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How to fix your lead generation strategy with content
Lead generation is one of the most important aspects of a business focused on sales. When piecing together your lead generation strategy, it’s imperative that marketers are generating quality, productive leads in order to help sales teams do what they do best… Sell.
It’s well known that content is the backbone to lead generation, as it allows for potential customers to be driven to your landing page or further into your sales funnel.
Syndicating content is an effective way to improve your lead generation efforts as it boosts your reach, letting you tap into audiences that you might not have been able to otherwise.
In this blog, I’ll be discussing what content syndication is, the best practices for doing so, and the best tools to help you generate more leads from your content – here’s how to fix your lead generation strategy with content:
What Is Content Syndication?
[sc_fs_faq sc_id=”fs_faq3lmsizpp5″ html=”true” headline=”p” img=”” question=”What is content syndication?” img_alt=”” css_class=”” ]Content Syndication is when your content is re-published by relevant third-party sources. Think of it as a two-way highway, the third-party sources receive quality, free content, while the original creator gets free exposure and publicity which in turns boosts leads.[/sc_fs_faq]
The following are some tips that will make your content syndication efforts most effective:
- Find Quality Partners: Unsurprisingly, the best places for your content is where your target demographic already lives and consumes information. Ideally, these partners should also have popular, high ranking websites that are receiving large amounts of targeted traffic.
- Best Syndication Strategies: You might be asking, what is the best way to work with content syndication partners?
This ultimately depends on the website, type of content, and the audience you’re trying to reach.
Sometimes it’s appropriate to syndicate full blog posts or articles, while other times it’s best to just include a headline with a link back to the original article.
Either way, it’s important to include links back to your landing page, and a specific call to action when possible.
Perhaps most importantly, it’s vital that you align your campaign strategy with your goals. Many B2B Marketers will first turn to pay per click traffic, social amplification (via LinkedIn) and/or content discovery (OutBrain and Taboola). They start paying to drive traffic towards a landing page and hope to back into an effective cost per lead (eCPL) that aligns with their goals.
Those are great examples of their goals not being aligned with the campaign strategy. As you can imagine, we’ll get into what is a great strategy aligned with leveraging content to drive leads.
- Plan Ahead: The secret to effective content syndication, like most other marketing tactics, is a good strategy. And a winning content syndication strategy is made up of great, valuable content, suitable partners, and a plan in place for optimizing and converting leads.
Content syndication focuses on content and quality sources of leads rather than trying to bring in as much traffic as possible. NetLine, a powerful B2B lead generation platform, allows you to do just that.
What Exactly is NetLine?
NetLine helps B2B marketers drive lead generation success through content syndication campaigns that actually yield leads. NetLine offers a Cost per performance (CPL) model that allows marketers the ability to hyper-focus on the exact type of industry professionals they’re looking to reach.
This is all done without the complications of phone calls, lengthy negotiations, and overwhelmed creative development. Simply tap into the on-demand access of the largest B2B buyer engagement and lead generation platform on the internet.
Save Money, Convert More Leads
The day of converting high quality leads through CPC and CPM campaigns are over…
When using a CPC budget, for example, the vast majority will be allocated towards sending traffic to a landing page where a CTA and opt-in form will be presented. It’s important to keep in mind that only 2.35% of visitors that arrive at your landing page will convert into actual leads.
Putting this into perspective, marketers are knowingly pouring over 97% of their lead gen budget down the drain.
NetLine solves this huge and expensive pain point by delivering your content directly to your target demographic with the buying power to convert into an actual lead. When using NetLine’s platform, you only pay when a lead meets your team’s criteria that have been established.
Now, let’s walk through the features of NetLine’s platform and how it can benefit you best as a B2B marketer.
After creating your account, you’ll be welcomed at the NetLine portal. You are given two options for creating campaigns, LeadFlow and ContentFlow.
As explained by NetLine, LeadFlow campaigns are directly for lead generation, whereas ContentFlow is for general brand awareness. Since this article is all about lead generation, we’ll focus on the first type of campaign.
It only takes 11 steps to get a content syndication campaign up and running with NetLine; we’ll be walking through each step of the process and explaining the importance for each.
Step 1: Get Started
Getting started, all that’s needed is basic campaign information including company name, website, and a high-quality logo.
Once done, you’re good to go to the next step!
Step 2: Upload Content
NetLine gives you full access over the content you upload, with a generous maximum of 30 pieces of content. It also gives you the option to select any content you’ve already uploaded to the platform.
Best practices for content for syndication campaigns include:
- Captivating title, headline, abstract and cover graphic
- Directly address your target audience, what their pain points are, and lead into the solutions you offer
- Avoid “salesy” messaging - Focus on providing value and solving their problems
It’s important to also note that a piece of content can only be active in one campaign at a time.
Step 3: Questions
After hooking in visitors with your content offer, the next step in the content syndication driven lead gen process is asking questions. NetLine breaks this down into two groups: Standard Questions, and Custom Questions.
Standard questions are default in the form and are required by the visitors to be answered. Custom questions are optional, however, NetLine warns marketers that adding additional questions can cause a higher form abandonment rate.
