Long story short: Look at the numbers. A data-driven content marketing strategy has emerged as a necessity for businesses aiming to attract qualified leads from organic search. By dissecting customer data and conducting meticulous research, marketers have the capacity to curate compelling and valuable content that profoundly resonates with the target audience. 

This thoughtful approach not only encourages meaningful engagement but is also designed to convert leads into devoted customers. The process of turning data into dineros unfolds through four key steps: 

1. Research
2. Strategy
3. Activation
4. Optimization

With a glimpse of how content marketing fuels organic lead generation, let’s turn our attention to the specific insights that will form the foundation for engaging, data-driven content (and remarkable results).

1️⃣ Research

What’s the best (and only) way to get the data that will serve as the foundation for your content strategy? Research, research, and more research. Qualitative and quantitative, hard and soft–now’s the time to follow your curiosity and find out everything you can about your audience, what makes them tick, where to find them, and what they need. 

Audience Research: Identifying Your Target Audience

Before starting the content creation process, you must clearly define your ideal customer profile(s) (ICP). By developing a detailed understanding of your target audiences, you can tailor your content to their preferences, pain points, and aspirations.

Creating Customer Personas

Craft detailed profiles that include demographic information, interests, behaviors, and goals of your target audience segments. This will help you empathize with your audience and create content that answers their questions, addresses their needs, and starts to connect the dots between their pain points and your solutions. The more your audience feels you understand them, the easier it will be to build trust.

Conducting Customer Research

Utilize as much first-person and third-party data as you can to gather insights into your audience’s needs, challenges, and motivations. By delving deeper into their preferences, you can better understand what type of content will resonate with them. Try these tactics to jumpstart your research process:

1. Surveys: Utilize surveys to gather valuable first-hand anecdotes and preferences. 
2. Customer Interviews: If possible, meet with customers or prospects to get a better understanding of their goals, pain points, and what they want from a product or service like yours, so you can tailor your content accordingly. 
3. Collab with Customer Support and Sales Teams: Engage closely with your client-facing teams to gather valuable feedback from customer conversations, allowing you to identify opportunities for improvement, where customers need the most help, and what trending topics come up frequently.
4. Case Studies and Testimonials: Research is a great catalyst for collecting case studies and testimonials from satisfied customers. You’ll be able to build trust with potential customers by getting specific about their needs and how your company addresses them. ABTSA: Always be 2 steps ahead!
5. Competitor Intel: Conduct thorough competitor analyses to understand the competitive landscape, identify your unique selling points, and differentiate your offerings, enabling you to position your company strategically in the market and in front of your audience.

Conducting thoughtful customer research sets the foundation for a strong content strategy aimed at generating quality leads. By leveraging what you know about your audience, you have the fuel to make informed decisions when planning content that speaks directly to what they care about. An audience-centric approach is the KEY🔑 to a successful content strategy that brings in the right leads at the right time. But there are more ways to get to know your audience and the information they seek, which is why we turn to keyword research to learn more. 

GA4 and Keyword Research: Identifying Organic Search Opportunities

At Tuff, we know that creating content that truly captures the attention of your target audience requires a deep understanding of not only their preferences, but also their behavior. By leveraging search and keyword data, we can craft content that will live a long, happy life online. Meaning – search engines can find it, your audience can use it, and it remains relevant and useful for weeks, months, years (?!) after publish. By combining metrics from GA4 and keyword research, you can uncover what you need to build an SEO-friendly content strategy. Here’s a good place to start:

• GA4 Analysis
  • GA4, the latest version of Google Analytics, offers advanced features/measurement that provide a comprehensive view of your website and marketing performance.
  • Use GA4’s enhanced measurement to track user interactions and behaviors across multiple devices and platforms.  providing a holistic understanding of your audience’s journey. Through that holistic view, you can identify patterns and trends that can guide your content strategy.
  • Leverage audience insights from GA4 to understand user demographics, interests, and engagement patterns. Then, segment your audience and tailor your content to their specific needs and preferences.
  • Content Performance: Analyze the effectiveness of your keywords by tracking key metrics such as page views, bounce rates, and time on page to see how your audience (or audience segments) interact with your content. 
  • Conversion Tracking: Multi-touchpoint conversion tracking can help you better understand which keywords and content contribute to conversions at each point in your audience’s journey. 

• Keyword Research

1. • Conduct keyword research using tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush to discover “hot” topics aligned with your audience’s search behavior. Check out search volume, keyword difficulty, and related terms and find the right balance of high demand and low competition to fill your keyword gaps.
   • Pay special attention to the intent behind popular search queries. Rather than focusing only on the words they search, try to understand their motivations, pain points, and desired outcomes when searching to get to the root of their needs.
   • Monitor your website’s SEO performance, tracking keyword rankings, organic traffic, and click-through rates. Use that data to refine your plan and continue to optimize for your audience, their needs, and the actions you want them to take. 

