Chapter 6

Generating Leads with Content Marketing

In This Chapter

Getting started with content marketing

Organizing your efforts and creating a plan of attack

Creating high-value content on a budget

Combining lead generation and content for the one-two punch

Everyone is talking about content marketing. If you've been to any marketing conferences in the past two years, you've probably noticed that content marketing is the new social media. It’s a hot topic on every marketer’s mind and is proving to be a large part of any successful lead generation effort.

Content marketing can be defined many ways, but I like C.C. Chapman’s the best, from the book Content Rules:

“Content marketing is anything a company creates and shares to tell their story. It is conversational, human, and doesn’t try to constantly sell to you. It also isn’t a tactic that you can just turn on and off and hope that it will be successful. It has to be a mindset that is embraced and encouraged. You’ve got to start thinking like a publisher and use that to plan and execute your entire marketing plan, which content of any variety should be a part of.”

Content marketing isn’t new. Brands have been using the concept of content marketing to tell their story for decades. In 1895, John Deere released a customer magazine that now has 1,500,000 subscribers worldwide. In 1904, Jell-O created a recipe book that contributed to $1,000,000 in sales by 1906.

Consider even early cave paintings. Engaging an audience through a story has always been a primary way humans communicate with one another. Brands need to integrate this tactic into their lead generation efforts. Content marketing becomes particularly important as the new buyer self-educates through the buying journey via online channels. And because the new buyer represents a fundamental shift in how we as marketers reach audiences, creating valuable content has become a primary focus.

According to Heidi Cohen, content marketing expert and blogger, content marketing’s major attributes include the following:

• Embodies the product or firm’s core brand elements
• Uses a variety of media formats such as text, video, photos, audio, ebooks, and infographics to tell a brand story
• Can be consumed on a variety of devices such as computers, smartphones, and tablets
• Is distributed through your owned properties like your website and blog, through third-party contacts and vendors, and social media platforms
• Provides measureable results through the use of appropriate calls-to-action

In this chapter, you discover how to create a content marketing machine to fuel your lead generation efforts.

Exploring Content

Content helps you build trust and become a thought leader in your space. Content makes a buyer say, “Eureka! That’s just the information I’m looking for!” and earns you a special place in his heart. Content is the Thelma to your Louise, the Sonny to your Cher. Content and lead generation truly create the perfect pair. Without quality content, you won’t have a comprehensive lead generation plan.

Content is the basis of many (if not all) of your lead generation campaigns. When you send an email blast, host an event, or launch a social campaign or pay-per-click (PPC) ad, you’re providing relevant (and hopefully insightful) content.

Rather than offering a boring datasheet that goes on and on about your product or service, create an ebook of actionable tips on how to fix a problem that causes potential buyers to pull out their hair. When you help a buyer with a problem, you become top-of-mind. After you gain a buyer’s trust because you’ve helped him so many times, convincing a buyer that your product or service is the best becomes much easier.

Being a thought leader

When prospects discover your company, most likely, they don't yet have trust in your brand and they aren’t ready to make a purchase. An overly promotional lead generation campaign can be a huge turnoff. A critical concept to understand is the difference between thought leadership and promotional content.

What is thought leadership? According to Jon Miller, VP of marketing and cofounder of Marketo, thought leadership “consists of ideas that require attention, that offer guidance or clarity. Thought leadership needs to be educational and ideally provocative.” Instead of merely creating content that beats your company's chest, try to provide your audience with something that they can ponder. Thought leadership in content marketing helps you:

• Create relationships with customers and prospects by engaging in relevant conversations
• Differentiate yourself as a source for research and best practices across your industry
• Build trust with prospects so that when they are ready to make a purchase, they automatically go to the industry leader

Purely promotional content produced for the sole intent of closing a deal and sent to a prospect at the wrong time can come across as yelling. The key here is to make sure you are sending the right message at the right time in a lead’s buying cycle.

