A Look Behind The Scenes At The Construction Of A Successful Lead Nurturing Content Campaign
- Written by Demand Gen Report Team
- Published in DemandGen Reports
Creating content for nurturing campaigns is a challenge even for season marketers, therefore any case studies outlining success in this area a hot commodity. A recent webinar, hosted by the B2B Lead Roundtable blog featured ECI Telecom’s Associate VP of Marketing Programs Michelle Mogelson Levy, sharing a great nurturing roadmap for marketers.
The webinar, titled “How ECI Telecom Developed a Content-Marketing Program from Concept to Completion and the Surprising Results,” explored the success the company had it with its lead nurturing campaign.
While ECI was already having success marketing to its targeted database of prospects, Levy pointed out that the company was looking to generate more leads in new markets for its broader base of technology solutions.
To achieve this, the company developed non-segmented content and molded it into a five-step automated nurturing program based on behavioral triggers -- including opting-in via web forms and attending online and offline events.
The results of the campaign were tremendously successful with a 78% average open rate (compared to 33% for the company’s traditional standalone campaigns) and 23% post-click conversion rate (compared to 11% for non-nurture campaigns).
Levy explained that ECI’s primary goal for the nurturing campaign was to focus on the buyers’ journey and create personalized, highly segmented campaigns that would appeal to several markets. “Our goal here was to really define how we were going to initiate the dialogue, provide value and establish ourselves as a value player in this wide-spanned industry,” Levy said. During the webinar, Levy highlighted three easy-to-follow steps that ECI developed for their “challenge campaign.” These three questions serve as a great roadmap for other marketers to build content-based nurture campaigns and hopefully replicate ECI’s success.
What do I need? For ECI, it was to push the educational stage and learning process for potential buyers. Since prospects are hesitant to believe vendors’ “words of wisdom,” their goal was to find third-party sources, analysts and industry professionals willing to share content that gave insight to a business trend or issue.
What do I have? For ECI, it was necessary to do an audit of their content based on persona, value to the persona, relevance and overall influence. The company executed a 10-month alignment of their global matrix organization to the buyers’ journey so their team understood and could define each stage -- education, solution, and vendor selection -- and the specific personas and communication strategies that coincided with each.
How do I fill the gap? ECI contacted several customers to see who their sources of choice were to understanding industry issues and learning about new business trends. Due to lack of internal content resources, the company purchased market research and content from companies like Yankee Group, Ovum and Heavy Reading to formulate and fuel a campaign that would deliver value to their target market.
In the end, Levy stressed that understanding your target market, their wants and needs is critical to proving you’re a valuable asset to an industry and that you can provide not only insight to business issues and trends, but can provide a solution.
“The elements of understanding your buyers’ journey, and understanding the importance of delivering the right content to the right audience at the right time is critical,” Levy said. “That’s what is really going to enable you to increase conversion rates and increase the amount of marketing qualified leads that you can then push to sales.”