By integrating these data points, you can develop content ideas that both engage your audience and are also rooted in real behavior metrics. This data-driven approach will enable you to create highly engaging content that resonates with your target audience. This level of planning, when done right, will attract relevant traffic, increase visibility, and build long-term site authority. As we move onto the next section, we’ll discuss turning these data points and trends into a practical, usable, data-drenched content strategy. Let’s do this.

2️⃣ Building a Content Strategy

Building Content Pillars

After conducting your initial research, you’ll have uncovered and collected relevant topics and themes that align with your audiences’ search behavior. You’ll have enough data to identify your top target keywords, which will form the basis for developing content pillars that address your audience’s interests and challenges. 

Content pillars are a fundamental aspect of any successful content strategy. They serve as the backbone of your plan, guiding your content production and ensuring consistency and relevance across everything you produce. By organizing your content around central pillars (think: themes), you establish your website as a reliable and authoritative source for specific information, boosting your credibility for search engines and in the eyes of your audience. 

Creating content pillars based on search and audience data lets you organize and optimize your content for search engines while providing valuable info to your audience. It’s a strategic approach that not only improves your SEO performance but also establishes your expertise and builds trust with your readers. 

Identifying the Right Promotion Channels 

Choosing the right distribution channels is a critical aspect of developing a successful content strategy. Here’s how you can determine which channels will drive quality leads: 

• Historical Performance: Revisit the performance of previous content you’ve published. Tap into key metrics such as engagement, conversion rates, and of course lead volume and quality. Identify the channels that are driving the highest quality leads and focus your efforts on developing content tailored to them.
• Audience Data: Use your audience research to select channels where they are most likely to be present and engaged. Assess the relevance of each distribution channel to your content and target audience. Are they Tiktok users vs. newsletter subscribers? Do they attend industry conferences or consume mostly digital content? Are they more likely to Google something or search Instagram for info?
• Industry Best Practices: Stay up-to-date on the latest industry trends and best practices for content distribution. Look for successful case studies and examples of companies that share a similar target audience and see what their publishing patterns look like. What do their ads look like? Which blogs do they continue to promote month after month? That may give you an idea of their top-performing content.
• Start with Key Channels: Begin by focusing on a few key channels that have proven to be effective for your industry and/or target audience. Allocate your resources and efforts accordingly to maximize your impact on those channels. As you gain more insights and resources, you can scale to more channels and begin testing. 

Scheduling and Logistics

This one’s for all the planners and organizers out there–logistics 🤓 A consistent content publishing schedule is key to maintaining audience engagement and building trust, two important factors in attracting and converting quality leads. Plan your content creation and publishing process in advance, allowing enough time for research, writing, editing, publishing, and optimization. To streamline the workflow, develop a comprehensive content calendar as your single source of truth. Include essential details like content pillars, topics, keywords, formats, distribution channels, and publication dates. This structured approach speeds up resource allocation, provides transparency, and sets the stage for a smooth and consistent development process.

When planning your timeline, make sure to incorporate repurposed content into your plan to extend its reach and lifespan. Transform existing content into various formats like videos, infographics, blogs, or social media posts. Reach new audiences and reinforce your message across channels without extra production time.

Here’s a snapshot example of a content calendar for a project management software company:

By implementing a comprehensive schedule, you can ensure that your content reaches the right audience at the right time through planned keywords, rich content, and optimized publishing channels. This naturally leads us to the next component of a strategic marketing plan: the funnel. Let’s talk about how we plan for content that guides prospects through each stage of the funnel, ultimately converting engagement into valuable leads. 

Full-Funnel Content Marketing

At a glance, the marketing funnel consists of three sections: 

• Top of the funnel (TOFU): Grab their attention
• Middle of the funnel (MOFU): Collect their contact info
• Bottom of the funnel (BOFU): Make the sale!

For your content to make sense to the audience, it must not only align with keywords and address pain points, but it must also match where your audience is in “user journey”. By mapping out the touchpoints your audience has with your brand (from TOFU to BOFU) you can tailor your content to address their needs along the way. It’s the data that tells us what they need when! 

We lean on UX (User Experience) to guide the audience naturally to the next step of their journey. By offering opportunities for capturing contact information from interested visitors, you can nurture and convert them into paying customers over time. Strong calls-to-action (CTAs) play a key role in driving conversions. Place persuasive CTAs throughout your content, encouraging readers to take action and provide their contact details in exchange for information or resources.

By strategically incorporating these lead gen tactics into your content, you can optimize your content strategy to convert engagement into valuable leads. 

