How the Right Content Strategy Can Boost Lead Volume By 400%

Blogging Through the Sales Funnel

In a scant eight months on the job, Jim managed to pull off a seeming miracle at Booker.com. He transformed 50% leads relative to contracts to nearly 100%. Sales productivity went up 240%, lead volume went up 380%, CPAs were cut by 50%, and they managed to get a net positive churn two months in a row.
Impressive, right?
So how does one manage to take a company that had 90,000 dead/dormant leads in Salesforce and change it into a thriving jewel of an SMB platform?
It’s all about content strategy.
With 20 years of work in the SMB space, Jim knows how to quickly evaluate and engage the interests of his clientele. To draw in the largest swath of prospects, it’s not about fancy logos or cutting edge visuals. Success can be accomplished with a simple blend of bite-sized, easily digestible content that draws your readers deeper into your blog.
What’s not so simple is the structured approach to creating this content, which involves multiple teams from across marketing and sales communicating with a dedicated core of content developers. Thankfully he is here to share his experience and insight with Booker.com, giving you a head start on effectively retooling your blog for success.

In This Episode

• How two focused personas can lead to 70% target market reach
• How the sales funnel leads to smarter blog structure
• Why an effective content team means a well-structured marketing department
• How a basic blog structure leads to easy adaptation and expansion to new verticals

Quotes From This Episode

“Much of what marketing does for Booker and how big a role marketing plays at Booker is driven by the content strategy.” —@JimDArcangelo2

“The combination of well-targeted, well-positioned content, teed up through a marketing automation system became the impetus for building out a marketing tech stack which helped us further tune our content, how we engaged customers, and how efficient the organization was as a whole.” —@JimDArcangelo2

“There are many common opportunities and problems among SMBs that are fairly uniform.” —@JimDArcangelo2
“Many marketers make the mistake of organizing content by the format in which it was created.” —@randyfrisch
“We have this constant flowing river of input and intelligence into the content team.” —@JimDArcangelo2
“We manage our content back and interrelate it into our sales cycle.” —@JimDArcangelo2
“The more you do, the more insights you gain, the better you understand your customers, the better you can segment, the better you can target, the higher you increase the yields.” —@JimDArcangelo2

Resources

• Jim D’Arcangelo on Twitter: @JimDArcangelo2
• Booker.com
• The Booker Blog
• HireFrederick.com
• SheBOOM
• NextWave SMB

What did you want to be when you grew up?

Given Jim’s knack for organization and attention to detail, it may come as no surprise that he spent a good portion of his youth heavily invested in the study of history. A chance encounter through an internship at IBM changed everything as he caught the tech bug and moved from a history major to working in data. But it’s not too much of a stretch… as Jim says, “whether it’s history a couple hundred years back or a couple years back, there are stories in all the data and stories in every piece of content.”