The Funnelholic

I just finished a webinar last week entitled; At Last, the Secret to Generating Leads with Content Syndication Revealed. You can watch it here if you missed.

In the spirit of Ardath Albee’s (@ardath 421) “Rule of 5,” which states that you should be able to create at least 5 pieces of content for every idea, here is my blog post on the topic of generating leads via content syndication.

First, let’s make sure we are clear what I’m talking about:

→ Step 1: It starts with your digital content (i.e., white papers, webinars, etc) that someone would “pay” for with a registration
→ Step 2: You syndicate, or distribute that content across the Web on third party, relevant sites to maximize circulation
→ Step 3: The publishers of the sites send you the leads generated from your content. Typically, for a pay-for-performance basis.

There are two buzzwords on the marketing blogosphere circuit that I want to make sure I position with regards to content syndication:

1. Content Marketing – The way content marketing is discussed today relates to your overall content strategy.  In other words, creating content for the different personas you are trying to sell to and their different stages in the buying process. When we talk about content with regards to content syndication and generating leads, we are really focused on content to get the person to raise their hand versus content focused on nurturing a prospect through the buying cycle.
2. Inbound Marketing – Everyone right now is talking about inbound marketing, this wonderful drug that every marketer should strive for. Here is an important thing to consider:  content syndication IS inbound marketing. Most people think of inbound marketing as solely the domain of driving people to your landing pages, with content syndication you are expanding your reach to a much greater audience. Furthermore, the publisher takes the risk of marketing your content. The publisher optimizes their landing pages, drives campaigns to your content, and only gets paid when they deliver a lead. This allows marketers to forecast their CPL costs fairly precisely.

There are three camps in the content syndication world:

1. The lead hound – These are people who have figured out how to convert content syndication and are pretty close to buying every lead they can on the market.
2. The “I have tried and can’t make it work” marketer – Content syndication can be difficult for folks.  Honestly, most people that can’t make it work don’t have the right back-end processes, such as lead nurturing or lead qualification, to convert these leads. Or put another way, they probably passed content syndication leads directly to the sales team.  Also, unrealistic expectations can doom you as well.
3. The neophyte – Haven’t tried it yet.

Now, that I’ve thoroughly set the table, here are my 7 tips for content syndication success:

1. Will it play in Peoria? –  You need to create content that converts — remember, buyers today are busy, distracted with lots of choices on what they choose to consume.  Your approach to content syndication should be that of a movie studio trying to get a big, wide opening weekend.  Understand what the buyers want when they are downloading content: research that helps them do their job. You can’t just put your data sheet out there on the internet.  (There is more, but that would be another blog post).
2. If you’re not testing, you’re not trying – Content syndication pros always set aside budget to test new channels and publishers.  It’s one of those things,-you can “analyze” their media kit all you want.  You won’t know until you try.
3. Diversify your portfolio – Create relationships with a number of online media partners and create redundancy. The buyers are everywhere on the internet, you need to be too.
4. Treat others you want to be treated, and then everyone wins – Make online media companies your partners versus just vendors.  If you share data and feedback and create a true supplier-manufacturer relationship, you can create optimized, enduring programs.  The opposite of this is a contentious relationship where both sides are defensive and no one gets better.
5. Content Syndication is the first conversation not the last – This is the expectation factor.  Some will have near-term projects, but a large majority will become buyers over time.  If you haven’t heard of lead nurturing, you aren’t reading marketing blogs (its literally all some of us talk about).  But seriously, feeding content syndication into lead nurturing is really effective.  If you are setting expectations within the organization that you are going to get all these near-term projects from content syndication, you will probably fail(sorry, it’s the truth).
6. The ultimate lead gen FAIL: Passing content syndication leads directly to sales – Well, don’t do it.  This is a major failure point.  Content syndication is NOT to be consumed by bag-carrying field reps. Instead, they should be sifted through a lead management process to determine who is ready to talk to sales.  Remember, the “I have tried and can’t make it work” marketer above, this is the most common symptom.
7. Forget campaigns, build a factory – The real content syndication lead machines are buying leads all year.  They have built the processes to convert them and they are just feeding the beast.  Coming in-and-out for small, specific campaigns means you will not be consistently feeding the top of the funnel.

