new e-book: ten content marketing killers -- how to survive and thrive by outsourcing your content...

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An Informative E-book from the Marketing White Paper Series Sponsored by

WinGreen Marketing Systems

Ten Content Marketing Killers

How to survive and thrive by outsourcing your content marketing

An Informative E-book from the Marketing White Paper Series Sponsored by

WinGreen Marketing Systems

http://www.wingreenmarketing.com


The Marketing White Paper Series from WinGreen Marketing Systems

Contents

Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 3

Business Process Outsourcing Applied to Marketing ............................................................. 3

Outsourced Content Marketing Grows in Popularity .............................................................. 4

Defining Outsourced Content Marketing .............................................................................. 5

Required Components of Content Marketing ........................................................................ 7

Content ....................................................................................................................... 7

Acquiring and Managing Software and Hardware Systems ................................................ 8

Campaign Management.................................................................................................10

Ten Reasons You Should Be Seriously Considering Outsourcing Your Content Marketing ........11

Features ..........................................................................................................................14

Benefits ...........................................................................................................................14

Conclusion .......................................................................................................................15

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Introduction

In this e-book, we’ll explore what outsourced content marketing is and why today’s marketing and sales leaders should consider taking advantage of it in their organizations. Spoiler alert: For starters, you can triple your inbound leads while reducing cost-per-lead by half.

We also will list the top ten content marketing killers. These are the ten things that cause in-house content marketing efforts to fall short or to fail outright. Some organizations choose to keep trying to overcome these killers, while others choose to cut right through to the real objective -- delivering quality sales leads -- by outsourcing to experts.

Business Process Outsourcing Applied to Marketing

Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) has become a common, mainstream strategy for both cost savings and process improvement in many types of business functions at companies of all sizes and in all industries. From BPO’s roots in

payroll and data processing outsourcing to emerging and powerful new BPO contract and scope structures focused on finance and accounting, human resources and recruiting, and customer support, the concept and reality of business process outsourcing is paying off for enlightened firms who effectively structure and manage BPO engagements.

One of the new and exciting forms of BPO is the outsourcing – or, as some call it, the “micro-sourcing” – of well-defined functions in marketing. For years, marketing organizations have outsourced public relations and advertising. Why? Because focused agencies can perform these functions better, faster, and cheaper. Now, as new marketing automation tools, content marketing strategies, and inbound marketing capabilities proliferate, senior marketing, sales, and financial executives have begun to look at lead generation and content marketing in a similar fashion. The question has become, “Why would we invest in people, processes, and technology to do something that is not our core competency, especially when there are agencies who can do it far more effectively and efficiently?”









The answer is a new outsourced marketing service designed to deliver better lead generation results at far lower costs. This new service is called content marketing BPO or outsourced content marketing.

Outsourced Content Marketing Grows in Popularity

The growth in demand for outsourced content marketing is based on two major shifts that have occurred since 2000 in how corporations buy and sell business-to-business products and services: (1) The emergence of Google and other Web based search engines has turned the buyer-seller relationship completely upside-down, as purchasers now begin the vast majority of their purchase evaluations and decision-making with a Google search and only engage the seller after most of the evaluation has been completed, and (2) the new content marketing techniques require significant investments in software, content production, web development, integration, customization and configuration of multiple software

applications and databases, and ongoing management and administration. This investment in both money and time overwhelms most individual companies, but large-scale providers of outsourced content marketing have already built commercial-scale software/content/manpower infrastructures and enjoy huge economies of scale.

Outsourced content marketing is paying off handsomely for those firms who have embraced the concept, planned their outsourcing transitions, and worked closely with their providers. A reasonable expectation for a mid-sized technology firm transitioning from conventional in-house lead generation to outsourced









content marketing would be 3X more leads at 50% lower cost-per-lead. The authors have seen examples of 10X more leads at 75% lower cost, and 8X more leads at 80% lower cost, for companies who transitioned to online content marketing.

As the U.S. economy begins to recover, and business-to-business purchasing starts to grow, the companies who will outgrow all others will be those who know who is buying, what they want, and how to reach them. The winners will be those who build and sustain healthy sales pipelines. Content marketing has proven to be one of the most effective tactics in support of pipeline growth. In addition, the strategy that multiplies the benefits of content marketing – more leads, lower cost leads, better quality leads – is the decision to outsource content marketing. Content marketing BPO is the quickest, most cost-effective way to achieve healthy pipelines rapidly and consistently.