Imagine you’re a marketer working in a small company interested in best practices for email marketing. You search Twitter and find an interesting blog post on optimizing email for mobile technology. You click the blog post, read it, find it useful, and subscribe to the blog. If the first email you get from the company, which just happens to be a marketing automation software firm, is a datasheet about their product, you will most likely trash it.

However, if the first email you get from that company is an ebook of best practices for optimizing email for mobile channels, you will probably open it, read it, and look forward to additional educational content. And when you’re ready to buy a marketing automation platform, the first brand that comes to mind might be the one who’s been sending helpful content over a period of time. Marketo's downloadable ebook The Definitive Guide to Marketing Automation is an example of thought leadership content. (The guide covers best practices for marketing automation, not just Marketo. In fact, if you are using a competitor, this guide is just as helpful because it's platform-neutral.) Your audience can read your asset and educate themselves versus being sold to.

Leveraging promotional content

Promotional content is an asset that delivers a hard sell. Think of a datasheet, pricing sheet, or even an ebook that goes into more detail regarding product or service information. This content is considered late-stage (late in the buying process) and should be used when a lead is very close to making a purchase. In fact, when a lead downloads a piece of promotional, late-stage content, he is considered a hand-raiser, and should be contacted by sales immediately. When a potential customer downloads a pricing or product sheet, it's a key indicator of positive buying behavior.

Promotional content has its place later in the buying cycle, but for the purpose of lead generation, you will mostly be using content that can be considered thought leadership in nature because you are trying to create relationships.

Considering different forms of content

You can tell a story in many ways. Customers and prospects consume stories in many ways, too. Some may enjoy reading an ebook cover to cover; others might consume information visually through an infographic or a slide deck. If you only create ebooks, you’ll reach some of your potential buyers, but never those who delete ebooks whenever they appear in their email.

To make sure you’re reaching every potential buyer, use a variety of content types. Here are a few to consider:

• Ebook: An ebook is a digital book that consists of text and images. Ebooks can be easily consumed on computers and mobile devices. They can be a few pages, hundreds of pages long, or anywhere in between. The great part about an ebook is that you can base many of your additional assets off the written content.
• Whitepapers and reports: Many people think of whitepapers and reports as being interchangeable with ebooks. However, I think of a whitepaper more as a long-form authoritative report or manual. Whitepapers often take the form of benchmarks and industry reports.
• One-pager/cheat sheet: A one-pager or cheat sheet is a short piece of content that informs a reader about a product, service, or concept in an extremely digestible way. These are always one page, but copy can also be on the back.
• Activity book/worksheet: An activity book is a great way to get interactive with your content. Instead of just telling your audience what to do, walk them through it! Think check lists, questionnaires, and templates. Even consider something fun like a coloring book, word scramble, or crossword puzzle.
• Video: Marketing videos come in many forms. Think 60–90-second demo videos, animated shorts, live action commercials, webinar recordings, and presentation recordings, to name a few.
• Infographic: Visual content is a great way to reach your audience in a fun and interesting way. An infographic takes a complex story, often including stats and quotes, and uses graphical elements to bring it to life in a more concise manner. Infographics are typically short and are scrollable on a computer screen or mobile phone.
• Slide Decks: Visual slide decks are a great way to present longer form information in an engaging way. You can create a special visual slide deck using creative visuals from an infographic, or you can upload a webinar presentation slide deck. Slide decks should present information in an easy-to-digest format, and also tell a compelling story at the same time in order to engage your reader.
• Podcasts: Never underestimate the power of a podcast. A podcast is a vocal recording of a presentation, webinar, or speech. A person can listen to a podcast on the go — in her car, on her headphones, and so on.

Delving into Content Planning

One of the most important aspects to content marketing for successful lead generation is the planning process. The best way to start planning your content is to conduct your own discovery session. Ask yourself, your marketing team, your salespeople, and your customer service representatives the following questions:

• Why are you creating content?
• What are your areas of expertise?
• What are the common concerns and pain points of your target audience?
• What are the topics you could write about that would address those pain points?
• Do you have any product/service offerings or announcements that you want to tie your content efforts to?
• Where do you want your content to live? In a content resource section? On your website home page? On your blog?

