Inbound & Outbound Marketing Play Nice Together

Content is sacred for marketers – particularly in the B2B marketing world.  It’s the offer of a value exchange.  We’ll give you something of value, and in turn, you’ll give us information about yourself so we can drive qualified leads for the sales team.  It’s the carrot we dangle and we want to protect the carrot.

The emergence of content marketing topples the notion of the value exchange with its mandate to spread content around.  Unleash it.  Un-gate it.  Set it free.  If you’re like me (a marketer charged with driving demand) – this probably makes you a little uneasy.   But I’m here to tell you that you don’t need to revolt in the face of content democratization.  There is plenty of value to go around.  Inbound marketing and outbound marketing can play nice together and a coordinated effort can really bolster your results.

Take for example, our recent Grande Guide campaign featuring Juan Eloqua.  This campaign leverages a series of “how-to” guides on topics like lead scoring, as well as a comical pitch man, Juan Eloqua – a video of whom accompanies each guide as a sort of content ambassador.  It’s the type of content any demand gen marketer would drool over – snack-able, didactic and well positioned.  It’s also the type of content that any social media pro worth their salt would covet for its viral, “share-ability. “

For this campaign, we decided to unleash Juan and his guides through both channels.  A series of blog posts and social media campaigns would point directly to the un-gated asset – our only hope being a retweet or blog mention.  Simultaneously, we promoted the same offer through an email campaign, where the email recipient was directed to a gated version of the same page – requiring the completion of a form to gain access.

Our campaign has had great results.   It has re-engaged contacts in our database, and to date, it has resulted in over 400 marketing qualified leads that we’ve been able to pass on to sales. But the story doesn’t end there.  Through social marketing, the campaign has been featured on a number of prominent blogs and kicked off a flurry of activity in the Twitter-sphere as a fun, shareable campaign.  In essence, we doubled our pleasure.

So what’s the moral of the story?  While social media channels have picked up tremendous steam over the past few years – there are still people who aren’t consuming content this way.  People still open emails and are happy to provide a little information to access a good piece of content.  Do you run the risk of the same person encountering this content through both channels?  Absolutely.  It’s a small world after all.  But so far, there’s been no negative feedback on our use of both gated and un-gated assets for different channels.

By using progressive profiling and pre-populated forms, we’ve made it very easy for contacts in our database to access the guides without having to tell us things we already know and we’re able to glean additional information in a way that isn’t overwhelming.

In the future, look for more campaigns like Juan Eloqua and the Grande Guides from marketers who know that even when you can get the milk for free – you don’t really need to give away the cow.