How I Created a Better Customer Experience and Attracted Better Leads
In Q2 of 2024 we noticed a substantial dip in form fills. This decrease in leads was a cause for concern when it came to meeting our ambitious revenue goals for the year. After a deep dive, I realized this was not unique to our organization, but instead a global trend.
The way that we’ve been doing our B2B Marketing for the last 15 years isn’t working as well as it used to. By the Traditional playbook, I’m referring to using gated content to capture leads until they’re “sales-ready”, scoring them and passing them almost like a baton to an SDR to qualify. The SDR then qualifies the lead and passes the baton to Sales” Jon Miller, Martech Entrepreneur
Why was this happening?
- People are bombarded with marketing messages. And they are over it – popular marketing and sales tools have led to an overwhelming amount of unwanted emails and phone calls.
- In 2024 the average person receives 120 emails – compared to just 20 in 2014.
- Buyers are now hesitant to download an ebook and fill out a form because they know they’ll get an unsolicited phone call and emails as a result. More buyers are turning to digital, self-guided research and are trying to do so anonymously. Then reaching out on their own timeline.
- People expect a tailored experience especially if they’ve filled out a form on our website before.
The Solution: Death to PDFs
As with all performance marketing leaders, I was faced with the conundrum: I wanted to reach a wider audience, but I still had to show proof of marketing’s impact to our board of directors and business partners. So we doubled down on these priorities:
- Focus on high quality thought leadership and make it easy to find.
- Content still matters – On average, people consume 12 pieces of content before they are ready to buy.
- Improve the customer experience on high-value content – This meant that the old PDF style gated asset had to go.
3 Reasons Why PDFs are Awful
- Terrible version control when someone downloads an asset (ahem. especially your sales team members).
- They a harder for Search engines to crawl.
- They are ugly and hard to read, especially on mobile.
The New Premium Asset Experience
We built beautiful landing pages to house our premium content and killed the PDFs once and for all! The asset-gate had to live on for reporting purposes, though, in a newer format as pop-up CTA strategically placed to appear in the moment our content gets good.
Bonus: This new format was crawlable for AI and search engines, meaning our valuable content can actually bring in organic traffic. It’s also way easier to read on all devices.
Friends With Benefits (Returning Visitors)
If you’ve completed a form on Praecipio.com and can’t get enough of our stuff, cool. We’re not going to harass you with MORE forms for all our gated content.
Thanks to cookies, once a user’s visited our website and been cookied, our CTAs will quietly associate and record the assets they checked out after that. Hubspot will grant them uninterrupted access to future assets without asking for another form fill. (Obviously this didn’t work with cookie blocking software but it was progress.)
Results
- Since the change, we noticed a substantial increase in website traffic, especially from mobile.
- Mobile Session rate increase 30%
- Our sessions via organic search volume increase by 20% to key assets.
- We met our Revenue goals and saw a spike in opportunities related to the assets that utilized this new format.
Nadia Kouri 