you ask for, the higher the price – both the literal cost of the lead and the price in terms of the value of the information you owe in return.
So, if you ask for too much and give too little, you could be chasing off customers.
In your quest for personalized experiences, are you making your barrier to entry too high?
It depends. (Everyone, get out your SEO bingo cards and cross off “It depends.” It’s next to “high-quality” and the free space.)
Lead generation requires some barriers to entry. That makes a lead a lead: They took an extra step.
There isn’t a single right answer here. If you have an expensive product or service that you only market to executives, it might make sense to either:
Require a large amount of information to weed out all but the most qualified leads. That way, you waste fewer resources on leads that don’t pan out. However, the leads are more expensive to acquire, and you may miss opportunities to build trust with users further away from purchasing.
Ask for minimal information from leads because one sale justifies the resources spent on leads that don’t pan out. This way, you don’t miss opportunities to get leads into your database, and you can always score them after the fact to mitigate waste. The risk is in the muddy lead database and potential resource waste.
For example, suppose you screen out Gmail email addresses and only consider leads with company domains. In that case, each lead will be more inherently valuable, but there are also plenty of reasons a potential customer might use their personal email.
This might be the best strategy for you if you don’t have a robust marketing and remarketing strategy to keep leads further away from buying engaged. It might also work well if you’re not using a CRM and scoring leads by hand, so you don’t have to weed out junk.
As you build out your content marketing and upgrade how you handle leads, it might make sense to relax the kinds of leads you accept.
Of course, everyone will have a different happy medium.
On the other hand, asking for more information that disqualifies a large number of leads could be critical to making the best use of your resources.
“When you’re evaluating lead capture, don’t get sucked into focusing on the wrong numbers,” Principe suggests.
“Lead volume seems important on its face, but only if they’re quality leads. I used to work for a medical supply company, and the sales team would constantly complain about uninsured leads. We couldn’t service those customers.
So, we added a field to our lead capture form asking for insurance information. Our form abandonment rate skyrocketed. Our lead volume dropped like a lead balloon. Our sales leaders started to panic.
Until we noticed that our qualification rate went through the roof and took our conversion rate with it. In the end, we boosted our ROI, even while our lead volume decreased.”
It’s a delicate balancing act we’ve been doing at SEJ for a while. When you signed up for our ebooks, you agreed to become a lead for our sponsors and receive their emails.
We like to think that you and readers like you agree to this because we treat you as a reader – and a person first.
This business model works because you’re a valuable reader whether you personally engage with those sponsors or not. We respect you by doing our best to provide valuable content.
We’re confident in the value of our leads because we’re confident in the value of our content. Readers like you trust us to do right by you by providing value for your data and time. Enough valuable readers, treated the right way, eventually become a sale.
This is an excerpt from the B2B Lead Generation ebook, which draws on SEJ’s internal expertise in delivering leads across multiple media types.
People are driven by a mix of desires, wants, needs, experiences, and external pressures.
It can take time to get it right and convince a person to become a lead, let alone a paying customer.
Here are some nuances of logic and psychology that could be impacting your ability to connect with audiences and build strong leads.
1. Poor Negotiations & The Endowment Effect
Every potential customer you encounter values their own effort and information. And due to something called the endowment effect, they value that time and data much more than you do.
In contrast, the same psychological effect means you value what you offer in exchange for peoples’ information more than they will.
If the value of what you’re offering fails to match the value of what consumers are giving you in exchange (read: their time and information), the conversions will be weak.
The solution? You can increase the perceived value of the thing you’re offering, or reduce the value of what the user “pays” for the thing you offer.
The more time before a reward occurs, and the less certain its ultimate value, the harder you have to work to get someone to engage.
Offering value upfront – even if you’re presenting something else soon after, like a live event, ebook, or demo – can help entice immediate action as well as convince leads of the long-term value of their investment.
It can even act as a prime for the next step in the lead gen nurturing process, hinting at even more value to come and increasing the effectiveness of the rest of your lead generation strategy.
It’s another reason why inbound content is a critical support for lead generation content. The short-term rewards of highly useful ungated content help prepare audiences for longer-term benefits offered down the line.
3. Abandonment & The Funnel Myth
Every lead generation journey is carefully planned, but if you designed it with a funnel in mind, you could be losing many qualified leads.
That’s because the imagery of a funnel might suggest that all leads engage with your brand or offer in the same way, but this simply isn’t true – particularly for products or services with high values.
Instead, these journeys are more abstract. Leads tend to move back and forth between stages depending on their circumstances. They might change their minds, encounter organizational roadblocks, switch channels, or their needs might suddenly change.
Instead of limiting journeys to audience segments, consider optimizing for paths and situations, too.
Optimizing for specific situations and encounters creates multiple opportunities to capture a lead while they’re in certain mindsets. Every opportunity is a way to engage with varying “costs” for time and data, and align your key performance indicators (KPIs) to match.
Situational journeys also create unique opportunities to learn about the various audience segments, including what they’re most interested in, which offers to grab their attention, and which aspects of your brand, product, or service they’re most concerned about.