Hold meetings with members within your organization that you consider key stakeholders. And make sure to spend time with some of the people who are on the front lines everyday talking to customers.

Developing buyer personas

Once you get a good sense of your content marketing and organizational landscape through your discovery, you are ready to create your buyer personas. A buyer persona is a representation of your various buyers and influencers. Basically, who is buying your product or service? Understanding these buyer definitions is critical not only to your content creation, but to your lead generation efforts as a whole.

A persona uses data to help everyone that is creating content to focus on a tangible representation of a buyer, versus a nebulous, formless one. If a buyer persona is created without research and based on outdated assumptions and hunches, you can have a biased and incomplete view of who you are actually marketing to. I have seen many marketing teams that don’t back up their hunches with measurable evidence. Personas then take on the attributes of whatever the most important person in the room thinks they should be.

The bottom line is the more you know about your actual buyers, the more you can focus your messaging and effectively target and speak to your audience.

How do you find out who your buyers are? Research, research, research. Set up time to speak with the following groups:

• Sales: Your sales team understands better than most in your organization who buys your product or service. They speak to prospects day in and day out and know buyer pain points, objections, and what gets them excited. And they not only understand who your primary buyer is, but they also understand the influencers — those who may not make a purchasing decision, but who heavily influence your purchasers.
• Customers: Current customers are a fantastic resource. They have already purchased your product or service and can tell you a lot about why they purchased, what their pain points are, and what a day in their life looks like. You might consider offering an incentive like a gift card or T-shirt to the customers who participate in your survey. One thing to note is that you want to experience the good, the bad, and the ugly, so make sure you interview customers who have had a wide variety of experiences with your company.
• Prospects: You also want to focus on those that are considering your product or service. Who are they? What attracted them to you? It may be tough to speak directly to prospects because they aren’t customers yet, so use the data that you may already have in your customer relationship management (CRM) or marketing automation platform to determine who they are and what they do.

Not sure what questions to ask? Try asking your buyers these questions to get the information you need:

• What is your job title?
• What industry do you currently work in?
• What are your core job responsibilities?
• What do you love most about your job?
• What do you dislike most about your job?
• What interested you about our solution?
• What are the pain points relevant to our solution?
• Which needs might our solution address?
• What are you looking for in a solution?
• What is your preferred buying process?
• How are you researching product/solution information?
• What is your role in the decision-making process?
• How do you typically choose to consume information?
• How often are you on a mobile device or tablet?

Don’t have the time to do this type of research? You can always bring in a third-party consulting firm to do this for you. Invest the time upfront before you risk wasting time creating content that doesn’t make sense to or isn’t even noticed by your intended audience.

After you have all of the information needed, you can begin building your personas. List them and start building your profiles. Figure 6-1 outlines a sample buyer persona worksheet, but make sure you include the following fields when you create your own worksheet:

• Who: Provide a detailed explanation of who the buyer is and include demographic information. To aid in your storytelling, consider adding real-life characteristics and descriptions to your worksheet. Even give your persona a name!
• What: Include a detailed explanation of job responsibilities and day-to-day life.
• Pain points: List each pain point that you collected from your interviews. What are the issues facing this persona — what makes this person pull his hair out every day? Addressing these pain points will be great topics for your content pieces.
• Goals: What are your persona’s 2–10 year goals? How can your product help her get there?
• Wish lists: What does this person wish for? What are aspects of your product that can help your persona achieve his wishes?
• Buying profile: Describe how this person buys. Can you often find her on Twitter searching for reviews? Or maybe this person asks his friends for advice.

After you have developed your buyer personas, you can start writing content that is applicable to their needs and profiles. Keep your buyer personas in mind as you create your content marketing plan.

