While content marketing has been all the rage as a buzzword over the past 2 years, more and more people are rightfully asking the question of its ROI: is it effective? Can I afford content marketing as a small business? How do I even measure content marketing ROI?
As Ally wrote last week on this blog, including lead generation as one of the objectives of your content strategy is an important way to answer these questions. While you’re probably interested in or already using content marketing for other goals such as brand awareness, traffic generation, SEO, social media publishing, etc… have you thought about also generating leads through your curated content? Integrating lead generation in your content strategy brings a measurable KPI that is aligned with any business’ #1 strategic objective: growing revenue.
Perhaps more importantly: it works! Content is a great way to generate new connexions that can lead to future business: by publishing relevant quality content that addresses potential prospects’ questions or interests, you generate opportunities to be discovered by them through their search queries or social media. Talking in the context of curation, we keep hearing testimonials of Scoopiteers who tell us they made valuable connections that originated with their curated content and developed further into business opportunities.
So as we multiplied the possibilities to generate leads from your curated content on Scoop.it Business and Enterprise versions, we wanted to give you a recap of how you can effectively do that when using content curation for your small business or company.
1. Drag and drop lead generation forms
Without having to create one line of code, you can add a slider to your Scoop.it pages with a customized message and call to action. As shown below, when visitors start scrolling down your page – meaning once they’re engaged with your curated content, this slider will appear from the right in a dynamic way to focus your readers’ attention on filling up a form: signing up for demos, webinars, mailing lists, etc. are all interesting options to consider that are made possible and visible by this feature available to all Scoop.it Business and Scoop.it Enterprise customers.
Once you’ve upgraded to Scoop.it Business, you will find the Lead-Generation form builder menu here:
Once in this menu, you can build a lead generation slider easily by dragging and dropping the fields you’d like to use:
Once you’re done, simply click on “Enable this form on my topic” and start collecting leads!
Tip: you can download your leads at any time in .csv format but you can also be notified of your leads in real-time by email by checking the option: Send me an email each time a user submits a form.
2. Add your lead generation Call to Action within your HTML header
With Scoop.it Business, you can add an HTML overlay to your Scoop.it page to make it the header of your curated content. This header can be the navigation header of your blog or Website for instance. But whether this navigation header already has a lead-generation CTA or not, you can use this feature to add a clear call to action to your Scoop.it pages.
This can be in the form of a clickable button:
A form to fill out:
or even a phone number:
If you’re not sure where to start to customize your HTML banner, here’s our knowledge-base article on how to do so.
3. Add Trackers for Marketing Automation and Ad Retargeting
In an ideal world, we’d love to think of our funnel as linear: visitors would come to our content site, find it interesting enough to sign up for whatever we have to offer and then be converted to customers during the next interaction we have with them. As many of us experienced as customers and as David Edelman from McKinsey started to note a few months ago, it’s much more complicated than that because the funnel is dead.
Customers hesitate, change their minds, come back again, are interrupted, their context can change, etc… While content curation is a great way to maintain top of mind with them as well as educate them on a specific topic or industry, it might take several interactions to convert them.
To address this, a lot of successful marketers marketers have leveraged marketing automation, ad retargeting and other techniques which requires visitor tracking. We’re now happy to offer this to our Enterprise clients who can now add javascript trackers from their favorite marketing tools and even combine them: you can thus for example add a Marketo Munchkin tracker combined with an AdRoll pixel for retargeting.
With such an integration, you can nurture visitors to your curated content, retarget them with a promotion that’s specific to their needs and optimize your chances of converting them.
So whether you’re just getting started using content for lead generation or a marketing automation expert, your needs should be covered with the above options but please tell us: what other lead-generation possibilities would you like us to offer within the Scoop.it platform?
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One of the main tips with how to generate leads is making regular tests on your campaign efficiency. Use A/B testing to improve your landing page and increase the quantity of targeted leads. To perform A/B or split testing, you must take two web pages that look similar, but differ in color, text placement, images, etc.
I know this is an older post, but trying to find info on what has happened to the lead generation form pop out that you discuss here. As of yesterday on my Business account, it has just disappeared -all the forms I built are gone and the option doesn’t appear in the menu.
This was a great feature and you really should give notice if you are pulling things like this, its incredibly disruptive. Sent a message to support but all I eventually got back was “we’ll look in to it. Great feature – very frustrated.
We didn’t pull it off @stevebutton:disqus. It’s still here: http://www.scoop.it/t/content-marketing-social-media-seo Looking at your topic, it seems there’s a conflict with the CSS you’ve added to your template and the lead generation form (as well as the menu bar which is now hidden). Did you modify it recently maybe? Anyway, like we said earlier through support we are looking at this but it will take a bit of time to investigate. We’ll keep you posted through our support system.