During the last week in August I, along with 2,800 other marketers, attended Inbound 2012 (an inbound marketing conference) in Boston. It was an absolutely fantastic week full of wonderful keynotes and great breakout sessions. One of my favourite breakout sessions was ‘How To Create eBooks and Webinars Your Prospects Will Love’, presented by Maggie Georgieva, as I came away with so many ideas for my own marketing.
Here’s what I learnt from Maggie during her 45 minute presentation …
Test Test Test
Marketing should never be based on superstitions or gut feelings. Everything we do should be based on the results of tests we have carried out. Each campaign needs to be built from a solid foundation upwards, with your marketing offer being the foundation, and upon that you build (in order) your landing page, your email, your blog and finally your social media.
There are 3 steps to creating ‘lovable’ offers for your prospects …
1. How To Approach Content Creation
Good content is where the lead generation process starts. Your content should be based on your data:
- Blog analytics. Check what the top ranking blog topics are to give you ideas for content;
- Page performance. Check page views to see what pages are the most popular and use this intelligence to produce an offer
- Landing page analytics. Conversion rates e.g. if your landing pages with ebook offers convert highest, then you should be doing more ebooks.
The format of your offers matter, so see which medium works best for your target market and offer your content to them via that medium, whether it be ebooks, videos, photos etc.
Review your email marketing analytics to check for patterns in your click through rates (CTR) in order to get more content ideas.
Think of content creation not as a silo but as something you can do across all your channels e.g. if Pinterest is a topic of interest to your target audience don’t just do an ebook, also look at publishing blog posts and webinars on the same topic.
If you don’t have enough internal data to review for content ideas, check out other sources of data e.g. Google News and leverage the current buzz for your own marketing.
All your content decisions should have data to back them up. If you take this approach your offer will be much more successful.
2. Know When To Publish
“Perfect is the enemy of good” – Voltaire.
If you constantly chase perfection in your marketing offers, then you will never publish anything. However, if you publish and review your data, then you can improve for your next offer.
The more you publish the more opportunities you have to drive lead conversion.
If time is an issue consider the following tips for creating high quality content fast…
- Repackage your own existing content:
- 20 ‘how-to’ blog posts becomes an ebook;
- An ebook becomes a webinar; or
- A webinar becomes an ebook.
- Curate public content (this way you’re gathering existence content and repackaging it, as opposed to creating original content, which is more time consuming to produce):
- 101 awesome marketing quotes;
- 54 pearls of marketing wisdom; or
- Learning Linkedin from the experts.
3. Double Down On What’s Working
Monitor your landing page conversion rates frequently to identify your winning offers, then repeat the activity that got you there.
Discover the offers that deserve your time; check the data and decide which of your offers to maintain, create again or ignore and move on. Focus on what is doing well and optimise those offers to increase conversion even further e.g. A/B test your landing pages and CTAs (call-to-actions).
Also consider incorporating some product information on your company into your top of the funnel content e.g. on your ‘thank you for downloading our whitepaper’ page, add a CTA for a secondary offer to, for example, demo your product.
What If Things Go Wrong?
If something doesn’t work, ask yourself …
- Is my offer compelling enough?
- Did I target the right audience?
- Am I not sending enough traffic to it?
If any of the answers are no, review the data, re-evaluate and try again.
To Summarise … The Key Steps To Succeeding With Marketing Offers Are
- Don’t optimise before you build strong foundations.
- Use real data to drive your content strategy.
- Publish often and iterate later.
- Do more of what’s working!
Link to Maggie Georgieva’s presentation slides