Defining Outsourced Content Marketing

It’s instructive to take a minute to define what we mean by “outsourced content marketing”. First, let’s start with the most common techniques in the broader category of lead generation, of which content marketing is one component.

Online lead generation is the use of Internet technologies to reach potential buyers of one’s products or services. Some of the methods include:

• Content marketing

• Email marketing

• Inbound marketing

• Pay Per Click (PPC) online advertising

• Cost Per Thousand (CPM) online advertising

• Social media

• Newsletter marketing

• Search optimized web landing pages

Most savvy marketers use a mix of the methods available, with an emphasis on









email marketing, newsletter marketing, and inbound marketing (and perhaps an overemphasis on CPM advertising). Marketing through social media (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, Slideshare, LinkedIn, etc.) has seen extraordinary adoption and growth over the past few years, but still accounts for a very small percentage of new incoming sales leads when compared to content marketing, PPC, and email marketing.

Content marketing has become one of the most effective methods of generating new business leads. Here is our working definition:

Content marketing is a method of marketing in which educational, relevant, and useful content is created and promoted for the purpose of attracting and engaging interested parties from a defined target market of potential buyers.

Content may be in the form of articles, blog posts, white papers, webcasts, podcasts, videos, e-books, or newsletters.

When combined with email marketing, content marketing becomes an extremely powerful and cost-effective means of reaching prospective buyers and influencers and convincing them to

“raise their hands” and self-identify by registering to receive content.

Outsourced content marketing is defined as contracting with a third party or agency to conduct some or all of the functions of content marketing. Some of these agencies are simply platform providers, i.e. the client will produce content, manage lead generation campaigns, and procure their own target lists while paying to use the provider’s technology. Some are focused solely on building opt-in lists through search engine optimization (SEO) and inbound marketing. Others may provide syndicated or dedicated content, manage outbound campaigns, and deliver leads to their clients through portals or CRM applications. As with other business process outsourcing services, the range of scope and scale across the providers varies widely, allowing clients to outsource as much or as little as they wish.









Required Components of Content Marketing

Online content marketing requires the following:

Content

The creation of compelling marketing content is the starting point for content marketing. To attract potential buyers and influencers to your website where they’ll voluntarily self-identify, you’ll need to continually create new content. Content can be promoted and delivered in many forms. The most popular forms of marketing content for online promotion are:

• Articles

• Blog posts

• Research papers (primary or secondary research)

• White papers

• Books, booklets, pamphlets, e-books

• Podcasts

• Webcasts and web seminars (“webinars”)

• Video

Creating content requires the talents and skills of subject matter experts, writers, and copyeditors for written assets, and subject matter experts and experienced public speakers for rich media assets.









Acquiring and Managing Software and Hardware Systems

Performing content marketing requires the following software applications and databases:

Content repository – A place to store all marketing assets in digital format.

Mass email software – Commercial software used to “blast” a single email (e.g. an invitation to a webcast) to thousands or even millions of recipients in a single mailing. (Also required is the knowledge of laws regarding unsolicited email or “spam”, the ability to author emails that do not get caught in recipients’ spam filters, and the ability to write emails that promote content without sounding “salesy”.) The

authors use Predictive Response software and are authorized resellers and partners with the company.

Inbound Marketing Automation software -- Setting up inbound marketing requires a system to automate the functions of generating blog posts,

web pages, landing pages, and other features of inbound marketing. A leader in inbound marketing automation is Hubspot.

Custom web landing pages – Each campaign or outbound email

promotion requires its own “landing page” on the company’s website. The landing page should re-state the offer from the email, present a form for capturing the visitor’s contact information, and provide a clear path









that integrates with Salesforce CRM is Ringlead. This e-book’s sponsor, WinGreen Marketing Systems is an authorized reseller and partner of Ringlead.

Webcast hosting – Webcasts and webinars are extremely valuable components of a content marketing function. You will need to be able to run a webcast, allow hundreds of people to view it concurrently, and take registrations, comments, and questions for each webcast.

