045. The Role of Content Marketing in Nurturing Leads for Demand Generation

Foreign. Hello. Well, looks like you work. How are you, Gavi?

I am Leo. How are you?

I'm doing fine. We, as always are for those of you listening, struggling with setting up all the technology behind this. It's quite complicated. It shouldn't be, but it is. So. Welcome to another episode of Demand Gen Studio. My name is Emilio Garcia and with me is Gavi Garcia. And we are going to talk today about the role of content marketing in nurturing leads for demand generation program. So quite an exciting topic. I hope everyone is doing well. And yeah, this time Gavi helped me to set up a nice presentation for me to not ramble about the topic all over the place. So for those of you that are going to watch this, I think it's going to be quite helpful. But as always, we're going to make it in a way that people listening will enjoy. So just start right away and now you should be watching the presentation. Very nice. So today we're going to, we're going to talk about. There you go. The topics that we will cover is obviously rounding up a little bit. Our understanding of demand generation is always helpful just to give some context for marketing practitioners and then we're going to dive into the content marketing and lead nurturing strategy or tactic itself. And how do you create effective content for lead nurturing? And obviously you always want to measure initially to know that you're going to get, you know, initial traction in the right direction and eventually that you are impacting business KPIs like opportunities and revenue. And with that we will conclude. So that's the agenda for today and let us start obviously with a little bit of conversation about demand generation. And in general, while it is a marketing strategy or philosophy or methodology we want to call it, it is not all of the marketing, you know, that's very important. It is similar to what happened for example with email marketing. It is a way of doing marketing, but it's not all of marketing because even in inbound there is a whole section of marketing that is not covered there related to, for example, branding or you know, what happens mostly on the traditional marketing space. So with demand generation is very similar. It's geared heavily towards sales opportunities and revenue and it leverages existing content and relies heavily on advertising. That's one key component. It's not only about it, but it relies heavily on advertising. However, it does have a component that it shares with imbam and that's content. Right. I typically say to prospects and clients that you, if you are going to do advertising at all and Even if you think that's demand generation, even if you're just trying to capture demand and the only message that you have is buy from me. There are just so many ways that you can say that, right? And you can just talk to a very small group of your target addressable market because most of them are not intent or in market at any given moment. So to really leverage your demand generation efforts and capture existing demand, you need to have content that covers all the buyer journey from the moment that they are not aware, from the problems that they have to the moment they are searching for some solutions to the stage where searching for solutions like yours. So you have to have content that answers the questions that your buyers will have along that journey and then you will use advertising to deliver that message little by little, right. According to this stage. And that's the part where you can use analytics and metrics. Do you understand at what you know to get a good estimate of at what stage they are in that journey? Right. If, if you are showing something on social media, probably there's a low probability that you have intent and you will focus a lot on awareness. If they are in search engines, then you have a good guess of intent and then you can be more specific about the content and the questions that you answer. And if they're in the website, in your website, then probably they're aware a lot of things, especially if they're visiting pages that are related to how your solution works and how people have success in the past with your solutions, then you know that they have to be your. There's a high probability that they're aware of the solutions because they are on your brand and obviously they know your brand. So you will tailor your message based on that. And content is a big portion of it, right? And finally, if they have opt in for communications and they're part of your database, that's where the nurturing starts, obviously. And the reason is because now that you have that opt in, you have an additional channel that is probably the most successful from all the digital channels available, which is email. I have a friend that focus a lot on email marketing and he uses this expression that, you know, email has been killed so many times, right? It's like a channel that is dying and is going away. And it is true that I'm sure that the role of email marketing or email will change over the years and more and more, especially new generations rely less on them. But still, for a lot of businesses, especially for the B2B world, email is the way to go. And when you have that direct communication, definitely you should take advantage of it. So while nurturing, it doesn't happen only through email. Typically when you're nurturing leads that you have opt in email is a great, is a great channel. So we will cover the, how do you can leverage this for that? Now talking specifically about content marketing and the role that it has on demand generation, it covers some areas and there are at least some of them that we will discuss today. One is definitely it will help you to attract new leads. Right? So that's the, the brand awareness portion of it. Right. You can use content and distribution channels to bring valuable information to, to your prospects, especially those are not aware of your, the problems that you solve and make them aware of your solutions and your companies. That's a great way that you can do that. The second way that you can use content marketing to leverage your demand generation process is to help you qualify leads. And I kind of gave a hint of it in the previous section because if people is consuming your case study, for example, then they're auto qualifying themselves as someone knowledgeable and that is searching for a solution. We do it all the time. Actually a few minutes ago I was, you know, looking at some information from clients websites and there are tools that will de anonymize the traffic. And while you will not know necessarily the name of the person that is doing, you know, visiting your website, at least you can get a sense of the company. And if there's a company that is in your ICP and you look at the, at the URLs that are visiting, if they are just surfacing your homepage and maybe some of the solutions, then probably you will qualify that lead or that company as someone that is more in the consideration stage. And you will not necessarily engage with someone with sales, but if, if the content that they're consuming is, you know, deeper knowledge, like white