I got the band back together: Tom Scearce (aka @TLOTL) and Chris Jablonski (aka @cjablonski). These are my partners in crime when creating long(er) list posts, and they certainly helped me here. We have put together a list of 26 reasons your leads are converting, and, as usual, we had some fun with it.

Before you read on, I want to make one point. There is typically one major issue to overall lead conversion: lack of lead management, also known as passing raw leads/MQLs directly to sales reps. I have yet to find an organization with legit lead management processes that can’t convert leads. They can convert co-reg, content syndication, you name it — because they have built an always-on lead management process to convert leads or inquiries into qualified leads.

One other point, this assumes you are producing at least reasonable leads/inquiries/MQLs.

With that in mind, here are the 25 reasons your leads aren’t converting:

1. You’re passing them directly to the sales team without an intermediate step or two (i.e., lead development or lead nurturing).
2. You don’t have dedicated resources (i.e., lead development or an inside sales team) connecting with and qualifying leads.
3. You haven’t tried to optimize what the lead development team is doing to convert your leads.
4. You aren’t leveraging scoring.
5. You aren’t leveraging nurturing.
6. You haven’t created a unified lead definition with the sales team (the term “unified lead definition” was coined by Brian Carroll @brianjcarroll).
7. You don’t have an SLA with your sales reps for what they guarantee they will do when you pass them a qualified lead.
8. Sales doesn’t care about you anymore and won’t follow up on anything you send.
9. You’re considering the wrong metrics when looking for optimization.
10. You don’t look at metrics at all.
11. You look at too many metrics.
12. You think your job is to get the most leads and the lowest CPL (cost per lead).  Right answer: your job is to create the highest conversion at the most efficient CPO (cost per opportunity).
13. You don’t have “conversations”— optimization sessions with your lead vendors.
14. You don’t have “conversations” — optimization sessions with the sales team.
15. You dump leads from different sources into an identical lead development path (@cjablonski).
16. Your shotgun marketing approach gives you a lot of quantity at the expense of quality (@cjablonski).
17. Sales disqualifies leads because they deem the leads too early in the sales cycle (@cjablonski).
18. Your value proposition is diluted, unreinforced, or at worst, forgotten as the prospect moves from inquiry through nurturing to sales follow-up (@cjablonski).
19. Marketing has no process for filtering raw inquiries and disqualifying those that don’t fit (at least closely) the ideal customer profile (@cjablonski).
20. Your sales team already has so many good leads on its plate, and sales reps would rather close those leads than sift through your mixed bag of suspects and prospects (@tlotl).
21. Your leads are going to inbound contact-center sales reps, and answering the ringing phone is always more important than calling out on your Web-captured “handraiser” leads (@tlotl).
22. Your leads were captured at a trade show two months ago and haven’t been nurtured or called since (@tlotl).
23. The first 100 leads tagged with campaign code “XYZ” were unreachable, unqualified or not ready to talk to a sales rep, and now any lead tagged with that campaign code is effectively blacklisted in the sales team (@tlotl).
24. You haven’t educated your leads with vendor-agnostic, third-party-sourced content that validates your solution in the marketplace (@tlotl).
25. You’ve purchased a targeted list of contacts or names, didn’t market to them and delivered them to sales — under the (false) pretense that they are actually leads (@tlotl).
26. Your leads are great leads, but they’re best suited for a product that your sales team is not properly trained, compensated or experienced enough to qualify. For example, your sales team is world class at selling a point solution, but you’ve delivered them (expensive) leads for a bundled offering (@tlotl).

Are there more?  We’d love to hear yours.

Here we are again. If you missed Part I, make sure to read it first. Once again, before we begin, I need to introduce the members of the band:

On the guitar, Tom Scearce (@TLOTL), and on the electric keyboard, Chris Jablonski (@cjablonski).

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Drumroll, please … Another ambitious post here: The Marketing Hipster Dictionary. When we started, I just wanted to create a post with some definitions of terms used in this blog and in the marketing space in general. Then we started having fun with some “originals.”

Before I go on, I must introduce my band. (Side note: I love when the lead singer introduces the band at concerts. I don’t know what it is — but I get excited.) On the guitar: Tom Scearce (@TLOTL). Tom is a brilliant marketer who understands marketing from brand to process. Follow him on Twitter. And on the electric keyboard: Chris Jablonski (@cjablonski). Chris can do anything. Period. And he does do everything, but he is not a dilettante. He does them all really well.

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