Setting Goals

To prove the success of your content marketing efforts, establish benchmarks and goals from the start. All goals should be specific to your brand and ladder up to business objectives, whether they’re increasing brand awareness, driving website traffic, generating leads, or a combination of all three. Whatever you choose, it’s crucial to proactively define your objectives and key performance indicators (KPIs) to track and evaluate your progress. Setting specific, attainable, and time-bound goals will help you stay focused and measure the success of your content efforts. Here are three examples of tangible goals, broken down into two phases (think: crawling and walking) to get you started: 

Example Goal 1: Increase monthly website traffic

Drive more potential leads to the website by increasing the number of unique visitors. Expanding brand visibility and attracting a larger audience to the website increases the potential for lead generation and future conversion opportunities.

• Phase 1: Increase unique visitors by 20% (compared to the previous month).
  • This will be our initial benchmark to gauge progress and assess the effectiveness of the content strategy in attracting a larger audience.
• Phase 2: Increase organic traffic by 30% (compared to the previous quarter). 
  • The emphasis shifts to increasing organic traffic to the website within a quarterly time frame. This will tell us about the content’s ability to rank higher in search engine results and attract more qualified leads.

Example Goal 2: Improve lead quality through content

Attract high-quality leads by creating content that addresses their pain points, offers valuable insights, and positions the company as an industry thought leader. 

• Phase 1: Increase average time spent on site by 15% (compared to the previous month).
  • The focus is on engaging visitors through better site UX and content. A longer time on the site signals a higher level of interest and better lead quality.
• Phase 2: Increase conversion rate by 10% (compared to the previous quarter).
  • A higher conversion rate signifies that the content effectively convinces and motivates visitors to take the desired actions, indicating better lead quality.

Example Goal 3: Expand email subscriber base

Grow the email subscriber list to nurture into a loyal audience. A larger subscriber base provides a direct communication channel for further qualifying leads and driving conversions.

• Phase 1: Increase email subscribers by 25% (compared to the previous month).
  • Attract more sign-ups through successful lead generation content and improved UX.
• Phase 2: Improve email open rate by 10% (compared to the previous quarter).
  • The objective is to optimize email content and subject lines to increase open rates. A higher open rate indicates greater engagement and interest among email subscribers, resulting in better lead quality and potential conversions.

By focusing on increasing website traffic, improving lead quality, and expanding the subscriber base, your content strategy can achieve clear, measurable, and attributable results that directly impact the bottom line. With that data, you’re able to provide a better roadmap for attracting more potential leads, nurturing them through engaging content, and ultimately converting them into customers. 

As we’ve discussed in this section, you have the opportunity to address your audience’s pain points throughout their journey. By utilizing keyword and audience data to create content pillars, you can spark your audience’s interests and acknowledge their challenges. Choosing the right promotion channels and establishing a consistent publishing schedule allow you to systematically fill in the content gaps on your website while giving your audience exactly the information you KNOW they need. Setting specific goals and KPIs sets you up to prove the impact your content has before you even hit the launch button. That’s up next ➡️

3️⃣ Activating Your Data-Driven Content Strategy

Writing Content for SEO

Simply put, the best content empathizes with the audience’s pain points and provides practical solutions that just so happen to be related to your product or service. Show up where they’re searching, educate and inform, offer solutions, and collect leads. It’s as easy as that 😉

To make sure your blogs and videos and infographics and whatnot reach the right audience, they all must be optimized for search engines. By employing basic SEO best practices, you can increase your content’s visibility and attract people (re: qualified leads) actively searching for solutions related to you.

SEO Writing 101

Start by including your target keyword in the post title, preferably at the beginning, and mention the target keyword early in the article (ideally in the first sentence). Reinforce it naturally throughout the content, aiming for at least five mentions while maintaining a healthy keyword density of 1-3% (so if your article is 1,000 words, 10-30 of those words should be keywords). Don’t forget to incorporate related keywords to expand the scope of your content and cover various aspects of the topic that users might be interested in.

To add links to your blog, prioritize a methodical internal and external linking strategy. Avoid too many consecutive paragraphs without links, as it can negatively impact user experience and SEO. Include at about five internal links in each piece of content with keyword-optimized anchor text. Be mindful not to link to another page with the primary keyword you want to rank for, even internally. Distribute the links naturally and ensure they are all working properly.

Don’t forget readability! Use subheadings to break up the text, keep paragraphs concise (3-5 lines), and optimize images with keyword-optimized alt tags. Maintain a natural flow without keyword stuffing, and remember that online readers prefer shorter sentences and dislike large blocks of text. Include an enticing call to action or clear next steps to inspire action.

When writing, focus on providing value, solving problems, and delivering a seamless user experience to attract the right leads and improve quality overall. 