papers, case studies, they go to the let us have a conversation or start a free demo from your solution, then definitely they are more qualified and it might be worth to reach out on a different channel to see if there's a need. And finally, obviously content can be used to nurture. Right? Right. So using the example again of if you have the direct channel of communication, which usually is email, but it can be also be just traditional SMS or any other sort of communication where you have identified one on one, then you can use existing content from your website, sales materials or any other kind of information to continue to educate those prospect buyers and at some point they will be ready to buy because Most of the time they are not ready even if they are aware of the solution because they it's not the right timing, right? Sometimes there are budget constraints, sometimes, especially B2B companies buy at the beginning of the business cycle in the year or any other moment. And during all that time they cannot act even if they want to. And obviously in some cases there are long term contracts that cannot be changed. So all those reasons prevent people from taking action. But if you just wait until they are ready, then your competition going to be there, you know, for a longer time than you and you will not have the advantage of brand awareness. So that's the tricky part, right? We understand that nurturing leads is a time consuming activity and sometimes doesn't yield immediate results. Like, you know, nurturing or talking directly to people that is already through transact. But you are giving away the opportunity for future business if you don't have established strategy to make it happen. So that's quite important. So as we are saying here, content marketing therefore can be used at all these stages, not just at the beginning, right? So you can use it for brand awareness purposes, you can use it for consideration purposes, you can even use it for, you know, when you have already exciting clients. That's another big lost opportunity here. If, if you have a database of current clients and it's large and, and you don't have a consistent effort coming from marketing to nurture those clients, you are losing opportunities to cross sell and upsell those customers. And there are many ways that that happens. Most of the times what happens is that especially in larger companies, right, if your client is a very large company, you might be their provider or partner for one division or one department and the rest of the company or other key departments that might take advantage of your solution might not be aware of your solution of your company. If you have a way to establish conversations with other divisions or departments, you can expand the business that you have. And obviously the second reason why this is important is because even your current customers, they are not aware of all the new features, solutions and changes that your solution have. And it's important to have your clients know about it so they can expand their usage. One company that I think does this very well is our, you know, solution partnership with HubSpot. As most of you know, they started as a marketing solution primarily focused on blogging and marketing automation. And they have exploded over the years and now cover the CRM space competing with Salesforce and they're covering the customer success competing with tools like Zendesk and similar ways and even, you know, business intelligence and nowadays AI, right. Is obviously included there. And there's so many changes that they have an ongoing effort to educate current customers on a weekly, on a monthly basis through events about all the new features on their current marketing solutions, plus all the changes and add ons to the ecosystem. And that's important because client notice and for the clients that we have that are using HubSpot as a platform, we can see how that effort eventually increase the stickiness of the platform. Right. Some clients of ours starts with marketing on a very simple package and over time, because of usage and all that communication, they start going up and upgrading their existing solutions and adding additional products. So it's very important to not forget that you also need to nurture current clients, not just the prospect ones. Right. So that will be something important for, for you to do. Now how do you, how do you organize this effort? And probably that's one of the first questions that you might have. What are kind of the resources that you can build to start nurturing your prospects along the way in some examples, right. So obviously you have the educational resources more in the terms of blog posts or articles or infographics that will help you to educate your leads for those that are looking for, you know, brand awareness kind of information. And then you will have more in depth content that showcase your expertise. Like case studies that those are great example. You will be amazed every time that we look at data from people surfing a specific website when you follow the path of the pages that they navigate. Case studies portfolios are always visited when someone has intent. So it is very important to have that social proof because especially in B2B scenarios, the person that is searching for the solution is trying to minimize risk. And one way to do that is to make sure that the company that they're hiring have done this before with a company like them. Right. With a scenario like them. And so that's something that is critical to keep in mind when you're building those case studies. Now obviously some prospects will want to get firsthand glimpse of how is working with you, how it feels, what is your thinking. And so reading content, the challenge that we have with that is that we don't truly know who made it it, right? You, you can hire someone else to write an article or a blog blog piece. And obviously on the case of case studies, you can cherry pick the scenarios where you were successful and ignore the ones where you were not so much successful. So a way of creating content that gives them a glimpse of how it will be Working for you will be activities where you are, you know, engaging directly with your audience and it can be at different levels. So webinars, for example, are a great way to have that one on one interaction. Highly recommended that you give your team an opportunity, especially the subject matter experts, to be part of the conversation so they can see what is the positioning and thinking of your company. How do you think about the problems that potential buyers might have? And you can find different formats, right? Like the ones that we're doing right now, which is more the. The potential prospect will consume the content but not necessarily interact with us in real time. But at least they get a glimpse of how is the internal thinking of the company. But you can, you can build something more interactive in the form of a webinar or a zoom session. And obviously some of this content can even be produced traditionally, right? You can just set up a session or a seminar where you invite key customers and have conversations. So there are many ways that you can leverage that idea.

