Ebook Overload: Exploring Other Content Types that Drive ROI as presented by Jay Acunzo, whom had experience with both HubSpot and Google. He now is the Director of Platform and Community at NextView Ventures consults, but also runs the sites SorryforMarketing.com and ViewFromSeed.com.
DESCRIPTION: Ebooks are perhaps the most saturated tactic to drive leads and prove the ROI of content. As audiences grow tired of the format and marketers try to squeeze out more results, it’s time to examine the content “offer” more deeply and figure out what’s next.
TAKE-AWAYS:
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What makes an effective content offer in general
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Other types of content besides ebooks that drive ROI (with data and examples)
- The playbook that puts this content to work building audience for your company
CONTENT MARKETING WORLD SESSION RECAP:
Diminishing ROI on Ebooks
While at HubSpot, leads started to dry up. Results started trending lower. Was it a content issue? Was there enough content coming out? It turned out that it was a “noisy niche that was drying up”. So the problem turned out to be that HubSpot wasn’t being creative enough. They had beat ebooks to death and the market was oversaturated. He ran a NetPromoter survey to find out whether or not a user would recommend HubSpot content.
They stopped using some stock photos in some of the their ebooks and engagement on those ebooks increased significantly. Their NPS sentiment went up from 33 to 52.
HubSpot’s new approach was “Save your audience time/or money” and “CREATIVITY” is key to staying fresh.
Framework + Process
Great B2B Content Marketing removes the same barriers as your product does.
B2B Examples
Give away assets — Hubspot started to look at what their product offers and gave away assets or sets of assets:
- Buttons (e.g. http://www.hubspot.com/products/calls-to-action)
- Workbooks: (e.g. http://offers.hubspot.com/social-prospecting-workbook)
- Blog about creativity: (e.g. http://www.impactbnd.com/blog-title-generator/blogabout)
- Content Communities (GrowthHackers, Inbound.org, Union Square Ventures)
- Inbound.org has 30K registered users
- Inbound.org has 80K visitors
- Inbound.org has 250 job applicants
- Templates: (viewfromseed.com) were super powerful — lots of downloads and views.
- Data 1-Sheeter: @Insight Squared used data (2200+ leads in first month, 75% visit-to-lead conversion)
- Project X-Rays: Give the v1 and v2 of a certain project. Insight into what has worked and what hasn’t with a campaign.
Distribution Playbook to Drive ROI
Flexible, sustainable playbook. You can reuse/rely on the same assets. A successful content idea can be repurposed over and over and over in different spaces and formats.
At the foundation is a the creativity of writers — the caveat is that format nor robots can replace creative writers. Think about creativity in terms of ROI — where do conversions happen? Where does ROI happen? Conversions happen after the click. It’s all about resonance, not just reach.
