If there’s one thing every technology solutions and services company needs, it’s leads.
Business-to-business service providers can have notoriously long consideration phases built into their sales funnel, and there’s only so much they can do to expedite the cycle.
That’s why it’s so important to have a constant stream of marketing- and sales-qualified leads. If that pipeline starts to run dry, a revenue drought is in the forecast.
In 2019, our client, a global software solutions and IT services provider, came to us on a similar pretense.
Here’s their story:
The mission: Fill the funnel
We had to work backwards from the ultimate goal here, which was to increase inbound leads (both MQL and SQL).
One of the best ways to generate inbound leads is to get more eyes on your conversion landing pages. And for that, you need site traffic.
To facilitate that traffic, we focused first on increasing the number of users visiting the company’s blog.
Specifically, we created a list of commercially relevant keywords – that is, keywords with strong monthly search volume and intent tied to our client’s products and services.
We took those keywords and created what we call Search Performance Briefs (SPBs). These proprietary resources essentially reverse-engineer the top-ranking pages for a specific keyword. The goal is to figure out exactly what topics and themes are prevalent within the content on page 1 of SERPs.
Once created, our strategist passed the SPBs along to the content writer assigned to the account. The scribes worked their magic and transformed the insights into blog content that has a strong chance of performing well in search results.
In theory, this blog content would help bring in more traffic by way of ranking on organic search. From there, our client’s conversion landing pages would help capture more leads. But to make sure that actually happened, we supported those conversion efforts by creating downloadable case studies and white papers that would turn some of the inbound users into leads.
The outcome: Exactly what we’d hoped for
In the span of about 12 months, we helped our client increase the number of keywords they rank for in the top-3 search positions by 84%.
As a result, they saw a 20% increase in organic page views on the blog year-over-year.
Most importantly, though – and the reason we did all of this – our client saw a 51% increase in organic contact form submissions.
The lesson: Leads will follow great content
At the end of the day, most of our work for this particular client was content creation.
However, that content was guided by keyword research and SPBs that our consulting team developed to ensure that it would rank well in search.
We knew that if we could improve rankings and drive more traffic to the site, we were halfway to improving lead generation.
From there, it was just a matter of getting visitors to provide their email address in exchange for more great content. Having high-value marketing collateral like white papers and case studies supported that goal.
And that is, more or less, content marketing in a nutshell.