4. Under-Pricing
Free trials and discounts can be eye-catching, but they don’t always work to your benefit.
Brands often think consumers will always choose the product with the lowest possible price. That isn’t always the case.
Consumers work within something referred to as the “zone of acceptability,” which is the price range they feel is acceptable for a purchasing decision.
If your brand falls outside that range, you’ll likely get the leads – but they could fail to buy in later. The initial offer might be attractive, but the lower perception of value could work against you when it comes time to try and close the sale.
Several elements play into whether consumers are sensitive to pricing discounts. The overall cost of a purchase matters, for example.
Higher-priced purchases, such as SaaS or real estate, can be extremely sensitive to pricing discounts. They can lead to your audience perceiving the product as lower-value, or make it seem like you’re struggling. A price-quality relationship is easy to see in many places in our lives. If you select the absolute lowest price for an airline ticket, do you expect your journey to be timely and comfortable?
It’s difficult to offer specific advice on these points. To find ideal price points and discounts, you need good feedback systems from both customers and leads – and you need data about how other audiences interact. But there’s value in not being the cheapest option.
In every large purchasing decision, there are multiple roles in the process. These include:
User: The person who ultimately uses the product or service.
Buyer: The person who makes the purchase, but may or may not know anything about the actual product or service being purchased.
Decider: The person who determines whether to make the purchase.
Influencer: The person who provides opinions and thoughts on the product or service, and influences perceptions of it.
Gatekeeper: The person who gathers and holds information about the product or service.
Sometimes, different people play these roles, and other times, one person may hold more than one of these roles. However, the needs of each role must be met at the right time. If you fail to meet their needs, you’ll see your conversions turn cold at a higher rate early in the process.
The only way to avoid this complication is to understand who it is you’re attracting when you capture the lead, and make the right information available at the right time during the conversion process.
6. Understand Why People Don’t Sign Up
Many businesses put significant effort into lead nurturing and understanding the qualities of potential customers who fill out lead forms.
But what about the ones who don’t fill out those forms?
Understanding these values and the traits that drive purchasing decisions is paramount.
Your own proprietary and customer data, like your analytics, client data, and lead interactions, makes an excellent starting place, but don’t make the mistake of basing your decisions solely on the data you have collected about the leads you have.
This information creates a picture based solely on people already interacting with you. It doesn’t include information about the audience you’ve failed to capture so far.
Don’t fall for survivorship bias, which occurs when you only look at data from people who have passed your selection filters.
This is especially critical for lead generation because there are groups of people you don’t want to become leads. But you need to make sure you’re attracting as many ideal leads as possible while filtering out those that are suboptimal. You need information about the people who aren’t converting to ensure your filters are working as intended.
Gather information from the segment of your target audience that uses a competitor’s products, and pair them with psychographic tools and frameworks like “values and lifestyle surveys” (VALS) to gather insights and inform decisions.
In a digital world of tough competition and even more demands on every dollar, your lead generation needs to be precise.
Understanding what drives your target audience before you capture the lead and ensuring every detail is crafted with the final conversion in mind will help you capture more leads and sales, and leave your brand the clear market winner.
This is an excerpt from the B2B Lead Generation ebook, which draws on SEJ’s internal expertise in delivering leads across multiple media types.
What, exactly, do you need to create a sustainable and scalable lead generation strategy with content?
It starts with an exceptional piece of content that the leads want – your “lead magnet” – but it doesn’t end there. Modern content marketing requires resources.
Without a content marketing plan and the ability to execute it, you’ll quickly exhaust your audience pool, and the leads will dry up. The good news is you don’t have to do all of this internally, but you need to assess the best use of your resources.
Let’s start with a map of all the pieces required.
Assets & Bandwidth
The four major components of successful lead generation with content are:
Understanding your available market audience and captive audience size.
Consistently creating high-quality, hyper-relevant inbound content and the research behind it to reach existing and new audiences.
Consistently maintaining a high volume of lead-generating content required for the audience and individual people within that audience.
Consistently testing and improving your content.
Market & Audience Research
Research goes into every step of content creation. First, to create a “lead magnet,” you need to be super dialed in on your audience’s specific challenges and immediate needs that you can solve.
You need to understand what a model of success looks like for them and provide a resource that gets them at least part of the way toward that success.
It’s a bit of a mind-bender. You must think backward and then forward at the same time. Before you can understand your audience, you need to understand what their audience is asking of them and get fully immersed in that consumer’s journey to your customer – and how that creates a need that applies to you.
When you provide a solution for your target audience, why is your target audience there? What is their audience asking of them?
Why does their audience need their solution, and why does that create a need for your solution?
You must think about all of those layers to provide the best content for them to solve their problem for their audience.
You have to create a whole experience of total immersion to create a remarkable lead generation strategy.
And you have to do this often. One lead magnet, solving one specific problem, gives you a lifespan of leads. But content becomes out of date, and the needs of your customers – and their customers – change.
The knowledge you need to create lead magnets isn’t a matter of a one-time research project. It’s the culmination of constant analysis and regular direct touchpoints with audience members.
