CONTRIBUTION STRATEGY
case study
RESEARCH
CREATIVE
PROMOTION
CONVERSION
RESULTS
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Over 1,200 New Leads Generated Through One
Contribution Strategy in Six Weeks
The digitalrelevance™ Contribution Strategy is an inbound marketing practice that
produces high quality leads, drives referral and search engine traffic and builds digital
relevance for enterprise organizations. This case study describes the success that
can be achieved by leveraging our 4-step Content Centerpiece™ approach: Research,
Creative, Promotion and Conversion.
LEAD GENERATION
with Contribution Strategy
CASE STUDY
4,721
LANDING PAGE UNIQUE VISITS:1,216
TOTAL NO. OF NEW LEADS40
CONVERSION RATE%
1,867
SUBMISSIONS:IN 42 DAYS
IN 42 DAYS
LEAD GENERATION
with Contribution Strategy
CASE STUDY
1,867
ENTERPRISE BLOG POST
OPTIMIZATION GUIDE
PDF & KINDLE
500-WORD
ARTICLE
+ LINK
TO LANDING PAGE
HOLY COW! CONTENT™:
CONTENT FORMAT
PROMOTIONAL CONTENTINC.COM
EMAIL, SEARCH
& SOCIAL MEDIA
PROMOTIONAL OUTLET
CHANNEL OUTLETSSUBMISSIONS
500
1K
1.5K
2K
INCREMENTAL LEAD GROWTH
COMPARED TO THE
PREVIOUS
PERIOD
RESEARCH
Develop a Winning Plan to Leverage Holy Cow! Content™
Discovering a great inbound marketing idea starts with determining how your organization can provide value to your target audience. Start the research process by identifying the personas that define your target audience in order to drive the most value for the campaign. Many organizations already have existing documentation that defines target personas, and this information can expedite the discovery of target persona networks online. In this example, our target audience was enterprise marketing leaders.
Next, we needed to understand how to identify Holy Cow! Content™ that we would
leverage for this target audience.
To determine the specific piece of Holy Cow! Content™, we would use for our campaign, we continued the research process by interviewing members of our target persona group. We understood that lead generation was a common challenge among enterprise marketing leaders, so we asked questions such as:
• What common challenges do you face related to generating leads online?
• How do you measure success for your online lead generation efforts?
• What processes and controls are in place in your online lead generation program?
LEAD GENERATION
with Contribution Strategy
CASE STUDY
• Solve a problem
• Educate / inform, or
• Entertain the
target audience
Content that fails to meet one or more of these characteristics isn’t Holy Cow! Content™
WHAT EXACTLY IS
Holy Cow! Content
™
?
CREATIVE
Preparing the Holy Cow! and her Minions
It’s important not only to create engaging and value-add content, but it’s also important to make that content easy to share. Versions of the Enterprise Blog Optimization Guide were created in PDF and Amazon Kindle format; the Kindle format now presents the guide as an eBook, which is packaged perfectly for virtually all e-readers, tablets and smartphones on the market.
The Holy Cow! Content™ also needed to be boiled down into a “teaser” article that featured several highlights from the content. Historically, we’ve observed a strong correlation between how many highlights we share from campaign collateral and the overall success of the campaign. People who read the teaser article don’t want a sales pitch; readers want to understand the value behind the collateral. Stronger, more targeted information in the teaser article typically After a few short meetings, we discovered many ideas and trends. One
challenge that stood out was that most marketing teams lack a clear answer for how to compose interesting, informative and compliant blog articles that have a positive impact on online lead generation. Specifically, many organizations lack the processes and controls to ideate, create and promote quality blog content on a regular basis.
This problem statement provided an excellent opportunity to educate marketing leaders by introducing a downloadable how-to guide. An enterprise blog optimization guide appeared to be the most valuable idea that could enable enterprise marketing leaders to get the job done right on their company blogs.
A typical research phase also involves developing a deeper understanding of promotional opportunities where the target audience spends time looking for this sort of solution. For purposes of this campaign, however, a single, high-quality promotional site was selected as the sole promotional vehicle.
LEAD GENERATION
with Contribution Strategy
LEAD GENERATION
with Contribution Strategy
CASE STUDY
PROMOTION
Drive Traffic to the Content
Generating demand for your Holy Cow! Content™ requires developing strong relationships with relevant and authoritative online industry resources. These relationships can include industry associations, news sites or other online communities that your target audience frequents on a regular basis. The magic formula here is to find online communities that have a measured over-representation of your target personas and a large subscriber base.
Using data from Experian Hitwise, we learned that enterprise marketing leaders are over-represented as a group on the widely read online version of the popular publication Inc. Magazine. This publisher also happened to be one of many content syndication relationships that digitalrelevance has earned and continues to maintain. Further analysis uncovered tremendous success of similar articles on Inc. com that featured how-to guides. We took cues from these former successes on Inc. to build an impactful teaser article for our Enterprise Blog Optimization Guide.
CONVERSION
Drive the Target Audience to an Optimized Landing Page
Our landing pages feature a simplified design that sings in tune with the look and feel of our brand’s website. Landing pages also keep the user focused on downloading the Holy Cow! Content™ by removing header navigation bars and links to other pages. Our optimized landing pages are hosted on a sub-domain to integrate with HubSpot, the marketing automation software we use. This allows us to set up a custom marketing funnel that nurtures these leads through a pre-programmed set of steps to a final buying decision. HubSpot also captures our lead information, lead growth and other user statistics that help optimize our campaigns going forward.
500-WORD
ARTICLE
+ LINK
TO LANDING PAGE
PROMOTIONAL CONTENT
INC.COM
PROMOTIONAL OUTLET
40
CONVERSION RATE
%
LEAD GENERATION
with Contribution Strategy
CASE STUDY
“ BUT MARKETERS ARE ALSO SEEING VALUE IN EARNED AND OWNED
MEDIA - AND IN SOME CASES, USING PR CAMPAIGNS AS A REPLACEMENT
OR SUPPLEMENT FOR TRADITIONAL ADVERTISING.” - AD AGE
The Centerpiece Stacking Method
By strategically deploying earned media with a Contribution Strategy, lead growth and acquisition can further be accelerated and multiplied month-over-month. It’s easy to see the powerful impact earned media can have on lead generation and growth.
Week 1
Week 5
Week 9
Non-campaign
Conversions Campaign #1 Campaign #2 Campaign #3
CONVER
SIONS
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