Mapping buying stages

The next step in your planning process is mapping your buying stages. What kind of content do you want to send to your persona and when? It is crucial to send the right piece of content at the right time. Someone who is just learning about your company isn’t ready for a case study, so don’t send him one. Conversely, a prospect may not want another educational asset if they are ready to buy. The idea is to move each prospect down your buying funnel with content.

Typically, most companies have buying stages that look similar to the following list:

• Early stage: Your prospect has not yet indicated any buying intent or preference for your company. He most likely has just started the research phase. The content you send your prospect in this stage must be educational in nature and relevant to your prospect’s interest.
• Mid stage: Your prospect may have indicated some interest in either your company or your product/service. The content you offer at this stage is geared toward helping your buyer differentiate your product from the competition so the right purchasing decision can be made. For instance, you want to offer buying guides, ROI calculators, and other content very closely related to your core product or service.
• Late stage: Your prospect has indicated strong interest for your product or service. She is well on her way to purchasing, and you should offer her pricing sheets, datasheets, and customer case studies. This is where you include your product-specific content assets. Sales may also be engaged at this time.

Figure 6-2 shows an example of content that is mapped closely to each buying stage. As the buyer gets closer and closer to purchasing, the content narrows to become more specific.

Depending on how many personas you created, you may want to create separate buying stages for each persona. For instance, if you have a CMO and a practitioner persona, they might have two completely different buying processes. Consider documenting each. This can help you segment and target even further.

Working with a content grid

After you have mapped both your buying stages and personas, you can create what is called a content grid. In this grid, you list out each persona, each buying stage, and then you insert applicable content in each cell.

For instance, say you are a marketer working for a professional services consulting firm. You have four total personas and one of them is the Chief Operating Officer (COO). You also have mapped your buying stages, so you know how to identify the COO buyer journey. In your grid, you want to make sure you have content that is applicable to the COO persona in all of your buying stages.

Figure 6-3 shows you an example of a content grid. Create your own in a spreadsheet or a PowerPoint slide and keep it handy throughout your planning efforts.

The key is to make sure you fill your content grid in for each stage of your funnel and each of your buying stages. This ensures that

• You fully understand each persona and what he experiences throughout the buying stages.
• You have mapped out each different buying stage and are close to your sales process.
• You know what content you already have and where you have holes.

Creating content arcs and themes

The next step to creating an awesome content marketing plan is to plan what content you are going to create. You have your buyer personas, you have a sense of what type of content you can create, so now what are you going to write about? No doubt it's a tall order.

You want to support business initiatives with your content, so the best place to start is to consider and map out the following topics as you create your content themes:

• Large product or service launches
• Large company announcements
• Hot topics and industry themes
• Search engine optimization (SEO) keyword needs

For product/service launches and company announcements, create a calendar at least six months in advance so you have a full view of what your company wants to promote. Then on the side, list at least four trending topics in your industry and at least four of the top keywords you want your website to rank for.

After you create your initial calendar setup, you will likely find that many of your product/service launches or announcements match up with both industry trends and your keyword needs (if you are focusing on the right topics). These consistent topics are your themes or arcs. Create an outline for each potential content arc and assign potential content types to each arc.

As an example, say you work for a natural food manufacturer. One of your arcs might look like the following:

Trend and Product Launches: Gluten-Free Natural Foods (April–June)

• Product launch: Gluten-free cookies (April)
• Service launch: Gluten-free shopper service (May)
• Product launch: Gluten-free frozen meals (June)
• Potential content ideas:
  • Ebook on gluten-free living
  • Video series on gluten-free recipes
  • Cheat sheets on ingredients that contain gluten
  • Infographic on the gluten-free alternative
  • Buying guide to gluten-free products
  • Blog posts on living healthier by going gluten-free

Start by trying one arc per quarter — four content arcs per year. After you have chosen your two (if you are planning for the next six months) or four (if you are planning for the next year), map your arcs to a calendar with approximate dates.

