Lead Gen Summit 2013 in San Francisco featured 20 hours of sessions led by brand-side marketers sharing their success stories on lead capture, qualification and nurturing. In this MarketingSherpa webinar, hear the top takeaways from this event to apply to your own marketing efforts.
Pamela Markey, Senior Director of Marketing, and Daniel Burstein, Director of Editorial Content, both of MECLABS, moderated sessions at the Summit and now have provided 30 minutes of highlights from two days of case studies, industry deep dives and the Summit live test.
Watch this replay to learn more about the top takeaways, including:
- Vice president of Marketing at SmartBear Software Keith Lincoln’s efforts in email marketing
- Value proposition communication lessons from Jon Ciampi, VP Marketing Business Development & Corporate Development, CRC Health
- How to make it easy as possible for visitors to convert through a case study by Jacob Baldwin, Search Engine Marketing Manager, One Call Now
- Keynote speaker Joe Pulizzi, Founder, Content Marketing Institute, on the importance of creating a content marketing mission statement
- And much more
Download the slides to this presentationRelated Resources
MarketingSherpa MarketingExperiments Web Optimization Summit 2014 May 21-23, 2014, New York City
MarketingSherpa Lead Gen Summit 2013 Wrap-Up: Top 7 lead capture, qualification and nurturing takeawaysTesting and Optimization: Implementing insights from Email Summit at accounts payable companyMarketing Automation: 200% increase in lead volume — SherpaWebinar replay
Landing Page Optimization: How CRC Health transformed decision-making across 140 sites — SherpaWebinar replay
%REGISTER%
Video Transcription
Burstein: Thank you for joining us today for another MarketingSherpa webinar. Today, we're going to be taking a look back at Lead Gen Summit 2013. We just got back from about two weeks in San Francisco and we're going to take a look at all we learned from marketers just like you, and try to take those two days full of sessions.
Markey: Packed days.
Burstein: 300 marketers, bunch of case studies, and just smush it down into 30 minutes of rich takeaways. How does that sound?
Markey: That sounds amazing.
Burstein: We also want to hear from you, hear your Lead Gen takeaways if you attended Lead Gen Summit. If you didn't, just what you learned about lead gen marketing over the years. We'd also like to hear your questions. You can use #SherpaWebinar. You can also use #SherpaWebinar to get to know some other marketers that are interested in lead gen. That was one of the most interesting things to me about Lead Gen Summit, seeing not just all the wisdom that came from the stage, but all the wisdom that was in the audience.
Markey: Peers talking to each other. Absolutely, and I see Roger's already online, who was at Lead Gen Summit, so you can definitely tap into him and get some of his learnings, too.
Burstein: Thanks for joining us, Roger. I am Daniel Bernstein, the director of editorial content here at MECLABS. With me is …
Markey: Pamela Markey. I'm the senior director of marketing at MECLABS. This is us at Lead Gen Summit having a great time, so we're thrilled to be here.
Burstein: We had the opportunity to cohost and with everything that we do, we created just a ton of content around Lead Gen Summit, so this webinar is just one small piece that you see some of the links there for SlideShare, YouTube audiences, but if you go to #SherpaWebinar, we're also going to be tweeting through lots of other content about the speakers and case studies that we talked about at Lead Gen Summit.With that, let's just jump right in.
Markey: Jump in. Let's go.
Burstein: Look at one of the first learnings and, at a high level, you're going to see what we get into today. The two big things I took away was quality over quantity, something we hear a lot, but we really have some great examples here, and also, listen to the customer. A lot of times, we assume we know more about the customer that we actually do, and this is a great example of that where a KC Lincoln, the VP of Marketing at SmartBear Software, really wanted to try to find that human voice that would relate to the marketer. So, we have a question here from [Imron]. Actually it's less of a question, more of a statement, wanting to know about lead gen in the tech B2B space and I think KC Lincoln's example was SmartBear Software is the perfect example for that, so his audience is IT developers and others in the IT field; a pretty skeptical audience.
Markey: Yeah.
Burstein: A hard audience to reach, and he had some great nurturing tracks using his automation platform to be able to reach out to those audience. A lot of it was driven by a trial download, but again, they're skeptical. So here's an example, you see here is a nurturing tract that, after they download, that trial it's a 30-day trial. They have a great nurturing track to teach that developer about the product. Eventually, hopefully move into a product purchase, but, at the top right there, he does something that most marketers don't do.