Publishing 

A well-executed publishing process is absolutely crucial in activating and maintaining a strong content strategy. It ensures that your content gets to your audience consistently, maximizing its impact and driving the greatest possible engagement. With the content calendar as your guide, you have a clear plan of action already in place. There are quite a few considerations to make before launch:

Start by establishing clear workflows and responsibilities. By defining roles upfront, everyone knows their tasks and deadlines, preventing bottlenecks and reducing errors or delays. Streamlining the workflow promotes collaboration and accountability across content creation, editing, proofreading, and publishing. The less time you spend on logistics, the more you can spend on the content and strategy itself.

Maintaining editorial standards ensures that your content reflects your brand’s voice, style, and mission, building trust and reinforcing your brand identity. Implementing a review and approval process guarantees quality control and accuracy, ultimately upholding the quality of content you produce. Leaning on automation tools, such as content management systems like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, HubSpot CMS, or Adobe Experience Manager. These tools provide a range of features to support content creation, distribution, and scheduling, enabling you to efficiently manage and automate your content strategy. By implementing some or all of these tactics, you can enhance efficiency, maintain quality, and deliver excellent content to your audience!

Now, let’s move on to the best (okay I’m biased) part of the process: reporting and optimization, where we analyze our results and make data-driven adjustments to further improve our content. It’s coming full circle now!

4️⃣ Reporting and Optimization

Reporting

Like most aspects of growth marketing, your reporting process simply must be structured and consistent in order to demonstrate success. First things first, you should always revisit your goals and KPIs. Take the time to reassess what you set out to achieve with your content. For example, if your goal was to increase website traffic and conversions, your KPIs may include metrics such as page views, click-through rates, and conversion rates. 

Quality ≠ Quantity

Next, pay attention to lead quality. To assess the quality of your leads, track their movement through (or out of) the funnel and collaborate with your sales team for additional context. They have valuable insights into the leads generated from your content and can provide first-hand feedback on the quality and conversion potential of leads your content has delivered. By working together, you can identify which content pieces are attracting high-quality leads that are more likely to convert into customers. This collaboration also helps ensure that your content aligns with the sales team’s objectives and that they have the necessary information to effectively nurture leads through the funnel. It’s a win-win 🤝

At the same time, make sure to assess the quality of your content itself. Look at metrics like engaged sessions in GA4, time spent on page, click-through rates, referrals, and bounce rates. These metrics provide insight into how well your content resonates with your target audience, captures their attention, and encourages further interaction. Further down the funnel, conversion metrics such as form submissions, newsletter sign-ups, and downloads, point directly to whether your content is generating those high-quality leads we’re after.  

Once you have all that juicy data, it’s time to uncover patterns, trends, and highly specific audience preferences. This deeper understanding will help you plan and optimize for even more data-driven, targeted, and engaging content that resonates with your ideal audience even better than before. 

Optimizing Your Content Strategy

To attract more qualified leads, refining and optimizing is the name of the game. Here’s how to jumpstart that process: 

Double Down on Success 📈

When you discover content that performs exceptionally well in terms of lead generation and engagement, you’ll want to sprinkle that magic into more content. Identify the key elements that contribute to its success and replicate them in your next content plan. The more data you collect, the stronger your plans become (and the better your results!)

Make it an Ongoing Process ♻️

Optimization should be an integral part of your content strategy cycle. Continuously monitor and analyze your content’s performance, making data-driven adjustments along the way (can we rework this content that’s not gaining traction, can we repurpose this winner for another audience?) Iterating on your content marketing strategy lets you supercharge its effectiveness in generating qualified leads while the gettin’s good. 

Our advice? Follow the numbers. Let your data be the heart of your marketing planning and content strategy. Marketers have access to so much information–and it’s up to us to use it wisely! Don’t let all your hard work go to waste. Report, analyze, optimize, and repeat. 

Embracing Data-Driven Content Marketing

Content lets us connect with people on a more personal level. By taking the time to understand their needs, interests, and preferences, we can build content that truly resonates with them, sparks genuine interest, and solves a pain point or two. When we tap into the insights we pull from (so, so much) data, we get to know our audience better than we did before, allowing us to create content that speaks directly to them, in the way that they want us to.

To effectively share our content, we rely on channels that help us connect with individuals in more useful ways. Our content and websites should guide the audience through a logical journey that actually addresses their real-life, in real-time, needs. 

By embracing data as our compass, we continuously adapt and refine our strategies, staying attuned to what truly matters to our audience, positioning us as a trusted resource. Ultimately, data-driven content allows us to infuse our online presence with humanistic elements, forging connections with a lasting impact.

Ready to rank higher and close the deal with your audience? The pros can take it from here 💪

Hannah Burks

Hey! I’m HB, the Head of Operations at Tuff. With a decade of experience across marketing and web, I specialize in complex problem-solving, strategic planning, and organic acquisition. My focus is on facilitating client growth, supporting our creative teams, and consistently improving efficiency across our org. Let’s chat!