Take a look at Figure 6-4, which illustrates what your calendar might look like.

Having a visual representation of what your content looks like for the next six months to a year helps you flesh out your lead generation programs and integrate your marketing to obtain goals that align to each core business priority.

One thing that is important to note here is that you want to maintain a steady drumbeat of interesting content. Your arcs should be the foundation of your content efforts, but don’t be afraid to stray a bit if you see something else pop up that you are passionate about and want to create lead generation campaigns around. You never know what might be new and exciting in your industry that you have to comment on. The key is to look to your arcs and your calendar as a guideline, but always think outside of the box and don’t be afraid to put efforts into something else that might also create buzz and drive revenue.

Doing More with Less in Your Content Marketing

Say you have a content plan that is tightly aligned with organizational objectives as well as industry trends and top keywords. Take a minute to sit down and take a few breaths. You have a good chunk of your foundation planning out of the way, and getting organized is half the battle.

But after you have your plan together, where do you start? This is a question I get constantly. “We have our plan, and we have some great pieces planned, but how do we get started and how do we do more with less?”

Even if you come from a large company where you have a large marketing budget and content marketing has been proven, you can always learn new ways to stretch your dollars and increase your return on investment. By being smart, thrifty, and understanding how your audience consumes content, you can quickly create a content marketing empire to be reckoned with!

Coming up with your big rock content pieces

The first step to creating a robust content library is thinking about your “big rock content piece.” Your big rock content piece is a large piece of content (ideally 20 or more pages) that maps to each content arc. Your big rock is the big kahuna — the fire that ignites many of your lead generation campaigns.

Your big rock content piece fulfills the following goals:

• Showcases your thought leadership around your arc
• Shows off creative writing and design prowess
• Is dynamic enough to be the basis for other content pieces (more on that later in this chapter)
• Contains best practices, tips, and actionable insights

Your big rock piece is the basis for many additional content pieces such as ebooks, videos, webinars, and so on, so make sure that you keep this in mind during your planning phase, and think creatively about what to include in the piece to bring additional value.

Don’t be afraid to make your big rock content piece long. Remember, you want to be recognized as a publisher, so the more value you add, the more your audience views you as a true authority. Be authentic, and people will notice.

I helped create several big rock content pieces at Marketo. Each one of these pieces aligns to one of their content arcs. For example, The Definitive Guide to Social Marketing aligned to a social marketing content arc and contains 81 pages of worksheets, tips, tricks, and best practices. Another example is The Definitive Guide to Events. Again, it's aligned to an event marketing content arc.

Follow this ten-step plan to organize your big rock content piece creation process:

1. Meet with stakeholders.

   Assuming that your big rock content piece aligns with business priorities and drives many lead generation campaigns, meet with internal stakeholders such as your CMO, VP of marketing, director of demand generation, your customer team, and so on, to get a sense of messaging, and to align timing and scheduling.

2. Create a messaging document.

   After your stakeholder meeting, take notes and create a messaging document to send out. This messaging drives both the core content for your ebook and your lead generation campaign messaging.

3. Create an outline.

   This is a crucial step to creating any content piece. A solid outline helps you flesh out details and align with stakeholders.

4. Write your first draft.

   Use internal resources or work with external writers to create your initial draft.

5. Review.

   Depending on your internal review process, this draft might go through multiple reviews with many people. Make sure it is viewed by as many eyes as possible.

6. Write your second draft.

   Incorporate the feedback and create your second draft. This is likely the one you send to your design team.

7. Send to design.

   After you have your second draft completed, send your copy to either your in-house creative team or an outsourced agency. Require that your team send you back two to three design options to choose from and make sure they understand ebook layout concepts.

8. Look over the first design draft.

   Your design team sends you back a templated, illustrated version of your ebook. Make sure you edit it for copy, consistency, and design. You might also want to send this version off to stakeholders for additional input.