Web visitor tracking – One of the new and valuable tools in the marketer’s toolkit is the ability to see who visits your website, which pages they view, and for how long. Salespeople use web visitor tracking to gauge the interest of a new lead by seeing how much they’ve viewed on the website before calling them. There are many software products now available that can provide different views of website traffic, from the most rudimentary traffic reporting (e.g. Google Analytics) to showing company names of anonymous visitors (e.g. Leadlander) to showing individual names of known leads and prospects (e.g. WinGreen Marketing Systems) and the pages they visit.

for the visitor to learn more or take advantage of other offers. Ideally, the landing page will also contain customized software code that will automatically deliver the contact information from the form to a CRM or similar system.

CRM software – CRM software is required to capture and store all new leads as they are captured on the landing pages. Furthermore, CRM provides the foundation not only for capturing new leads from content marketing, but for providing tools and workflow for more effectively advancing those leads to successful sales. Procuring and setting up a CRM system requires expertise in the company’s marketing and sales practices, plus database configuration, workflow customization, report setup, and ongoing administration. The leading cloud based CRM vendor is Salesforce.com.

De-duplication software – The maintenance of an accurate, “clean” database of leads, contacts, opportunities, email addresses, etc. is critical to the success of any content marketing effort. You’ll need to acquire, configure, run, and administer commercial software for both bulk and real-time de-duplication. A terrific tool









Lead Scoring – Software that assigns scores and ranks to new and repeat leads and prospects allows salespeople to prioritize their call-downs and make most productive use of their selling hours.

Lead Nurturing –About 70% of new, interested leads generated through lead generation efforts are discarded by sales people because they do not have “current” needs or interests. (This is of course what we’ve taught our sales professionals to do for years: Qualify on the basis of budget, authority, need, and time. Any lead with a purchase timeframe of more than six months away is automatically disqualified.) New technology allows sales and marketing to work together to set up automated “drip emails” to nurture longer term leads until they’re ready to make purchase decisions. It’s important to integrate lead nurturing automation software directly into your CRM and lead generation systems so that salespeople can simply click a “Nurture” button instead of discarding the lead altogether.

Campaign Management

Effective content marketing must be planned, developed, and executed reliably and consistently. You’ll need to set up regularly scheduled campaigns to promote your content to your targets via email. Campaign management requires tracking and reporting tools that allow you to select your content, create your offer email with click-through links, link to your campaign landing page, manage and select email lists, launch your email blast, and track results. You’ll need an experienced marketing professional to set up and execute all campaigns, acquire content, work with the webmaster to create HTML emails and custom landing pages, and integrate campaign results and incoming new leads with CRM and salesforce automation systems. Running effective content marketing campaigns also requires project management skills and the ability to keep all contributors on schedule.

The decision to outsource all or some of the functions of content marketing should be based upon your company’s capabilities in each of the areas listed above, and the cost of those capabilities.









Ten Reasons You Should Be Seriously Considering Outsourcing Your Content Marketing

Here are the top ten content marketing killers. As a content marketing agency, we see the following shortcomings in more than 90% of the companies we engage. When these obstacles are present in your organization -- and we’re betting that you, the reader, can identify with most if not all of them -- you should begin to seriously consider outsourcing your content marketing.

1. You probably can’t do it yourself (even though you know what it is, what systems you need, and what the components are).

2. You don’t have the software platform.

3. Even if you acquire the software, you









probably don’t know how to quickly deploy cross-platform integration and the required degree of automation.

4. You can’t generate enough content to sustain multiple campaigns per month, every month of every year.

5. Your marketing people know how to write, but don’t have domain or technology depth to create compelling content.

6. Your domain or technology experts know all about your products, your technologies, and how your customers use them, but aren’t capable writers.

7. It’s no one’s job to author, copyedit, and set up 30+ white papers, 50+ original articles, and 20+ webcasts per year. (Corollary: Do you really want your top technical people spending up to 20% of their time writing marketing content?)

8. The marketing staff gets pulled in many different directions throughout the year. “Fire drills” interrupt the schedules for content marketing campaigns.

9. You probably don’t have access to 100,000 to 1,000,000 email addresses from your target market, and you probably don’t know how to find them.

10. The modern techniques of online content marketing are still not taught in business schools or marketing curricula. There are few individuals available in the job market with the required experience and know-how to build and run a complete “system of content marketing”. As a result, you have little resource to attack the previous nine items, and you’re faced with on-the-job training someone to build your system and methods for you.