The post Optimizing Your Content Marketing Strategy for High-Quality Lead Generation appeared first on Tuff.

Several of our partnerships here at Tuff are with B2B businesses who are looking for new and fresh ways to generate leads – and quality ones at that. B2B is a different ballpark than D2C and you have to get creative when it comes to how you target, the ads you test, the CTAs you push, and the means you use to convert people into leads.

We’re beginning to find out that digital advertising has become the primary way to drive B2B leads – $442 billion worth of sales happened because of digital advertising, accounting for 62% of the total advertising sales that occurred all over the world. When you’re looking for a digital advertising channel to find these leads, you’re going to want to find one where you know your audience will be – and that’s LinkedIn.

Benefits of using LinkedIn as a B2B marketing channel

It probably comes as no surprise that LinkedIn is THE channel to be on if you want to reach an audience of professionals. Seeing as the purpose of the channel originated as and still stands as a way to connect business professionals to new career and educational opportunities, that’s the network you can find on LinkedIn.

As of this spring, LinkedIn has reported it has 675 million monthly users, 40% of which are on the platform on a daily basis. That’s a whole lot of people to be reaching – a whole lot of ENGAGED people. If you’re looking for a marketing channel that you can rely on as a way to reach new leads and assist with your B2B efforts, you’ve pretty much just found your place.

Audience targeting options on LinkedIn

Not only is the audience you’re likely looking to hit on the platform, but LinkedIn also provides some of the best targeting options to reach business professionals. Since users decorate their LinkedIn profiles with a ton of information, such as their education, job title, company, accolades, skills, and more, you’ll have access to targeting people by these parameters. Some of the most useful ones we use on a regular basis are:

• Company Name
• Company Industry
  • This parameter can often be a little broad – this article breaks down which more niche industries fall into a broader category!
• Job Title
• Job Function
• Job Seniority
• Member Skills

LinkedIn also offers the option to target lists of contacts or companies if you have a large volume of either of these that you want to reach. The company list targeting allows you to upload a list of company names that will then be matched against the 50 million LinkedIn pages on the platform. The platform recommends that you upload a list of at least 1,000 organizations and allow it to match for at least 48 hours. The most important fields LinkedIn recommends you include to provide accurate and effective matching is the LinkedIn Company Page URL.

These targeting options will help you tailor your targeting to exactly the type of audience you’re looking to reach – and you can even break down performance by demographic once you’ve started running your campaign to see how each job function or company industry is targeting.

Driving leads via your website or native lead generation forms

Once you’ve nailed down your audience targeting, it’s time to decide exactly how you want to collect these leads. You may want to drive this audience to your website so they can learn more and submit their information. However, driving traffic away from LinkedIn needs to make sure you have a really optimized experience once you get there (and don’t get us wrong – we’ve got the skills to help you do that!)

However, LinkedIn also offers a native lead generation feature where users can click the ad and open a form where they’re able to submit their information, all while never leaving their current browser window. These forms are customizable, so you can ask the typical information you may need to qualify a lead, such as:

• Name
• Email address
• Phone number
• Company name
• Job title

The best part about this is that since most of this information is already part of a user’s profile set-up, the platform will auto-fill most this information in the form without the user having to input it themselves, which leads to higher lead submission rates! There’s also the option to include a custom field where users can select a multiple choice response or type something in if you need additional pieces of information that LinkedIn doesn’t offer.

We test a few different ways to drive these leads – we can either just encourage them to submit their information so they can learn more about the company’s products or services, or we can encourage them to submit their information to gain access to a resource or other piece of content from the company. In order to customize this, once someone submits their information via the form, they’ll be taken to a “confirmation” portion of the form where they’re met with a short message and a CTA button that you’re able to customize. You can drive them to a landing page or your website to learn more with the CTAs “Visit company website” or “Learn more,” or you can drive them to a piece of content using the CTAs “View now,” “Download now,” or “Try now.” For the latter, where you’re granting them access to a piece of content, you can link to a page that has the content either on a web page or as a PDF.

Offering content as a valuable incentive to collect lead information

We’ve found that when it comes to driving leads, offering a piece of content in exchange for a user’s information tends to be more successful. Especially in the B2B space, content is becoming more important than ever – 54% of decision makers spend more than an hour a week reading and reviewing thought leadership, and that same amount more frequently purchases a new product/service they had not considered before once they’ve read a compelling piece of thought leadership. Whether it’s an e-book, a white paper, a guide, or a checklist, promoting a piece of content that’s unique to your business will increase the value for someone deciding if they want to fill out the form.

