As a lean, early stage startup, we needed a low cost lead generation program. With mentorship from Colin Hung at VentureLab, I built an automated content marketing engine that converted prospects into sales within 6 months. Here's how we did it. 

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Step #1 - Create something valuable to your target customer

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We had one blog post that stood out in driving traffic to our site. It was about trauma-informed ABA. Why was this a stand out piece of content? I'd argue it was because it touched on something controversial ie. ABA and married it with a celebrated hot topic: a trauma-informed approach. 

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Given we knew that was a hot topic our target customers were trying to learn more about, we created a practical guide so they could implement the approach themselves. This ebook served as our lead magnet titled: How to Incorporate a Trauma Informed Approach Into Your Care.

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Step #2 - Create a content journey that connects this topic to your product's value proposition

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Our ideal customers were care providers that were actively looking to enhance their care. People seeking out and engaging with practical guides about novel care approaches were who we hypothesized would be engaging. The next challenge would be getting them to create a connection with the value of our product. 

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We created an email drip campaign that created a bread crumb trail to this. 

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After they downloaded the ebook, they were added to a 7 email campaign with 9-11 days between emails. It was designed to provide them with helpful resources and building trust with the end goal of engaging them in conversation.

 

Here's what those emails looked like:

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1. A request for feedback on the ebook. 

2. Sharing a blog post: It’s time to stop ignoring the link between behavior and trauma​​

   • We needed to connected caregivers' everyday challenges with the topic of the ebook. ​

3. Sharing a blog post: A clinician’s take on trauma-informed ABA

   • ​Build trust by showing them we rely on innovative experts like the KOL we interviewed. ​​

4. Sharing a blog post: Innovations in trauma-informed care​

   • Start bridging their interest in innovative care with technology. ​

5. Sharing a blog post: Wearables can give your team superpowers

   • Show them we understand their needs and connect that with the value a product like ours could provide.​

6. Sharing an Awake Labs case study: How wearables can improve transitions into care

   • Build trust and show value by sharing an example of how it's worked before

   • An open invite to book a time in our calendar to discuss further

 

These emails were short with a balanced sending cadence that wouldn't annoy them but was enough to build familiarity.​

 

Step #3 - Distribute and promote
 

Now remember, there was no advertising budget. So I leveraged low-cost channels.

 

Social Media
I ran Linkedin and Twitter campaigns, promoting the ebook and the related blogs, sharing the content in 6 weeks intervals broken up by time-sensitive, topical posts about events or news. 

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Our Website + SEO
Every post was optimized for the keywords I knew we ranked for and drove traffic: trauma informed aba, how to do trauma informed aba, what is.... etc. Then I made sidebar and banner ads for the ebook that we displayed on our own website to capture visitors on our own site. 

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Email Marketing
I ran an email campaign for each blog post to our subscriber lists, segmenting the list to target caregivers that delivered care through a organization. The goal was getting them to download the ebook so we could try to identify those in active search for solutions.

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Partners

We worked closely with Community Living Ontario, which sent out regular newsletters. I worked with our contact there to feature the ebook in those newsletters to capture new prospects. 

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Step #4 - Evaluate

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We got a lot of engagement and downloads of the ebook... but none of these leads converted. I dug into the campaign data to try to understand why. Opens and clicks were high throughout the drip campaign, but the leads we were getting did not match our ICP or were way too early even after three months or nurturing. I figured this out by looking at what people clicked, the replies to the campaign and googling their email addresses to find more identifying information. 

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Step #5 - Iterate

 

So what next? We validated that we could draw prospects in with content and get them to engage with us. But, the content we used hadn't gotten the right people at the right time. I worked with Colin, our Venture Lab mentor to iterate on this approach, trying to come up with a better lead magnet. 

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In parallel, we had been having a hard time onboarding new customers. For most care providers, this was their first time purchasing and implementing technology beyond desktop computer software. They kept coming up against the same obstacles we'd seen in other customers and we guided them through the process. This was very time consuming and kept delayed onboarding and activation timelines, simply because these organizations didn't know how to prepare.

 

That gave me a new hypothesis: what if our prospects weren't buying because they didn't know how to champion a purchase like this?

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Our next piece of content had two goals - improve our onboarding and potentially speed up our sales cycle. We created a guide that give our customers step-by-step guidance on how to prepare before we even started the onboarding process. We called this ebook Technology Purchasing 101.

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I wrote supplemental blog content and repeated the same process I had to distribute the trauma-informed ebook. 

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Step #6 - Results

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This piece of content was much less popular, we got a slow, gradual trickle of downloads. It was nothing like the waterfall we had with the initial ebook. However, as our leads progressed through the campaign, we started to see them request demos and purchase our technology. 

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Within 6 months of publishing this ebook every single one of our new customers had downloaded the ebook. Our onboarding process was smoother and our prospects from all sources were converting faster. 

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It wasn't a viral lead generation magnet, but it helped us get the right people to purchase and made this process more effective and efficient for our team. 

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My takeaway from this was that one of the best things you can do as a content marketer is find ways to reduce friction for your champions. If you're selling a new type of product, make it easy for them, do some of the heavy lifting and share the framework with them. Invest in your champion - and they'll be more likely to invest in you. B2B sales is all about relationships at the end of the day. 

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