Even if you can overcome these ten content marketing killers, you’ll still face significant effort and expense in building a content marketing capability. As you begin to implement systems and processes, you find that you encounter more and more challenges at the next levels of detail.

With so much time, cost, risk, and lack of know-how between you and the sales pipeline objectives you hope to achieve through content marketing, why would you want to burden your organization with suboptimal in-house systems and headcount? The justification for outsourcing content marketing is a very easy one. Content marketing BPO delivers the irresistible combination of better results and lower costs.

The table below summarizes the features and benefits of outsourced content marketing.









Features BenefitsComprehensive, outsourced content marketing • Significant cost savings (25% to 50% lower

cost than in-house content marketing; 50% to 80% less cost than in-house conventional lead generation)

• See immediate results. No ramp-up

• Avoid hiring and training

• Avoid software and hardware investment, con-figuration, administration

• Fixed monthly retainer. No variable costs.

• Flexibility. Scale up or down as needed.

Content marketing agency creates all content • No more slipped schedules

• No more fire drills

• No more mad scrambles for content

Content marketing agency uses its own software platform

• No IT or software investment required

• Pre-configured, ready to go

• Massively scalable, infinitely flexible

Automated lead capture and real-time distribution to designated salespeople

• Save time and labor in uploading and download-ing contact information

Sales enablement tools • CRM provides “single view of the truth” for leads, prospects, contacts, and customers

• SFA provides automation to manage sales work-flow

Automated lead nurturing • Keep prospects alive and “warm” until they’re ready to purchase

Management views, dashboards, reporting • Accurate forecasts

• Insight to sales activities and drivers

• Measureable marketing









Content marketing has become an indispensable tactic in the arsenal of today’s marketers. Online content marketing reaches more potential buyers, more quickly, and at lower cost than conventional direct mail or other traditional marketing techniques, and addresses the change in the buyer-seller relationship that has created the need for marketers to entice target buyers to “opt in” or “self identify” themselves to the process of being sold products or services.

However, because online content marketing is in its infancy, many challenges face the marketing and sales professionals who want the benefits of this marketing method. Software and technology platforms for managing campaigns, mass emailing in bulk, and automating lead and contact data capture are expensive and difficult to integrate with each other. Content marketing, by its very definition, requires a steady input of content, yet most organizations don’t have the capacity, talent, or focus to author enough content to fuel the marketing engine on a consistent basis. Finally, content marketing systems and methods are not yet taught in college curricula, and employees with breadth and depth of experience in online content marketing are scarce.

These challenges have led to the emergence of a new form of business process outsourcing, called outsourced content marketing or content marketing BPO. Benefits include significantly higher volumes of incoming new prospects, much lower cost per lead, and better conversion rates due to higher quality, self-identifying leads.

Conclusion









WinGreen Marketing Systems is a content marketing agency specializing in inbound marketing, outbound marketing, and high-impact lead gen-eration programs for technology companies in the United States and Canada. Headquartered in Downingtown, PA, the company was founded in 2009, and is a business partner of Salesforce.com, Microsoft, Ringlead Inc., and Predictive Response.

WinGreen’s content marketing services include authoring and publishing of client-branded content in all digital forms, including white papers, e-books, articles, blog posts, social media posts, webcasts, videos, and podcasts. WinGreen delivers compel-ling content that attracts target buyers and influencers across the entire spectrum of buyer personas and buying phases.

The company’s inbound marketing services utilize WinGreen-authored content in its many forms to attract and engage target buyers and influencers to its clients’ websites.

WinGreen uses Hubspot’s world-leading inbound marketing automation to manage content, campaigns, and analytics. The combination of content published by WinGreen and inbound marketing supported by Hubspot tools is unbeatable for building prospect pipeline and revenue growth.

WinGreen also provides outbound content marketing services for predictable, reliable, cost-effective lead generation. In addition to author-ing all required content, WinGreen also builds target email databases, delivers mass email marketing, plans and executes regularly scheduled campaigns, and utilizes its own commercial-grade, cloud software infrastructure for all marketing automation. WinGreen’s outbound content marketing is the perfect way to get immediate lead generation results while building long-term inbound marketing engagement.

Contact WinGreen at www.wingreenmarketing.com/contact-us or call (650) LEAD GEN (650-532-3436). Learn more at www.wingreenmarketing.com.

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