Additionally, NetLine has recently introduced a new subset called Conditional Questions, which can be asked depending upon the visitor’s answers to the standard questions.
Step 4: Filters
NetLine delivers leads by matching your ideal criteria to its impressive network of B2B leads. It is guaranteed that you’ll only pay for the leads you get that match the criteria you set.
Filters allow you as a marketer to decide exactly what you’re looking for in terms of potential customers and only receive what you’re looking for. It’s as simple as it sounds.
Additionally, it can automatically filter out students, interns, consultants, and contractors to contact you only with those with buying power. If desired, you can reverse this filter. Filters you set can be modified at any point during or after a campaign, allowing you the ability to tweak and determine which lead filters work best for your offer.
For the more advanced B2B Marketers, you can also leverage their ABM Filter capabilities to deploy a content-first ABM campaign where you’ll only be paying to obtain leads that specifically meet the filters you selected AND are employed at the accounts you uploaded via the interface.
Step 5. Lead Scoring
Lead scoring is an important aspect of any lead generation strategy. NetLine makes this process simple, as you can further define your target audience by weighing the filters you had set.
On a scale from 1–10, 10 being the highest, you can set the importance of questions over each other. Additionally, you can weigh answers as well, “A” being the most ideal as your target audience, and “C” being the least ideal.
For example, if reaching executives in a certain industry is more important than the annual revenue of the target company, than you’ll rate the former question as a higher value.
Step 6: Mapping Leads
This optional step is designed to help you easily integrate your lead values into your CRM or marketing automation platform.
Lead mapping is a great tool to ensure that your lead data is consistent with how you’re internally tracking and managing leads. If the default terms don’t match to your internal naming conventions, you have the option to change the name values in this step.
Step 7: Lead Terms
In this section, you’ll be setting the terms for your campaign in terms of budget or total desired quantity of leads.
Additionally, after your budget or the total number of leads are reached, NetLine will deliver 10% extra to account for any potential bad data. Campaigns can be edited or paused at any time while it’s active. To update the total spend, increase or decrease the budget, to control the number of leads delivered, increase or decrease the quantity.
Step 8: Schedule Your Campaign
In this step, you’ll set your campaign start and end date. Keep in mind that your campaign is subject to end before the end date if your desired lead volume is reached.
Once submitted, your campaign schedule is subjected to approval and typically takes 1–2 business days to become live.
Step 9: Lead Fulfillment
In this step, you’ll set up who and where your leads will be sent to. NetLine gives you two options to choose from, either manually selecting account managers to send leads to, or have the leads file automatically into your CRM platform.
In this step, you’ll also decide on fulfilment type and frequency. Choosing “incremental” will deliver leads you have not previously seen, while “Cumulative” will deliver all leads received.
You’ll definitely want to make use of their Connector capabilities if you’re looking for real-time fulfilment of leads into your preferred Marketing Automation, CRM, Salesforce Automation platform. They offer pre-built connectors for a number of popular platforms including Eloqua, HubSpot, Marketo, ON24, and Salesforce. Don’t fret if your preferred platform isn’t listed…you can also build your own connector to virtually any other 3rd party martech solution directly from within the interface with zero coding skills required!
10. Review Campaign
The final step before submitting your campaign is a full review of all the campaign details you entered.
Campaign checklist:
- Campaign Info: start and end date
- Campaign Info: total leads
- Campaign Info: total campaign cost
- Cost-per-Lead: total cost per lead
- Campaign Filters (Expand all filter selections)
- Campaign Content: preview your campaign content
- Campaign Scoring (Expand all scoring selections)
- Email Fulfillment: schedule and recipients
- Connector: review your setup
Step 11: Submit!
Congrats!
You’ve completed your first content syndication driven lead generation campaign with NetLine.
It’s important to be consistently checking your campaign results and reporting, as there is always room for improvement when developing your go-to lead generation strategy.
Salvaging Leads
As mentioned earlier, you’ll only pay for the leads that match the criteria you have set. However, you still have access to any leads that were rejected, as well as the reasons why they were rejected.
Leads are rejected for one of two reasons. Either they are “surplus” leads, meaning that your lead volume has already been hit, or they simply don’t match your criteria.
Campaign Reports
Now the fun part begins!! You can see your leads coming in real-time via live reporting. NetLine offers a comprehensive campaign reporting section, which will allow you to filter, customize, and schedule reports based on the different campaigns you’ve launched. Below is a screenshot of what you can expect to see. If you’d prefer, you can also have a look at a live sample report.
Utilizing the data retrieved from your campaign reports, you’ll be able to more effectively tailor your content syndication campaigns to deliver the highest quality leads directly to your sales representatives.
Conclusion
Lead generation is such an important aspect of B2B marketer’s jobs, therefore it should be taken extremely seriously. Instead of draining budgets on CPC and CPM campaigns that simply don’t convert, try taking a content-driven focus to your lead generation strategy with NetLine.
NetLine gives you the tools and resources to effectively drive results and yield actual leads, time and time again, regardless of your industry.
If you’re ready to get started click here to get access to NetLine’s platform; the account is completely free to create – you’ll only pay once you start generating some actual leads from your efforts.
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