As a former B2B publisher, I’ve had the unique opportunity to design and launch a Content Marketing driven Lead Nurturing business. Before publishing, I had come from the corporate world. As a result, I am frequently asked to give the non-varnished COO perspective on this experience.
Is it Worth Pursuing?
During the depths of the Great Recession, I like other COOs were “dialing for dollars.” The experience has instilled a new impetus in the executive suite to explore alternative digital models across the value chain. Content Marketing has great appeal; because the data out there suggests that not only can you reduce your customer acquisition costs, but for once you can build a measurable link between marketing and growth. Save money and generate ROI. Check!
To reinforce my point, following are two data nuggets I was able to quickly dig up.
Brands relying on inbound marketing save over $14 dollars for every new customer acquired – Source: http://www.stateofinbound.com/
Companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales ready leads at 33% less cost. – Source: Forrester Research 2013
The initial comment I hear from most CEOs is, “Marketing that drives measurable ROI and sales. Great!” Usually this is followed by, “So we get our {PR, Marketing, Internal Communications} person to write up a 2 page white paper, load it on our website and start collecting names and numbers for our sales team to call… Easy… Done“.
No… Content marketing is less like casting off a pier and more like building a commercial fishing business. The investment offers huge potential. However, throwing out the content net for leads is a complex process requiring new models, new methods, new tools, new structures and new skills. I have witnessed big corporations shut down this model after spending tens of thousands of dollars. A relaxing day on your new boat can soon turn into an episode of “Deadliest Catch”.
Building Content Marketing Capability
I have observed breakdowns at every stage of this exercise that have led to no leads, wrong leads, costly leads, and leads the sales team can’t convert. As a CEO or COO, what should you look out for when building out this new capability?
What Fish Do I Want to Catch?
During your annual strategic planning exercise, you identify a new adjacent market that’s teaming with growth. You want to build out a content marketing capability to go after this market.
First Step – KNOW YOUR TARGET PRODUCT MARGIN! Get your finance team involved. Make sure your new customer sales don’t result in losses after cost of selling. With Content Marketing, several factors play into your customer acquisition cost and conversion. Back into the right sized budget for this program. After iterating on this a bit, you may discover the math doesn’t work and want to refine your target customer or your program design.
Set the right KPIs and build a dashboard to keep close watch. HubSpot lays out a nice metric cheat sheet with “The Six Marketing Metrics You CEO Actually Cares About”.
Expensive Bait
Content like any product should offer a strong value proposition to the user. Great content is important and great content is not cheap. Content production will define the 80:20 of your cost. Various statistical studies have identified the optimal length for a written content piece to be 1,600 to 2,000 words. Farming this out used to cost me $2 – $3 per word. That’s $6k for just one piece, and it does not include layout and production! For my content, I dealt in complex insurance and risk management subjects. Key lesson:
The more complex the subject matter is in your industry – the harder to find the right writing talent – the higher the cost.
Marketing Charts did a study in late 2013 which demonstrated that different forms of content are more successful at different points in the buy cycle. See the chart below.
You may need to produce content in written, video and info Graphic form. Another takeaway:
Don’t build up a lot of new overhead to support the new model. Try leveraging internal resources or use scale-able variable labor models.
Re-task Research: If your organization has an internal research function, retool resources to produce marketing content. Your data assets can be shaped into Info Graphics and research insight papers.
Leverage Internal Thought Leaders: Compensate your leadership to develop thought leadership pieces. Train them if needed. Not only does this increase content production capacity, but it builds the individual brands of your leaders.
Bull Pen: Build a bull-pen of quality freelancers over time. Trade guaranteed volume of work for discounted rates. This option is particularly valuable in niche and technical industries.
Outsource Offshore: Several Indian offshore firms provide services. I used a firm for low cost international news article summaries. This may be an option for companies with large international footprints.
Crowd Source: Don’t build editorial, video production or Info-graphic capability. Create a leverage model and crowd source it! Again, think variable, scale-able labor. Some options include: Crowd Source, Genius Rocket, Ghost Bloggers, Constant Content, and Blog Mutt.
Landing the Big Fish
You may spend quite a bit more in Cost per Lead (CPL) with Content Marketing than other digital sources. Don’t let this scare you out of pursuing this approach. What you pay more for here you can make up in better conversation. Build, organize and present your content in a way that draws customers through the buy funnel; so you end up with sales ready leads.
Editorial Calendars organize your content. When I ran a magazine, I spent weeks structuring and timing our content for optimal return. Similarly, your organization will need to adopt publishing model elements. I organized issue themes by creating a chart with the content element on one axis and the promotional channel on the other axis.
Identify the buy cycle phase of the content: Awareness, Consideration, and Action. Walk each campaign from start to finish in the calendar.
Awareness Stage: As the Marketing Charts exhibit shows, you could use several forms of content for each stage. However, Conferences, Live Events and Webinars are the big fishing nets that collect large numbers of leads at the top of the funnel. Build a calendar of industry events. Take advantage of your current event booth and speaking investments and integrate them with the content release process.
Consideration Stage: Invest in a sales automation tool like Marketo, Eloqua or HubSpot to improve your lead qualification at this stage. These tools marry behavioral scoring with drip campaign functionality to personalize the release of the next stage of content based on interaction activity with earlier content. This approach let’s you pick out the big fish from the school.
Investment in these tools can be justified using Lifetime Value of a Customer math. For a quick reference, look at the info-graphic at KissMetrics.
Pay up for a good sales automation tool… Better qualification = Better conversion = More money
Action Stage: Align the schedule with seasonal buying cycles and contract renewal periods. Make sure the Decision Stage of your content cycle peaks just prior to the start of the buying season. The last phase of content is all about your solution to their problem.
Yum! Fish Sticks
Building out a content marketing capability does not end at the generation of a lead. You need to convert these leads. When I launched a lead nurturing offering, I was surprised to find clients who suddenly stopped buying the service when the model was working great. Why?
I discovered that my client’s sales teams were operationally unprepared to properly work the number and nature of leads from this source.
Common pain points I heard from my customers included:
- The business did not have a tool for routing leads to the most appropriate salesperson. The marketing lead got stuck with this job and did not do it well.
- Salesforce.com or its alternative was not correctly configured.
- The sales team required new training to sell to this type of lead.
- Marketing did not pass along enough detail about the nature of the “bait” to the sales team; so they could not tune their pitch messaging.
Get your sales leaders involved early in the process to anticipate these issues.
Building a Content Marketing Capability is a complex process requiring new models, new methods, new tools, new structures and new skills. While this is a marketing function, building this capability may not reside solely with the CMO. Throughout this post, I highlight elements requiring strategic partnerships, new technology, off-shoring, organizational realignment, building teams, recruiting new skills, sales training, and process re-engineering. Assign a cross-functional team to drive this forward. Given the analogies to Publishing, you may want to consider recruiting talent from this industry to lead this function.
While this may seem daunting, don’t be discouraged and leave money on the table. Embrace the ambiguity of this change with some of the approaches I’ve presented here and Transform 4 Growth!