While this strategy is completely possible with LinkedIn’s tried and true Sponsored Content ads, LinkedIn has also released a new product that we’ve been testing lately at Tuff – Document Ads. These ads showcase a preview of a document (in PDF, PPT, PPTX, DOC or DOCX formats) and require a user to submit a form to unlock the full document. They stand out in the newsfeed as a piece of content, which is attention-grabbing as it is, but they also don’t require visiting another page or downloading the resource if they don’t want to – they can simply read the full resource directly in the platform.

Results from real Tuff partners!

We’ve been testing in-platform lead generation with a few of our B2B partners in an effort to increase lead volume after originally driving to the landing page, and it has led to an increase in leads – and, even better, an increase in qualified leads.

Radion Health partners with brokers and consultants to offer level-funded and medical stop-loss insurance to small employee groups, and LinkedIn has been a top-performing social channel for them since we began working with them over the summer. We began to see lead volume decrease and CPLs spike after a few months of driving to the landing page, so we made the adjustment to lead generation campaigns – and leads increased by 265%. These leads also had an over 60% qualification rate, a 164% increase in quality compared to the period before.

Another one of our partners, Multiverse, which builds professional apprenticeship programs that companies can offer in place of corporate training or to adults who are looking for an alternative to college, has also relied heavily on LinkedIn for their B2B lead generation efforts. After testing driving to a landing page with a form from our ads, we switched to lead generation in October and have seen a 3x uptick in qualified leads compared to the period before.

We’ve also been testing Document Ads with a native lead generation form versus Sponsored Content ads driving to a landing page to promote a piece of content for Multiverse. For one particular report, we’ve driven 17 leads from the Document Ads compared to 1 from the Sponsored Content ads during the same time period!

Are you looking to drive leads through LinkedIn?

If driving leads through LinkedIn is on your radar for 2023, we recommend utilizing its products such as the native in-platform lead generation forms or Document Ads and testing them to see what works best with your audience and with your offerings! If you’re looking to get started with LinkedIn advertising or take your existing strategy to the next level, let’s talk!

The post What’s the Best Way to Generate High-Quality B2B Leads on LinkedIn? appeared first on Tuff.

As a growth agency, we run a lot of lead generation campaigns for our partners. Whether it’s B2B businesses looking to fill their pipeline or D2C brands building hype for a product launch, we’ve run lead gen every which way on every channel you can think of.

When we’re creating a growth marketing framework for these campaigns and thinking of what tactics to use, the question inevitably gets asked “Are we looking for quality or quantity with this strategy?”

Both.

The answer is both.

Of course, everyone wants a full pipeline of highly qualified leads for their sales team to feast on. Strong leads accompany more sales which leads to higher revenue. The issue is it’s never that simple. The typical tactics we look to employ here to generate leads usually sacrifice one of these areas. It is so difficult to generate leads at a high volume that are high quality at the same time. This is an issue we were having earlier this year with one of our partners, Thnks. 

Thnks and Tuff

Thnks’ mission is to help establish and build stronger relationships through efficient, personalized, and thoughtful gestures of appreciation. Does that sound vague? That’s kind of the idea. Their platform allows you to send cups of coffee, a grab-and-go lunch, or an end-of-the-day cocktail to anyone’s email or phone with just a few clicks. The platform is very business-focused, seeing most of their traction coming from sales and HR professionals.

Thnks brought us on to help them bolster their lead pipeline and unlock a new avenue for growth through paid acquisition. They had seen some success in the past but wanted a team to bring some stability to their advertising channels as well as a strategy that helped these channels work together. When it came to lead generation efforts, we really only focused on two main social platforms:

• Facebook/Instagram
• Linkedin

When it came to generating marketing qualified leads, we were only looking for companies of a certain size who we could expect to send a high volume of Thnks if converted to a customer. Thnks supports smaller businesses and individuals, but those customers don’t generate the same kind of LTV, so we decided against allocating budget to acquire these users at smaller companies.

Linkedin ads aren’t for every business, but they can be a really great place to generate leads depending on your product or service. With Thnks in mind, we saw a great opportunity to leverage their targeting options to isolate users who work in roles that are more likely to use Thnks and work at companies large enough for us to consider the lead“qualified.” Like I hinted at above, we were really looking for users who worked in sales or HR roles at worked at companies of a certain size.

Taking advantage of these targeting options has resulted in really efficient lead to MQL rates on Linkedin. Year to date at the time of writing our lead>MQL rate is sitting at 83%, which has been a huge factor in keeping our cost/MQL down on that platform. Unfortunately, we can’t say the same about our efforts on Facebook/Instagram.