Also like podcasts are like the ones that we do and social media posts that we do all the time too that they're including the educational resources that we can use on creating content as well. That didn't mention that, but some that we can include into into our strategies.

Yeah, it is, it is definitely true. Now something that we are kind of like assuming here is that we already know what not just the type of content but what we will say. And that's obviously something very important to stress out. You might have different formats, but the reasoning on if you're going to do blog posts versus white papers versus case studies and if you're going to read it on a reading format versus an audio format versus video format will come from the fact that, that you need to know in advance how your potential buyers like to consume content, right? What is the format that usually works for them? And it's especially important to have conversations with customers, right? To ask them know how. This is the tricky one. You don't want to ask them what do you like the most podcast or video? You phrase the question in a different way. What you ask is how do you, how do you buy bought this solution in the past, what research you did or what are the places where you go and consume content to learn more about, for example, CRMs or project management services. And you will get different question answers, right? Oh, well, I depend heavily on social media recommendation or I ask friends and you know, for example, well, if you ask friends, you ask directly or are you asking on some spaces like might be WhatsApp groups or Slack groups or Facebook groups. And so depending on how they are getting to know about potential solutions and the their habits. Right. I'm a habit podcast listener versus you know, I spend a lot of time on YouTube that will tell you how you need to format the content so they can consume it better or in an easier way. So that's obviously very important that you need to get a good sense of what are the ways into how your, your prospects consume content. Very good. So, and we are kind of like going to cover that in the how do you develop that comprehensive content strategy? Those are the steps, right? We have covered some of them already, but if we need to put them in, you know, in order, you start defining your target audience, right? Which is part, that's the part that you share with demand generation for. In order to distribute the content successfully, you need to define your target audience so you can get a sense of how big your effort is going to be. Right. If it's going to be very narrow with a handful of companies that are large, you will use a different path that you have tens, hundreds or thousands or ten of thousands of companies, then it will be very difficult to have one on one conversations to distribute that content. You will need to use something that has more leverage. Then you will need to identify your goals because as we were saying, sometimes your goal is just to improve brand awareness across an industry, sometimes is increase upselling cross selling opportunities for your customer base. And so those are very different goals. Even if you are going to build content for both of them for both of those opportunities. Once you have defined your audience and define the goals and in the audience definition is included the distribution channels that you will use, then you will need to come up with a content calendar. Because usually you can leverage some of the content that you already have, but most of the times you will have to build or repurpose that content specifically for the program or content market and lead nurturing program that you're going to implement. So you will need a content calendar to keep everybody aligned and usually is aligning your marketing team members plus your sales team because some of that content will be used by sales as well. And obviously as we said, you choose the right content formats. One key recommendation that I have here is because most marketing teams are resource constrained both on money and people that ideally you pick no more than one or two content channels or hubs and no more than one or two distribution channels, test them for a little time and little time might be a few months, right? We are not talking about weeks here. And on those few months, you want to start looking at those initial KPIs just to prove that you have some meaningful traction that will allow you to decide if you want to continue or double down on that effort or if you want to try something else, right? So a content hub can be your blog, you launch your podcast, or you launch your live video series. It is typically something that you can put a cadence on it so you keep your team aligned and committed to building up that content consistently. Because probably just like with any other things in life, the biggest challenge for content creation is the discipline of doing it consistently, right? So it's very easy that dates slip off and your blog is not launched, your newsletter is not launched, your episode is postponed. So you need to have that calendar and the discipline of building that content ahead so you can start giving your audience the, you know, the knowledge that you are going to be there consistently providing value. And once you have created the content, then you start distributing. And as we said, you track the results. And here the key is that that tracking will happen at two levels because your goals are usually business goals, like you want to increase the market share or you want to increase the revenue year over year. But for the first few months, the impact that your efforts will have on those big goals is going to be almost zero, right? And if you don't track something in the middle, then you will feel that the effort is not yielding any results. So you need those leading indicators and those leading indicators follow the funnel. Usually just to put an example, imagine that you are building a blog that will be your content hub. And if you're not going to do advertising, then SEO will be automatically your distribution channel, right? So