This is a guest blog article from Marcus Sheridan of The Sales Lion. Marcus is a HubSpot customer, a marketing consultant and blogger extraordinar. He will be my guest during this Friday's Content Camp webinar that will teach you how to generate leads using your content.
In January of this past year, I took a moment to compare all of my ‘leads’ from 2010 vs. all of my leads that turned into ‘customers’ during that same time period (BTW, I own a swimming pool company called River Pools and Spas, and we install fiberglass swimming pools throughout VA. and MD.). As I compared all their analytics in HubSpot, there was one number that quickly drew my complete attention, and has since revolutionized the way I use content in sales.
The Magic of Page Views
To make a long story short, upon studying these analytics I saw that if my leads viewed at least 30 pages of my website, and then I went on a sales appointment, they’d buy about 80% of the time.
Although these numbers may not sound big to some, they’re actually huge for the inground swimming pool industry. In fact, the average closing rates in the pool industry are around 10-15%. So, if you compare that number to the 80% my company achieves if we reach that magical ‘30’ page views, then the results are astounding.
Upon realizing just what a difference this number, or should we say ‘tipping point’ made with my leads, I then focused all my marketing efforts into helping potential customers view more pages, much more aggressively than I’d ever done before. Now, instead of passively hoping a lead would ‘move down the funnel’, I was using content to literally ‘push’ them down the funnel.
And do you know what? It worked. Big time.
The Results
Just to give you a real life idea as to how much it worked I’ll simply tell you these stats regarding my company in 2011 (keep in mind the economy hasn’t been terribly kind to ‘pool guys’ these past 3 years):
- Record number of sales
- Highest profits since the company was started in 2001
- We went on fewer sales appointments than we have in years yet the quality of these appointments have been through the roof (We can now be more selective based on what the numbers tell us!)
- We have pools to install through the beginning of next year.
- Business has been so great that my partners have allowed me to shift my focus to helping other companies achieve success with inbound marketing. (YeeeeHawwww!)
This being said, when I presented this principle of ‘page view tipping points’ to Mark Kilens a few months ago at a Content Camp webinar, he soon came back to me with a simple message:
‘Dude, do you realize this could be an awesome app in the HubSpot Marketplace?’
Ahh, it’s nice to have smart friends, isn’t it? Upon hearing those words from Mark I jumped on the idea, hired a developer, and have since launched the first edition of ‘The Tipping Point’ app in Hubspot. This is a FREE (yes, I did say free) app and I sincerely hope you’ll go ahead, as soon as you’re done with this article, and download it (just go to the Community tab then to the App Marketplace) so as to start learning what your magic ‘tipping point’ is. Because the app uses a HubSpot API, customers on the Small or Basic packages don't have access at this time.
Once you know this number, you can then design a content strategy, through emails/blogging/etc that will help folks read more of your ‘stuff’, thus pushing them further down the sales funnel at a faster rate.
For those of you that would like to learn more about this concept of ‘Content Tipping Points’, please visit my blog The Sales Lion and also pick up my free, 230 page eBook: Inbound and Content Marketing Made Easy. (Yep, that’s 230 pages of inbound marketing awesomeness at ZERO cost)
Oh, and don’t forget that Mark and I will be talking about this very subject in a Content Camp webinar coming up on the 14th of this month, so sign up today!!
Questions about Tipping Points or the App? Please feel free to ask anything below!
Image credit: Joe Shlabotnik
