Content marketing is one of the big hot trends in marketing today.
But there’s a dirty little secret the content marketing evangelists won’t tell you…either because they don’t know or fear it will reduce their value if revealed.
Namely, the more generous your free content offer, the worse the quality of the leads your content marketing campaign will generate.
Decades ago, Ed Nash articulated the notion that lead quality and lead quantity are inversely proportional.
If you use tactics that boost lead quantity, you get all those extra inquiries at the expense of lead quality, because the tactics attract responses from people who like the free offer but are not necessarily potential customers.
Conversely, the more you do to qualify the leads your marketing generates, the better the quality of those leads, but the fewer you get.
Marketing with freebie offers, whether the giveaway is content or merchandise, is a tactic that carries with it the danger of boosting lead quantity, i.e. creating hoards of people who want your free white paper at the expense of lead quality.
For instance, I once saw a promotion aimed at farmers to get them to refer their neighbor farmers to the marketer. The offer: give us the names of 3 neighbors who buy seed for their farms and we will send your son a free football.
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This campaign was submitted to a Caples Award contest in which I was a judge, which was where I saw it. Of course it did not win.
My friend Sy Sperling, founder of the Hair Club for Men (HCM), said they ran a free content offer on TV where they gave away a $15 book on hair loss. Result: a flood of freeloaders requesting the book, almost none of whom had any interest in coming into HCM for a free consultation.
Clearly, free content offers run the risk of requiring you to give away valuable material to people with no interest in what you are selling.
How can you make content marketing work better, and get requests for info from genuine prospects instead of deadbeats?
Here are a few suggestions:
1. Make the content of your white paper or special report narrow and specific. Reason: Very few people will download a guide on “How To Size A Valve” unless they are valve buyers.
2. On the landing page where they can register to download or request your content, have 2 boxes to check