9. Look over the final design draft.

   Hopefully you will only have two sets of edits to send to design. But regardless of how many rounds are necessary, make sure to go over the final draft with a fine-toothed comb.

10. Promote!

    You are at the finish line — of the content creation process, at least. Now you want to get promoting and start collecting those leads.

Slicing and dicing

Here comes the fun part: slicing and dicing your content pieces. Think of slicing and dicing like a turkey dinner. This concept was introduced by content marketing expert and Altimeter Group analyst, Rebecca Lieb, and it's a fantastic way to explain what you are going to do next.

According to Rebecca, “You start with the turkey dinner at Thanksgiving and that’s the main event, and everybody knows that after Thanksgiving you’re eating turkey sandwiches, you have turkey on your salad, maybe turkey and eggs for breakfast.”

Basically, think of your big rock pieces as the main event, the turkey dinner, if you will, but then you slice and dice your amazing turkey into many different dishes that feed you and your family for some time to come.

Check out Figure 6-5, which illustrates the turkey analogy.

Now that you are thinking of your content as a tasty delicious Thanksgiving meal, what will your leftovers look like? Remember all of the content types I discussed in the beginning of this chapter? Think about which ones you might be able to create from your big rock piece. Here is an example of what I mean. From your big rock content piece (50 pages of content), you could create

• Four ebooks: Created from four separate chapters
• Two checklists: Created from existing checklists that you included in your initial ebook
• One to two webinars: Content created using content directly from your ebook
• One to two podcasts: Taken from your webinar recording
• One to two slide decks: Created from webinar slide deck
• One video: Created from your ebook messaging document
• One infographic: Created from some of the great stats you included in your ebook
• Four to five blog posts: Created from content taken directly out of your ebook

These examples alone constitute at least 15 additional pieces of lead generation fodder for you to use in email, social, paid programs, content syndication, and so much more. Basically, from that one effort, you can create so many valuable pieces, and that is why I love the tactic of creating the big rock content piece first. It can be easier and more streamlined than focusing your efforts on five different ebooks when you are first starting out.

To illustrate this even further, Figure 6-6 shows slicing and dicing in action with real content pieces.

Repurposing

Big rock content is great and the turkey dinner idea is economical and efficient, but what if you just don’t have the resources available to do either, or you need something done in a short period of time? Repurposing is a fantastic alternative if you are a small team or do not yet have the budget you need to create a robust content marketing plan. Repurposing is also an attractive content creation strategy for everyone else because even if you have a large marketing team, you can always learn new techniques.

The concept of repurposing is taking something you created and putting a new spin on it. The content you need already exists. Just think creatively about where to find it.

Here are a few examples:

• Blogs: Most businesses have a blog (I cover that more in Chapter 8). Take a blog post you wrote and create an ebook out of it. Stretch the content as far as you can by having your design team provide engaging visuals throughout. You might be surprised to learn you can easily take a 500-word blog post and turn it into a five- to six-page ebook! And voilà! You have a content asset for an email blast. Take a look at what I mean in Figure 6-7.

  

• Webinars and presentations: Many businesses are starting to include webinars as a regular part of the lead generation mix (see more about creating webinars in Chapter 14). When you produce a webinar, make sure to have a writer on hand to create a transcript of what the speaker says in his presentation. From there, take the transcript, reorganize it if needed, and create an ebook or report from it.
• Reports/ebooks: Take a report or an ebook you create and turn it into a visual asset such as an infographic or a visual slide deck using the same content. Reports lend themselves well to visual content because they tend to have a lot of great data points. Ebooks should tell a story, so take that story and craft a visual slide deck. Figure 6-8 shows an example of how something like this can be approached.

  

Rewriting and redesigning

Maybe you have some old content that you created a few years ago and aren’t sure whether to toss or save it. You know it looks old and dated, but the information in there is still good.

What can you do to bring it up to date? Here are some simple steps you can follow:

1. Do a content inventory.

   Look through what you already have and create a list or a spreadsheet listing content types, subjects, and dates published.

