Tactic 1: Operation Land Grab

In Chapter 15, we helped you accelerate your blog development volume with an Insights Committee and shrink production velocity using “Window Time.” These simple but effective blog accelerators could allow your blogs to be published from once a week to once a day and beyond. Your company is now becoming a beacon of intellectual property, and companies that share your industry space are keen to leverage your intellectual property machine as a guest blogger. There will be very few companies in your industry that can supply themselves with enough great insights and will seek external guest contributors. Progressive marketers at these companies will also recognize the power of third-party thought leadership on their blog to provide greater credibility.

Operation Land Grab is like a trip into the Wild West. During the Gold Rush, prospectors raced westward to stake a claim to new land. These prospectors captured new land for free by putting in hard work, time, and effort rather than money. Using this analogy, there are companies in your industry (e.g., consulting services, technology products, industry analysts, etc.) that have the land (i.e., new leads not in your pipeline) that your sales team wants to attract. All you need to do is capture this land. Using your high volume of insights, you will develop a scheduled system to guest blog on the companies' websites that will drive their database of leads into your sales pipeline. How does this work?

1. Develop a list of potential lead owners (companies and their websites).
2. Contact these lead owners about their guest blogging schedules.
3. Create a content calendar just for Operation Land Grab.
4. Communicate the calendar and new volume demands to the Insights Committee.
5. Keep the Insights Committee on schedule to create these guest blogs
6. Ensure every guest blog has your call to action back to your lead capturing insight (such as an ebook).

I can't stress the last part enough. Remember that insights, like blogs, are consumed in a silo. You must drive their leads into your marketing automation system! Sales for Life has more than 30 guest-blogging partners at the time of this publication. We had set a goal to guest blog every business day so that we had a third-party blog post published somewhere in the world each business day. We found that while we have more than 30 partners, five or so will drive 80 percent of the lead flow. With no surprise, these are the largest publications that have hundreds of thousands, even millions, of readers. That doesn't mean we would abandon the small company blog. Remember, if that website attracted one lead, and that one lead was hyper-qualified and became a buyer, that cost-of-customer acquisition would still be very, very cheap.

Tactic 2: Event Lead Exchanges

Webinars and virtual summits have been an incredible lead-generation source for our business. The secret sauce: It's not really about the content in the webinar. Of course, the webinar needs to be compelling, but the real value of a webinar is massive acceleration of new leads. This is accomplished by inviting guest panelists and promotional partners into the event. The panelist will be part of the presentation during the event and he or she will be responsible for promoting the event just like you will. If you've chosen your panelists correctly, they will provide high-octane volumes of net new leads into your system. But often forgotten are the promotional partners for your event. They are similar to sponsors, except rather than exchanging money, you will exchange leads.

As a best practice, we build promotional packages for our panelist and promotional partners that outline social post schedules, email templates, and so on. Within that promotional package, we outline the ideal customer profile (ICP) that we'd like to attract for the event. Clarity is key! What is the size, industry, and region that our promotional partner needs to fuel new leads. We then strike a deal with that partner on an exchange, starting at 1:1, and accelerating to 5:1 for virtual summits where there are thousands of leads created. For every new lead a promotional partner places into your CRM, you'll populate their CRM with an equally valuable lead that they don't currently have. This is the ultimate form of co-opetition. All of a sudden, for larger webinars and virtual summits, you're adding hundreds or perhaps thousands of new ideal buyers into your CRM to begin the nurturing process. Within weeks or months, those ICPs will consume your insights, and a portion will develop into marketing or sales-qualified leads. This is the ultimate fishing with a net to provide fuel for your sales development representatives (SDRs) to qualify new leads.

Tactic 3: Repurpose and Recycle Your Top 10 Percent

Hubspot, a leading marketing automation platform and a company I believe is always on the forefront of digital content marketing, has some incredible analytics from its own blog: “92% of their leads come from blog posts over 30 days old. 30 blog posts (0.5% of their blog database) represents 46% of all their leads!”¹

That doesn't mean you can abandon creating a high volume of new insights. You need to first achieve search engine optimization (SEO) power over your competitors. Next, you need enough data points to understand which insights are your best performers. Once you've established this baseline, you'll quickly recognize the Pareto Law within your own insights—80 percent of their consumption and conversion will come from 20 percent of the insights. But which insights are the productive ones?

Scaling Social Selling Mastery is about shrinking the velocity required to create a new asset, so the time-management game starts to work in your favor. This is why we love to repurpose and recycle techniques. The most important value to repurpose and recycle is that you're not starting the SEO clock from 0, as your top assets already have hundreds or thousands of views. These assets have become key educational pieces for your buyers, and your sales team likes sharing them. Now, you're only going to build on the SEO value that's been established, perhaps helping this insight rank number one on Google.

Here are steps you can follow to help accelerate your repurpose-and-recycle system:

1. Identify the top blogs, ebooks, infographics, and so on based on SEO (traffic, clicks, conversion).
2. Run the copy through Google Analytics for keywords. Can you spike the SEO by adding new keywords that are hot in your market?
3. Cut the insight and paste it into your new insights template. Are there key ingredients missing, like a call to action or bold H1 headlines that perform better in Google?
4. Add updated statistics, stories, images, and metadata to refresh the insight.
5. Change the call to action to drive to a new and better performing next step.
6. Adjust the insight's date of publication to reflect today's date.

The last step is a lesson in psychology. Both your buyers and your sales team will gravitate toward the new. When you do a Google search, how much does the publish date play into your clicking? We as consumers always want the latest information. By adjusting the date of publication for this article, you'll have sales professionals begin leveraging the insight because it's fresh, and you'll have the loyalist sales professionals who use the insight because it's effective.

At Sales for Life, we're refreshing our top 10 percent performing insights every quarter. Our team gathers the data and ensures we're polishing a mixture of:

1. Top performers by eyeballs (clicks and shares). This helps with brand awareness.
2. Top performers by conversion, focusing on lead generation.
3. Make sure we're polishing a mixture of asset types, and not allowing specific types like ebooks to grow too stale.