Running ads on Facebook is an attractive option for B2B lead generation since the cost to deliver impressions and generate clicks on Linkedin is typically much more expensive. While clicks and impressions are generally cheaper on Facebook, you don’t get the same robust B2B targeting options that are accessible on Linkedin. Facebook offers some job title and industry targeting, but it’s nowhere near as accurate or reliable as what you can do on Linkedin.

Year to date at the time of writing, our lead>MQL rate is 48% for Facebook generated leads. When you put that number next to the 83% that we’ve seen on Linkedin, it immediately shows a gaping whole and huge opportunity for improvement on the Facebook front. 

Now we just needed to figure out what can be done to improve our lead quality on Facebook. This number has such a huge impact on our overall cost per qualified lead, so any improvement we can find will go a long way in letting us hit our MQL goals. 

How Clearbit was able to help

Working in digital advertising doesn’t mean I’m immune to ads. If anything I might be more susceptible to them since I can appreciate it when I get targeted with a good one. A few months ago I got hit with an ad from Clearbit offering to solve the exact problem that I was having with Thnks. I give their platform a ton of credit for being able to target me so well, but the creative (and yes, this is the exact ad I clicked on) was too relevant and enticing for me to ignore. I clicked through, did a little bit of research on the Clearbit website, and submitted a lead form requesting a time to chat with one of their sales reps. 

What I learned on that call is that Clearbit was able to offer us the best of both Facebook and Linkedin advertising wrapped into one. By plugging their product into our Facebook ad account, we’ve been able to access “Linkedin level targeting” with our Facebook campaigns. This has allowed us to take advantage of the lower cost of delivery and clicks on Facebook while also isolating our highest qualified audience by industry, job title and company size.

This was exactly the solution we needed for our low lead>MQL rates from Facebook ads. That issue was directly caused by a lack of targeting options on Facebook, and Clearbit plugged that exact hole.

Results

As I mentioned above, we introduced Clearbit to our Facebook efforts in an attempt to increase our lead>MQL rates. We were happy with our cost per lead as reported in Facebook, but not enough of those leads were actually qualified. Thnks didn’t bring us on to generate a high number of bad leads, so paying close attention to the qualification rate has been super important to our partnership.

It took a couple weeks for Clearbit to really hit stride, but since then the numbers really speak for themselves. We’ve seen a huge improvement in our lead qualification rate when looking at Clearbit campaigns vs. non-Clearbit campaigns.

This is the exact result we were hoping to see when introducing Clearbit. We’ve seen a monumental improvement in our qualified lead rate with these new campaigns, which has helped us drop our cost/qualified lead while getting more high quality leads in the door. The results so far have been incredibly promising and we’re excited to continue using this tool with Thnks and other B2B partners we work with.  

“I view our partnership with Tuff as more like an extension of my team. We strategize together, ask tough questions, examine the results, optimize – and it just keeps getting better. Exactly what I was looking for.” – Brad Veach, VP of Marketing at Thnks (see all Google Reviews for Tuff) 

Conclusion

Getting Clearbit onboard was not the most straightforward test I’ve ever run for a partner. It required multiple calls with our point of contact at Thnks, calls with the reps at Clearbit, negotiations back and forth, and some onboarding for the platform itself. It was complicated, but the end results were more than worth it.

Despite the complexity, the thinking that went behind it is pretty standard for how we tackle testing and optimizations for our partners. We followed the steps Growth Marketers always take when introducing a new tactic:

• Isolate a problem metric you’re looking to improve (Our lead to MQL rate is holding us back)
• Find the root cause of the problem (Facebook targeting options are not as robust and accurate as we need)
• Put a plan in place to address the problem (Clearbit gives us the targeting options needed to drive more qualified leads)
• Execute and analyze results (Our lead qualification rate for Clearbit campaigns is 61% higher than non-Clearbit campaigns)

If you’re interested in exploring this type of testing framework and talking through some solutions we can offer to help your user acquisition, give us a holler! We’d love to talk.

Ethan Broder

Hi there! I’m Ethan, a Growth Marketer based in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. I have four years of digital agency experience under my belt creating and executing acquisition strategies for a number of different verticals across multiple channels. When I’m not at my desk, you can find me skiing, mountain biking, or chasing my dog around in the mountains.

The post How We Used Clearbit to Generate More Quality Leads for Thnks appeared first on Tuff.

Among our list of eCommerce partners, the central focus of nearly all of their growth marketing strategies is the same: grow revenue. So, in order to do this, channel selection and tactics are primarily focused on driving customers to their websites who convert the most efficiently. That way, we’ll be able to scale their businesses and put marketing dollars towards the channels with the highest return. Winning.

While there are many metrics to keep track of and many ways to measure the success of revenue-driving campaigns, at Tuff, we cut through the noise and hone in on last-click attribution. This is the best way to quickly learn which channels are most effective and deserve the most attention from our paid ad budgets. 

