CXL - $680k with valuable gated content

Gated content that guides readers to solve a crucial challenge is a known catalyst for lead gen.

Erin Balsa leveraged this to drive $680k in attributable revenue. She's sharing how she did it today.

We've also got exciting news on GA4: yes, the days of Universal Analytics are over, but we got your back with our upcoming new course.

Keep reading to learn what's going on in the CXL community and what other marketers are achieving with our trainings.

TODAY'S HOST

Erin Balsa, Founder @ Haus of Bold

Original research is a core piece of every content strategy I build for my B2B startup clients, and that includes players like Intellum and Uniphore.

Just last week, an EVP of Revenue used proprietary data to wow the crowd on stage at an industry event—and we'll email the upcoming research report to attendees and booth visitors.

I fell in love with research reports when I worked as a Marketing Director at The Predictive Index. Back then, we published four reports per year and repurposed them across different channels.

Publishing proprietary industry research helped us to:

Build authority, thought leadership, and trust, even in a saturated market
Generate request demo hand raiser leads
Re-engage cold prospects
Get mentioned in The New York Times, Forbes, and Inc
Drive revenue (with one report driving $680k in attributable revenue)

Some marketers think reports work solely to convert traffic to leads. And yeah, they do. But I've also had great luck using reports to re-engage cold leads.

If you want to understand how prospects engage with these reports, start looking at actual user journeys. Here's an example:

One customer had read our blogs, subscribed to our newsletter, and created a free account within our interactive learning center. After poking around in there, she went cold.

When our "The Impact of Behavioral Drives in a Remote Workplace" report went live, we launched a retargeting campaign in addition to our organic distribution efforts.

The customer clicked on the ad, downloaded the report, returned to our learning center, completed a course, and then requested a demo. The report ultimately drove $680k in revenue.

People still ask me about this report almost three years after it was published. Here's why it performed well:

It was timely. Many of our clients and prospects were managing remote employees for the first time ever.
It was unique. Lots of companies were publishing remote work reports in 2020. To stand out from the crowd, we surveyed our user base to tell a unique story about how behavioral drives affect employee feelings toward remote work.
It was helpful. Not only did we provide data insights, but we also provided actionable tips that readers (mostly business leaders) could implement right away.
It showed product value. Prospects saw a clear use case for buying a tool that could help them uncover employee behavioral drives so that they could tailor the way they manage remote employees to get better results. Customers who purchased the Hire module saw the value in buying Inspire, too.

The report was also fuel for sales enablement and partner enablement—especially when selling to a sophisticated audience of subject matter experts and senior leaders. Cold outreach gets easier when you're giving someone something of value rather than asking them to hop on a call with you.

Gated content (templates, guides, or reports like this one) is a powerful tool for lead generation. While I don't recommend sharing a long-form report in a cold outreach email, sending an executive summary or a one-pager with high-level messaging and 2-3 key findings can deliver lots of value and open the door to a conversation.

Use copywriting techniques (like the PAS framework) when deciding how to share key information, and offer unrivaled value to generate high-intent leads.

Connect with Erin on LinkedIn.

Universal Analytics is over: get ready for the Google Analytics 4 course

The days of Universal Analytics are over. We've worked with GA4 expert Fred Pike to produce the one and only GA4 course you need.

Join the waitlist for the course now. In the meanwhile, you can get ahead with some pre-reading.

Read the guide to Google Analytics 4 here.

Offering valuable gated content: demand gen vs lead gen

Erin Balsa's report is a perfect example of gated content that operates two levers that contribute to growth:

Number of new leads generated (measured as a monthly quantity)
Quality of new leads generated (typically measured with a conversion metric).

To influence the first, lead gen efforts have to present a compelling offer. Put yourself in the shoes of the customer and ask, “Would this be worth handing over my email address?”

To influence the second, lead gen content should be targeted toward bottom-of-funnel prospects. Step into those shoes again and ask, “How close am I to purchasing?”

To compete with high-quality, free content, your reports should guide readers through actionable, proven strategies for solving a crucial challenge.

Now, should you pump out "state of the industry" lead magnets, or tap into existing demand to build a pipeline of high-intent leads?

Read the entire article.

Unpopular opinion: Technical skill is not enough

Technical skill is not enough.

In the first decade of your career, your ability to outperform your internal peers and external competitors in a specific marketing discipline (SEO, CRO, PPC, whatever) is the way to get ahead.

Delivering measurably improved performance in a specialism impresses, gets you that promotion and fuels business growth.

It’s what brings many people to CXL: expert, technical training based on the latest best practice. So it matters. But it isn’t enough.

It’s not enough to grow into a marketing or business leader, it’s not enough to take your agency up a league, it’s not enough to pull significantly ahead of the competition in a sustainable way, and it’s definitely not enough to be taken seriously as a C-suite contender.

To level up, whatever your specialism, you need to:

Understand your customer deeply, in a variety of ways.
Understand your competitors’ positioning, business, and marketing strategy.
Know how to position a brand, a product, or an offer in a competitive marketplace.
Understand how to allocate budget and resources across specialisms and drive better results across all of them through coordination and strategic (sometimes non-revenue focused) direction.

Each of our experts, whatever their specialization, understands that technical skill is there to enable the delivery of a big business vision: a killer idea. Without that, even a 1000% uplift in a key metric isn’t sustainable.

That’s why there’s a strategic element to each and every one of our 90+ courses. Because we’re here to help the hungry get ahead, not just halfway there.

If you want to boost your credibility, take your learning beyond your specialism.

Think across the business, think sideways, but think beyond.

You could start with some of our hidden gems this week, like User Research or Applied Neuromarketing.

Always play tomorrow’s game.

Have your say: What brings you to the next level?

Marketers: what do you truly believe to be true - are you gonna get to the next level through fundamentals or the next edgy, innovative, untapped growth source?

Tell us here.

Community sneak peek

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This week's star question is:

Which user ID would you push to GA4: WordPress or CRM?

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