He puts the opt-out right up there, very, very clear. We had KC on our webinar a few months ago, and some marketers saw that and they were upset after. I looked at the survey after, because we always ask surveys at the end of these webinars to help learn from you how we can improve this, and they said, "Why did you put that in there? That's not a best practice. That's some bad advice."
And so, I talked to KC about it, and he did a lot of A/B testing and this is what he found was most effective, so I put this first, at the very beginning, because one of the things we wanted to do today was share best practices, but also challenge best practices.
Markey: Yes, absolutely.
Burstein: All the things we're talking about today are spurs for you to test with your own audience. He tested. This was most effective, and it makes sense why. If you look, he's got a 2.3% opt-out rate, right? No one likes any opt-outs, but again, this is at the beginning of a drip campaign. This is at the beginning of a 30-day drip campaign, and the last thing you want to do is harass people and get them to feel like they're just being barraged with email and spam. You want them to opt-in. You want them to be a part of it. And. I think Pamela mentioned when we looked at this before, by not opting-out, right?
Markey: Yeah, I think you just, in your mind of the customer, they're saying to themselves, "You know what? I like what's coming here." It just reemphasizes in the customer's mind that they like what they want. Give me some more.
Burstein: And so speaking of A/B testing, here is a really interesting A/B test that KC did. So here you see the pretty much traditional marketing email. It looks a little creative but, "No bull. Save 10% off. Learn more.” Everyone probably does a marketing email similar to this, so this was the interesting thing about the A/B test. I like to call this the John Stewart test. If you're familiar with John Stewart from The Daily Show, he takes the news and he skewers it and he adds a little irony to it. So what they did is, for the treatment that was the control we just saw, they had a sales rep send an email they prewrote that said something along the lines of, "Below is an email our marketing department sent out about the promotion. We ask if they could tone down the marketing fluff for this one. It seems they took it to heart.” And then, they included a link as you can see there, to the actual email, so people still got that administration. I mean, so out of the box, the sales reps to make fun of Marketing, not that they don't do it all the times amongst themselves.
Markey: Right, this personalizes them, shows the sales rep this is a real person.
Burstein: Let's take a look at the results, though I mean, really, really impressive you'll see there. Pamela's the color expert and not me, but I think that's the magenta.
Markey: Fuchsia.
Burstein: Fuchsia, that has a much higher return there. You can see right there one of those segments almost triple the return, so we put this up front. When you're looking at your lead gen, again, don't assume you know about the customer. See how you can learn from the customers. A/B testing is a way to do that and you can find some interesting results. And, another very interesting point we want to make from this chart is you don't just see one result from KC, so what he did with his automation software is he really segmented his list to understand all of the different segments and how he can reach out to them.
Markey: Awesome, so this is a snapshot from the live test that we do at our Summits. This is one of my favorite parts of our Summits in which we actually develop, launch and validate an entire test over 24 hours, which is not an easy thing to do. This is Kyle Foster, research manager here at MECLABS. So he, working with the audience, and with the labs back here in Jacksonville, developed a test sponsored by Act-On, and what we did is, we came up with sort of different case scenarios for lead generation, obviously it's the Lead Gen Summit, we're trying to get leads.
So, we had a couple different incentives, MarketingSherpa Quick Guides. Our hypotheses were if we add an option to choose between three incentive options, we'll add to the perceived value, and that perceived value perhaps will allow us to add additional form fields so you can maybe ask for another piece of data.
So, the idea was the research question, which incentive approach is more effective for generating leads, and whatever in your mind as a marketer is, what does effective mean? So we asked the audience. Again, they got to choose these things. Let's choose the incentives, so we gave them all of the MarketingSherpa Quick Guides produced in the last little while and being good lead gen marketers.
Burstein: I just had to tease the audience about it, because you know as we talked, one of the biggest learnings is, one, don't assume the customer is you. We always make that assumption, I would do this. I would do that. Your customer could be very different from you, and don't assume you know the customer. I think it's really interesting, a group of lead gen marketers and they chose the lead generation topics.
Markey: Exactly, with email marketing and content marketing as the additional incentives, so we also asked them to choose the form selection, so we said, O.K., we think because we're going to give the customer a choice to choose between incentives, that maybe they'll give us a little bit more information, increase the friction a little bit. How many — two, three, four fields — do you want to add? They added one, more on the conservative side, and they chose to add job title to the form. So, if we look at what the control looked like, this is just, you know, standard download page, a piece of content, the simple form. Then, we provided the one there in Treatment #1, which had the choice between one of those three tabs to choose the one that's right for you. So, again, not all your customers are interested in just one thing. And then Treatment #2, which had the same exact thing, but adding that additional form field.