2. Do a read-through on older content.

   Read through each content piece that is more than a year old. Note: If you are in technology, this time frame may be more like six months if your space is rapidly changing.

3. Ask yourself key questions.

   After you read through the content, ask yourself what you would need to do in order to get it updated. Is the content still relevant? Do your leads and customers still talk about this subject? Are the stats included in the piece up-to-date?

4. Decide whether to keep or toss.

   Based on your read-through, you can determine whether you should keep or toss each piece. There are two good rules of thumb here. If your content piece is about an event in the past, toss it. If your content piece is a report from a previous year, toss it as well.

5. Rewrite as needed.

   Go through each asset and update copy related to industry trends, making sure you update all of the outdated stats and your company boiler (the About Us content that should appear on the last page and tells readers of your ebook who you are and what you do).

6. Consider a redesign: One of the best ways for a content piece to look fresh enough to perform well in lead generation campaigns is for it to look modern. A simple redesign works wonders.

For an example of how a content overhaul can improve an old and outdated piece of content, see Figure 6-9.

A word of caution. If you do decide to retire a content place and scrap it, check to see whether it is active in any paid programs, and always set up a redirect to route readers to a current page. After something is posted on the Internet, there are most likely live links out there, and you want to make sure everything gets redirected. You don’t want a lead who clicks on an old ebook to get an error page — make sure your lead always gets to your website.

Defining Content’s Relationship with Other Lead Generation Efforts

Many of your lead generation campaigns are fueled by promoting your content. Although this book goes into great detail on how to create campaigns using various lead generation tactics, it's important to first lay out the foundation and define content’s relationship with other lead generation efforts.

Email

Email is a great way to promote your content to your database. Consider creating email campaigns whenever you write an important new piece of content. Depending on your content cadence (how often you create and publish content), you may not want to send an email out for each piece of new content you develop, but you want to make sure you create dedicated campaigns to all of your larger pieces, particularly your big rock content pieces.

Figure 6-10 gives an example of what a content-specific email looks like.

Social media

Social media is a great place to promote all of your content, the big and the small pieces. Social media is also where you want to promote your visual pieces like infographics and visual slide decks. Videos also perform exceptionally well on social channels.

Schedule promotions spanning a few weeks for each piece of content. Make sure to create a custom image for Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. And the more creative your messaging, the more people will want to share and download your asset. Take a look at a few sample social promotions focusing on new content assets in Figure 6-11.

Website

Your website is the home base for all content pieces. Consider hosting all of your content in a resource section (I dive more into that in Chapter 7). Also, make sure you add new content pieces to your home page and on all applicable product or service pages. For home page promotion ideas, refer to Figure 6-12, which shows how new content can be merchandised for optimal conversion.

Blog

Each content piece should have at least one blog post created for lead generation purposes. Don’t be afraid to take content directly out of the ebook and include a few links and calls-to-action (CTAs) within the body of the blog. Also include a few images that reflect the content piece design. Figure 6-13 shows how a blog can be used to promote downloads for a new content piece. The CTA at the end asks the reader to download the content asset.

Webinars and presentations

After a new content piece is created, always consider a webinar, particularly for your big rock content pieces. Have a thought leader in your organization speak to the key points and create a deck. Often people who haven’t downloaded your asset will sign up for your webinar. From the webinar, you can get some nice qualified leads and promote additional downloads of your asset. Figure 6-14 shows an example of a larger content piece that was turned into a webinar and has done nicely as an additional asset.

Paid programs

You can choose among many paid programs to promote your content asset and drive new leads. With a paid program, you pay a third party to show your content piece to a targeted audience in the hopes of capturing more leads. Paid programs are a great way to get new leads into your database, as long as the cost of getting noticed is offset by the interest that is generated. Paid programs typically ask for names on a form in exchange for a download of something that intrigues the target audience. Include content assets in pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, banner ads, paid email programs, content syndication, and paid social campaigns.