those block pieces will start indexing on Google. And if you also have on your team or you hire someone that will help you improve the chances that your content index faster at a higher position and for more queries, then that will be the improvement or the effort that you will have to improve the distribution channel, which will going to be search engines. So when you start the effort, the initial metrics are just are we publishing at this point speed or the frequency that set up ourselves to do, right? That's the one thing that you want to enhance or, or motivate the team to accomplish, right? So it's going to be on a monthly basis, it's going to be on a bi weekly basis, are we keeping true to our schedule? After a little while then you want to start tracking the. The first impact of that publishing is that those pages are being indexed by search endings, right? You can say, well they're, they are being picked up by Google and improving the chances of doing that. And initially your position or the, the ranking is going to be very low. You're going to be in page 10, page 9, page 8. And so the only thing that you can track at the beginning is that you're moving from page to page. But your traffic impact will be almost zero because very few people click on results on page nine. That's the reality. But if you keep focus on seeing the rankings improve even through some link link building and things like that, eventually your blog will hit page one. And that's when you start seeing the traffic, right? And now you can start tracking the impact that those blog pieces are having on your traffic for your website immediately. You need to want to focus on the quality of the traffic to inform you if the content that you're building is the right one. And, and what I mean by looking at the quality of the traffic, you want to see what countries the traffic is coming from or the visitors are coming from. Are they coming from mobile, are they coming from desktop, are they staying a long time? And if you have tools that allow you to rebuild the companies of the visitors, even better because that way you can know if the traffic is coming from the ICP or is coming outside of it. Do you have a lot of college students, you know, reaching out to your content? That's not bad. But they will not be probably buyers from a demand generation perspective. So you want to be mindful of the quality of the traffic itself after a little while. Obviously if your traffic keeps improving, what should happen is that some of those visitors will start becoming leads. If you have extra offers on your blog content, for example, for subscribing to your newsletter, downloading additional content along the path, right? Like case studies, ebooks, teaching people your lead generation metrics should start improving, right? So your conversion ratios will improve. You will need to add call to actions to those blog posts so you can start getting leads. And it's the same parameter, right? Some of those leads will re, will be become hand raisers and start asking for consultation with your sales team and so forth. So you can see where I'm going with this, right? Eventually those leads become opportunities and those opportunities become revenue and their revenue will circle back to your effort and will give you an idea of the return on investment. So you can see this is a long path and that is the reason why content and lead nurturing is not something that you can do for two or three months and then stop and recoup the investment for the next sales that you will have. That will not happen even with advertising. You are just shortcutting their initial stages, right? You are not waiting for that ranking effort. You are not waiting for that big social media following to build up. You are just getting in front of the right person or in front of the right searcher instead of waiting for Google or for social media to pick up your content. But still they will walk through all those stages before buying from you. So you really need to build up the expectation on management that the results that you will be tracking at the beginning are going to be leading indicators are going to be, you know, some people call them fluffy or not impactful indicators, but they are just proxies for initial traction, if that makes sense. Right. So this is probably one of the key components about tracking results. Not getting diluting on. It's not that we don't care about the, you know, important metrics like business impact, it's just that they're not going to happen over time. That's something, something really important to understand. And, and yeah, as I was saying, and I, I covered most of them here, but as we're saying, some of the key metrics that you will develop will vary per content hub and will vary by distribution channel. Right? As I was saying, if your content hub is block and your distribution channel is SEO, then you will focus on metrics like those. But you can do the same, for example, with content that is created on a blog piece and distributed social media. The only difference is going to be that in social media you will focus on the number of followers for the channel that you pick on the engagement of the blog post that you have the reach. And similarly, you want to look at the quality of your followers. Are you getting a lot of followers from the RRCP or is mostly family and friends the ones that are clicking and liking that content? It's not bad, right? We always are grateful for the encouragement, but they will not buy from you. And so you want to make sure that you are finding the right places, the right groups, the right locations where you are putting that content on social media to increase the chances that some of them will come back to the website and start asking inquiries. One key thing though, for some of those distribution channels that is important to keep in mind is that there are some of them that will have a hard time on attribution. Like social media is a good example. You will find that a lot of people will consume the content on social media. They will not Click necessarily on it. They will take