In honor of Halloween, let me tell you one of the most terrifying things I can think of. Today we will discuss the Tale of the Terrifying Content Campaign.
One day, a strong-willed Director of Marketing (we will call him Jake) decided it was time to publish a content campaign. He gathered a team together, and they decided they would create an ebook. So they went to work.
He also sat down with his strategist to determine lead qualification on the ebook, since it would be lead generating content. They decided that they would place a number of CTAs in the content for their audience to convert from. They also decided that prospects who downloaded the content would be placed in lead nurturing, to receive more content and emails in the future.
After weeks of work, his team had a final draft. So Jake finally went to work. He went in his marketing automation program and began constructing the necessary emails, landing pages, workflows, and etc.
Finally, the campaign was sent, but something wasn’t right.
Leads didn’t pour in like they should have. The ebook was perfect. The content and design were executed flawlessly, and the content was great for the audience segment they had targeted.
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But where were the leads?
As it turns out, Jake didn’t build a great campaign around this great piece of content. In his marketing automation platform, he only built an email and a landing page. The email was sent out to a few thousand prospects, but the the form on the landing page wasn’t actually capturing any lead information. As a result, the sales staff wasn’t receiving any lead information for follow up.
Beyond that, the campaign was rendered useless by a lack of distribution. They did distribute it through email to a specific list of prospects. But they didn’t put the content on social media, nor did they use any forms of paid advertising to get the content to their audience.
I know. It’s absolutely terrifying. But don’t worry, we won’t leave this terrifying tale here. Let’s straighten this out and see exactly how this campaign should have looked.
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1. Lead Generation
First of all, the campaign should have been set up right. The form on the landing page should have been set up to capture leads correctly. If the form and workflow would have been set up correctly, this would have enable actual lead generation for sales to follow up.
Leads are useless if you aren’t following up on them.
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2. Social Media
Second, Jake should have utilized social media. Social media is a great opportunity to distribute content to your audience, especially if you have invested some time into developing your presence. The posts should have been staggered to allow the content to be distributed to his network over a few weeks.
Investing time into your social media pages are a great opportunity to build a distribution network for your content.
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3. Paid Advertising
Finally, Jake should have utilized paid advertising as part of a comprehensive content campaign. There are a number of different paid advertising channels that you can utilize to distribute your content to the right prospects at the right time. For instance, paid search, the display network, paid social, and banner display on industry sites are great opportunities to reach your audience.
There are even a number of targeting options that you can use to make sure you are reaching the right prospects where they are making purchase decisions.
So now you see exactly what made Jake’s campaign so terrifying. Hopefully you’ve even learned a few things. Maybe you have learned a few things from Jake and can avoid turning your marketing department into a haunted house of low ROIs and stress-related stomach ulcers.
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