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Over the last two years at HubSpot, our monthly lead volume has more than tripled -- from around 1,200 leads per month in March 2008 to about 14,000 leads per month today.
What's driving this growth?
Certainly each of our inbound marketing channels -- this blog, webinars, social media, SEO -- as well as paid media campaigns, have grown over time.
But focusing on channel-by-channel growth misses another very important story: Content produced as part of a cohesive multi-channel package generates more leads than it would produce independently.
If 1 blog post + 1 webinar + 1 Facebook campaign all produced independently is 3, the sum of them produced together in a helpful, interesting way is far greater than 3.
So what makes a great package? Here are the fundamentals:
1. A Big, Sexy Piece of Content
This is the foundation of your package -- the core piece of new information that draws people in and gets the conversation started on your site, blog and traditional media outlets. The piece of content could be an ebook, a research report or something else. Our State of Inbound Marketing report released in February is a great example that worked well for us.
2. Supporting Blog Articles
This is how you publish and distribute your big, sexy piece of content. Take a couple of the most important, interesting pieces of your big piece of content and turn them into a short blog article. For example, for our State of Inbound Marketing report, we turned a sections on cost per lead and blog-post frequency into individual articles. The blog articles are great opportunities to promote your campaign's webinar (see below), but be careful not to be too promotional.
3. A Supporting Webinar
You should use the attention your big piece of content generates to drive signups for a big webinar on the topic. A webinar is a great way to capture leads from the the report -- the signup form gives visitors a reason to leave their email address. There's one other big advantage of the webinar: It generates discussion about your piece of content. As people retweet their invitation and the discuss the live webinar, people in their networks get drawn into the discussion and find their way to your site.
4. Supporting Social Media Campaigns
Once you have your content and blog articles published, you should promote the whole campaign on social media. Post each blog article and your big piece of content on Twitter and Facebook. Make sure you webinar landing page is easy to retweet and share on Facebook. And don't forget about LinkedIn. LinkedIn Groups can be a great place to post questions and start discussion before to a webinar.
5. Email Follow-up
When you finish your webinar, make sure you send out a recording to all of the people who registered for it. This is one more big opportunity to generate some buzz around your content. Many of the people you email will share the recording on the social networks. When they do, you'll get more traffic and more leads.
There are other elements and ways that you can do to expand and optimize an inbound marketing lead generation package, but these are the fundamental we focus on at HubSpot.
How about you? What's fundamental to your inbound marketing package. What are you experimenting with?
Image: Jonathan W on Flickr
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