You also need to know where you are now and where you can reasonably get to in terms of your audience size. Do you have an audience currently? How large is it? Do you have a plan to grow your audience?
While you absolutely can generate leads with direct tactics like ads, to do it with content marketing, you need an audience first.
The first step is knowing your current marketable audience. Then, develop a plan to expand it with your own content marketing efforts and partnerships that expose new audiences to your brand.
And, of course, you need to develop a distribution plan for your lead magnet content to put it in front of your current marketable audience and new audiences who might be interested.
Audience research moves you toward planning content. As a business trying to generate leads, you need supporting content for each step of the process.
First, there’s the organic strategy that comes with building an audience. Here’s where the deep understanding of audiences really starts to matter.
Content that adds value for free creates trust and goodwill. It’s the kind of long-term thinking that allows you to generate leads from your own audiences and also creates leads passively from people growing to recognize and trust your voice.
Then, there’s all the supporting content that lead magnets need to thrive: landing pages, email copy, supporting articles, social media posts, ads, etc. All of these content pieces must also be carefully targeted toward the direct problems your audiences face, as well as the specific words and phrases that drive interest and action.
More than that, you need to understand what channels and platforms audience members with specific problems use. Your supporting content must be optimized for that channel and fulfill the expectations that users of that channel generally have in addition to the problems you address.
Creating Lead Magnets
Now, we come to the lead magnets themselves, which need to be exceptionally helpful.
An underwhelming experience with lead magnet content can turn a lead off. If you fail to uphold your end of the deal – providing a path to a specific definition of success in exchange for personal information – then you’ll struggle to convert leads.
Success could look like:
“With this resource, I can perform a difficult task more efficiently or easily.”
“With this resource, I learned something new, and I can use this knowledge directly to solve a problem.”
“I can use this resource as a reference that will save me time or energy.”
“I can use the data in this resource to build or change my approach to a problem.”
“This resource changed my perspective and assumptions about a topic I already know something about, and I can take this innovation back to my team to discuss a new approach.”
To build a content resource that meets one or more of these goals, you need deep and expert knowledge of not just the subject matter and your products, but also, how to be useful.
You need to know how to teach someone something or persuade someone into considering new perspectives. You need to know what information matters and why.
You need to be a leader in:
Knowledge of the subject matter.
The craft of content, teaching, and curating impactful information.
Empathy for your audience and the ability to approach problems from their point of view.
Then, there are the technical skills that go into data analysis, the design skills that go into laying out a document, visual assets, and much more.
One person might possess all of these skills. They might likely exist disparately among different people on your team, in which case you need to align them.
Very likely, you’ll need to find external partners to supplement one or more of these skills.
Testing & Optimization
Often, when content isn’t performing as well as a business wants, its answer is to put more money behind it in terms of distribution, for example, more ads.
That’s because it’s somewhat rare for a business to have the resources to keep content updated as frequently as it should be.
But if there’s a problem with the content, that’s what needs to be assessed. More distribution might get more eyes on content, but if the content is outdated or not quite the right answer, this will be a failing strategy.
Continually testing, updating, and producing new content can be a massive resource sink. Not only does every piece of the content puzzle need refinement – from organic intent analysis to CTA testing – but you also need consistent new and updated content to scale a lead generation strategy.
Updating and producing new organic content helps grow your marketable audience. And new lead magnets that solve specific problems create new opportunities to turn readers and subscribers into leads.
The “updating” part of this is critical. Many businesses focus on making new assets but not maintaining old ones. You should apply the insights that new research gives you about your audience to existing content.
But, again, we return to the problem of assets and bandwidth.
Many businesses simply don’t have the resources to deploy the knowledge and time required to do it right.
Building content teams involves a mix of internal stakeholders and external partnerships. Even here at SEJ, where inbound traffic is our bread and butter, we use strategic distribution partnerships to expand our marketable audience. You can’t do it all on your own.
The great thing about a specialist distribution partner is they can help you build the knowledge and research you need to create stronger content efforts internally.
Publishers and influencers thrive on acutely understanding and serving the needs of their audiences. They’re a direct line not just to your audiences themselves, but also to:
Up-to-date analysis on trends your audience cares about.
Insights on the exact language your audience does and doesn’t respond to.
The tone and content types that resonate with your audience.
Deep understanding of your audience’s problems and anxieties and how they want to be helped.
But there are all kinds of external partners you can work with to fill gaps in your team, from content production to testing and research.
Don’t ignore the insight and knowledge you gain from working with external specialists, whether they’re helping you with distribution or creating the actual content assets.
Take everything you learn back to your team so that when you’re able to expand your resources, you have knowledge to build on.
The toughest thing about content marketing and lead generation is that all of these aspects flow into one another at different points. A sale could happen before someone even becomes a lead.
A lead could spend months in your “lead nurturing” (more later) flow before finally converting. And people can drop out of this process and never think about you again at any point.
Keep testing, perform new audience research, and relentlessly improve your value. That’s when you’ll start delivering exceptional leads to your sales teams through content marketing.
