Stretch your marketing budget in 2023: A proven formula for content marketing, lead generation, and awareness.

A proven formula for content marketing, lead generation, and awareness.

Posted on: March 9th, 2023

Let’s state the obvious. The job of a marketer in 2023 is tough. Chances are you are working with a conservative marketing budget, the size of your team may have been impacted, and the pressure is on to do more with less. Or, in many cases, you’re spreading and shifting your time and budget into new areas like AI-driven marketing. And of course, expectations are higher than ever to boost engagement, drive brand awareness, and fill the pipeline. What’s a marketer to do?

Squeeze that lemon

Here’s a proven formula for creating a valuable multi-pronged approach to content marketing, thought leadership, demand generation, awareness, and sales enablement. It’s a formula we’ve used for our own purposes as well as for our technology, financial services, and automotive clients. It’s a strategy that lets you:

• Engage with your community of customers and potential prospects at the front-end and back-end of the cycle.
• Produce meaningful insights for product management, product marketing, sales, channel marketing, and even technical support and customer success teams.
• Develop unique and ownable fodder for creating data driven messaging and positioning as well as marketing and sales factoids, data, and proof points.
• Produce new marketing content, sales materials, social content, and media news.

It starts with a hypothesis

The foundation of the approach is to define a hypothesis-style objective that you want to develop. This could be market trends, customer challenges, industry use cases, customer insights, or any other thought leadership style narrative. An example could be “We want to study how marketing organizations are using AI to influence their marketing programs” or “We want to research the challenges small IT organizations are facing moving to a zero-trust security model.” Once you know what you’re out to discover (and rationalized why this is important to your business and customers), then you can move on to the next stage.

Build a survey

The survey is the piece that enables you to build data points and collect the insights that will support your mission. When developing your survey questions and answers, think backwards. Think about what you need to discover or prove and craft questions and answers that will support those goals. Not all questions need to be for your marketing content, some can just be for internal usage. And of course, follow survey best practices about the number of questions, expected time to complete, wording, etc.

The results are in

With results in hand, start breaking down the data. Identify what’s valuable for your hypothesis that will support future marketing content, and what’s important for other teams like product management, sales, tech support, and customer care. Trust me, your teams will be clamoring to get their hands on the results, and each will find a particular set of results insightful on how it impacts their business unit.

Data-driven marketing content

Now you can get to the fun part, turning your survey results into thought leading marketing content. A great 1-2 combination is to create an infographic and a research style report. The infographic is great for general consumption that teases the findings. Typically, it’s a marketing offer you would openly share ungated, but there is no reason it can’t be used for lead generation. The research report is your chance to really go deep to establish yourself as an authority in your industry and develop ownable points of view and perspective.

Establish yourself as an industry leader with research reports, market insights, and customer trends.

You can tie the two together by having a call to action at the end of the infographic with a link to a landing page to read the report, which would typically be gated behind a lead generation form. Video is another great avenue to pursue if it’s within your means or budget. Depending on your organization’s in-house creative services team, these may be the only pieces you will need to work with an outside agency or freelance designer to produce.

Use infographics, video, and rich conent to tease the findings of your research.

Product marketing teams can also take the survey results and infuse them into customer-facing content like presentations, blogs, web copy, and sales enablement tools. What’s great is these types of materials are typically handled in-house by product marketing and do not require any 3rd party help or budget.

Now get the word out!

It’s time to put these efforts and content to work. You don’t just want to publish these results and hope people find them. You want to shout it from the rooftops.

Work with your PR team to develop a press release about the findings and your organization’s point of view on them. Getting your release out there on the newswire is an affordable way to spread the word and gain a lot of media pickup. If a formal release is out of the question, then craft a blog-style press release. Either way, be sure to have a link that drives readers back to your gated landing page where they can read the full report. But don’t stop with just a wire release or blog.

Have your PR team actively “pitch” the story to relevant trade publications, journalists, and analysts. Some editors may even want to schedule a podcast interview where your subject-matter-expert offers critical insights merged in with important brand messaging (i.e., why the survey results are important and how you can help). The goal here is to engage with them and have them write or produce their own story (versus just reposting the release), request an interview, and be independently talking about your news. Some editors may also want you to draft an educational thought leader feature article that goes more in-depth into why you did the survey and why you feel the results are compelling.

Enage with indsutry publications and websites for earned media.

To further build demand, convert the findings of the survey and report into slides and conduct a webinar. This becomes your opportunity to really engage with your community and actively share the results in a dialogue, where you can poll the audience and answer questions.

Promote your report with display ads and social media images.

Finally, use all these new nuggets of information and factoids to create a series of social media images, digital banners for paid advertising, and website graphics and hero images. This way you can tie everything together with a consistent set of messaging, creative, and call to actions.

Give it a try

With some fresh ideas and creative juices flowing, talk with your marketing and stakeholder teams to see how this approach could be used in your organization. If you want to brainstorm on ideas or learn more about how our team can help, drop us a line at hello@meritmile.com.