9 times out of 10, last click is a great performance indicator for growing a brand, But what about the other 10% of the time? What’s the right strategic approach for eCommerce brands that have longer customer journeys? We most often see these longer journeys associated with luxury items that are higher priced—here, the customers spend more time in the consideration phase, making sure their decision to buy is right before they pay the high ticket price.

In those scenarios, we still keep last click as our preferred attribution model, but instead of locking in on just revenue as our main goal, we add leads into the equation as well.

Here’s how we do it: 

eCommerce Lead Generation: is it right for me?

For eCommerce lead generation to be a smart tactic for your brand to employ, you need a dedicated email marketing funnel—one that you’re managing relatively hands-on and improving on a regular basis. You also need some sort of sales strategy designed to convert your leads. You also need a way to qualify leads and have a measurable way to determine their value or potential value. Without these two mechanisms, lead generation will not work for your eCommerce brand. 

I have an eCommerce popup, does that count as lead generation?

To get super pointed with a definition: lead generation is defined as the initiation of consumer interest into products or services of a business. 

While eCommerce website popups are one proven way to grab website visitors’ emails in exchange for a free shipping or percentage offer discount, they can limit the consumer experience and hurt your perception (blame this on their overuse in the last decade). 

Our new favorite eCommerce Trend for lead generation is to develop a standout quiz or poll to capture contact information and provide you with the following: 

• A way to prove your industry expertise.
• A non-aggressive tactic to grab consumer insight.

Can you show me an example of an eCommerce Lead Generation Strategy?

Why yes, we can!

One of our partners, Canoe Club, is a high-end fashion retailer based in Boulder, CO. 

From a marketing standpoint their products differ from traditional eCommerce brands in two distinct ways: 

1. Their inventory is ever-changing. Products from their brands are purchased in low quantities so what might be available one day won’t necessarily be available the next day.
2. They’re a retail brand store, so they are selling other brands’ products. These products are on the higher end and have a higher barrier to entry. 

Due to these distinctions, Canoe Club’s customer lifetime value is higher than average, but finding individuals who meet their criteria doesn’t happen at a mass scale. 

Many people need time to find their Canoe Club fit and often times that won’t be on their first, second, or even third visit to the store. 

Additionally, even if Canoe Club has something a new visitor likes, they might not necessarily have it in their size. Their product lineup is based on buying seasons and quantities are limited per size. 

So instead of paying expensive costs to keep customers in an advertising funnel’s consideration phase, we worked with Canoe Club to develop a lead generation machine that captured leads at a high rate. We originally spotted this opportunity when we noticed the high traffic to email conversion rate. 

While we drove much of the strategy that laid the foundation for this successful tactic, we couldn’t have done it without the Canoe Club team. They developed a highly addicting, user-friendly quiz that drives prospective customers to sign up with their email. 

Appropriately called the Style Compass Quiz, this interactive quiz uses sophisticated TypeForm logic to assign users one of four style archetypes. 

We fell in love with the Style Compass Quiz the minute we laid eyes on it at Tuff. It’s far from stuffy and spammy, and is so unique that our Growth Marketer, Kristin said:

And she wasn’t wrong. On Instagram, Facebook, and even Reddit – the quiz has done insanely well at generating leads for Canoe Club. Here are our Campaign Results to date: 

With this style quiz, we’ve been able to increase Canoe Club’s email list size significantly and provide a way for them to capture people in the awareness and consideration phase at a low cost. 

From here, Canoe Club can do what they do best, which is to provide their subscribers with email marketing updates on their ever-changing lineup of fits and seasonal brand drops.

And we can keep doing what we do best, driving qualified traffic from established and niche ad channels that take action. In this case, the action is subscribing with an email address.

We are currently using Facebook to hone in on luxury audiences that may not convert on the first few website visits, but are great consumers to have in an email marketing flow. 

The other channel we are using is Reddit. Often left out of most Growth Marketing Strategies, Reddit presents a unique opportunity for brands to leverage their extensive collection of niche communities on topics ranging from fashion and style to bitcoin to sports (to name a few). 

Reddit advertising allows you to get in front of these niche communities with an offer. In this case, it’s for our style compass quiz: 

While generating revenue from Redditors isn’t the easiest, we’ve been fairly successful at generating email leads from these communities. 

To conclude, finding a piece of content, quiz, or poll that your potential customers can interact with and leave their contact information is a great way for you to grow your email list, prove your expertise in your industry, and learn about your consumer. 

Finding the right channels and audiences to market this to is the challenge, but when done correctly can diversify your business’s revenue streams and provide an opportunity for you to grow other parts of your business aside from daily revenue. 

The post Stacking the Top of the Funnel: How We Captured High-Value Email Leads for Canoe Club appeared first on Tuff.