actions that are very hard to track on analytics, like saving that piece of content, sharing with other people, even maybe saving it for consuming later. And they will come back later to your website typing directly the URL of the name of your company or by any other means, right? Doing a search. So if you are doing some distribution channels like social media or even groups, or more traditional efforts like sharing that content on trade shows or similar things, what you should be looking for is an uptick on, on the traffic, but coming mostly from direct and organic. And because that's hard, right? If you're also running organic at the same time, you will wonder, well, is this basically coming truly from the content that I am distributing on search engines or is coming from the efforts that I'm doing on social media? It is really helpful that both at the anonymous level and at the form level, you ask the question, how do you hear about us? Right? So if you want to get a sense of the quality of the traffic, you can ask the traffic in an anonymous way, how do you hear about us? Right? And you don't ask for email. Most people will not answer, but if you have tens of thousands of visitors per month, some of them will answer. And that will be very quality sample to get an idea of the distribution and obviously for the forms themselves. Also, it's a great question to ask because what the answer reveals is what is the most impactful channel that people remember you, if you have many of them. But finally, that's the other reason I highly recommend to focus in on one or two distribution channels at the same time. So you lower the possibility that you have conflicting channels competing for attention, right? And therefore you wonder if one or the other is the one that is impacting the business performance. So focus on a few so you can have a clearer vision of the impact. Sometimes it's not going to be direct, but eventually you will see some impact if you know the channel is doing the proper work. Finally, one of the things that I want to highlight here is that the other key area of struggle is the idea of return on investment. Because there are so many levels to measuring return on investment. Here, the simplest one and the one that most people struggle and eventually stop on a marketing effort because they don't see return, at least the way they measure is that they just take some or all the investment, right? All this spending, and then they circle back and look at how much revenue for that single event a new client brought, right? So that is a, that is a problem because if you do that for some kinds of transactions and for some kind of products and services, the one time purchase is not large enough to justify the acquisition cost, right? We'll put you some examples. If you use, you take that approach, how will Starbucks or Coca Cola, right. Advertise at all or do marketing at all? You are trying to get a customer to buy a five or six dollars cup of coffee, right? So it is not a high transaction value, but the way they need to look at it is what is the retention of companies like Starbucks or Coca Cola once they have a customer for one of their products, right? Or let's say Gatorade for example, right? You don't buy one Gatorade if you like it, you buy it consistently over time. So that term of purchase and for B2B applies similarly in a different way, right? Is that usually when, especially for SaaS, you don't have one month of subscription, you have a year subscription. And that usually if you have a good customer experience, that will continue for the years to come. And that's when the cost of acquisition changes completely, right? The comparison is if I land a client and I'm just getting $30,000 on a year, but that client is going to be for, with me five or six years, then investing six months of that revenue to acquire that five year, six year customer. Makes sense, right? So really, really important that when you start these efforts, if possible, you have a customer lifetime value value for reference, right? Because usually if you have a new distribution channel, that lifetime value will be unknown. And if you're talking about years, then you will have no idea of what will be the return until six or five years. And some of your customers churn and all that. So nobody is that patient, right? You know, considering marketing, if, or management. If you tell them, well, we will know the return on investment in five years. We will like, we cannot weigh that much, but you will have some reference, right? If most of your customers have come from referrals or from more traditional channels, you might have a history or you can refer to competition there, right? What is the average lifetime value or tenure of a client for a product that is similar to ours? Get that estimated LTB and use it to justify your investment and obviously continue to track it until you get the true return on investment for the new channel that you're launching, right? So that's another key that is important when you are, especially when you are creating content. So with that we will finish today. I hope you have found this useful again as a summary, content marketing and especially nurturing your client, your prospects is a very useful tool, part of your demand generation program. It helps you along the way from brand awareness through consideration, you know, customer acquisition and even expansion. And definitely invest time to understand what are the ways that your customers consume content, the formats that they use. Build up metrics to measure success, but not just focus on the business ones, right? The ones that matter to management. The but also focus on leading indicators to help you gauge traction and experiment, right? That's the other thing. What might work for a company might not work for another one. So these are just best practices. What really matters at the end of the day is for you to test for your company on your own scenario. So thanks so much for listening. I hope you can join us for the next one. And until then, have a great day.

Have a great day everyone have a day. William.