So, we also asked the audience to predict a winner. They picked Treatment #1, which makes sense, since there's the additional incentive, but not the additional form fields, so we tested it, ran the results, and, ultimately, the control actually won, which is interesting. What it told us really was that the additional incentive choice did not really have an impact. That being said, it's 31% significant statistical significance, so it's kind of a wash.
Burstein: But what it really did tell us, too, is the audience, you can see overwhelmingly, 64 % chose Treatment #1, when in reality, there really wasn't that much difference between the control and treatment so they had a bit of a false confidence there and, again, the benefit of testing, you can really learn from your audience and not just assume.
Markey: Yep, so the choices that didn't seem to increase the perceived value. We also took a look at what the people filling out the form chose. Obviously, the lead gen far and away was the winner. That being said, it was the default when you landed on the page. It may not have been as clear to people if the tabs, that there was a choice, so you'd have to test that again. We also found that the perceived value does not outweigh the perceived cost, so that additional form field was reducing the lead gen rate by 11%, but you have to ask yourself, like Dan said, quality is a key factor, so if it's really important to you to have that additional piece of content, that additional piece of data, you may want to look at adding extra form fields.
Burstein: Yeah, this was really interesting on two levels I think, because, again to tease the audience a bit, they weren't that bold. We gave them to opportunity to add three, four fields. They only added one, and the field they added, too, it wasn't phone number. It wasn't propensity to buy. It wasn't a budget number. It was simply job title, and even with just adding that one, if you have to make the case to your sales boss and say, "Hey, adding more fields is going to reduce the number of leads we get," this is a great example of that, because just adding that job title, 11% less leads and how much value does that job title really add? Now, on the flip side, if job title is just so crucial to this sales team …
Markey: Or revenue, or industry, or whatever it might be
Burstein: The 11% less leads might be really worth it to actually be giving sales qualified leads, or actually having in your nurturing track qualified leads that you can nurture better because you know more about them. You can segment better and eventually end up with more revenue, so you can really look at those results two ways, and that's, I think, the really interesting thing about A/B testing.
Markey: Yeah, and it was great. Marketers were asking for, how do I test, what should I test, and having this sort of live dynamic thing happening at Summit really lent on energy to it, so thanks so much to Kyle and Steve and Brittany and the whole team who ran that and, of course, Act-On, that sponsored it.
I will mention as well, so we're prepping the live test for our next event which is Email Summit in February, so Dan and I are going to be in Vegas with the rest of the team. We're excited to announce our keynote speakers have been chosen: Dr. Noah Goldstein and Dr. Dan Ariely, who are incredible behavior economists, as well as Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, our founder and CEO here.
Burstein: Where are we going to be in Vegas?
Markey: The Aria Resort & Casino, which is so beautiful. I'm really excited. So I hope to see you all there.
Burstein: Lead Gen Summit was a sellout, so we're hoping for great things from the Email Summit. We also wanted to thank our sponsor of this webinar. The sponsor helps make this information free for you. That sponsor is Oracle Eloqua, and they wanted to let you know that Eloqua's platform makes it easier to analyze how well a campaign is doing across channels. They have to say it, so there you go. Oracle Eloqua. Thank you.
So let's jump in. So, when you think about testing, and you think about your customers, something that really comes out is the value proposition. That's a frequent thing to test to understand what value you can provide your customers, how you can best communicate that, but Jon Ciampi, we've had the chance to talk to him. This is the second Summit we've had with him.
Markey: He was in Boston as well, yes.
Burstein: At our Optimization Summit, and I've learned a lot from Jon, and one thing that he did that was really brilliant is he doesn't only try to better communicate to the customers he can serve how he can serve them, he tries to better communicate to the customers that he can't serve that cannot serve them.
And so what that ends up in the end, we're not really looking for leads when we talk about lead generation. We're probably looking for closed deals or revenue or something like that, so if you're getting people to become a lead and sign up to become a lead who you really not a fit for your company can't serve. You're really just going to alienate them. You're going to waste sales time.
So, let's take a look at how Jon did that. So, Jon works for a company called CRC Health Care. They have a large network of treatment facilities for different addictions such as drug addiction, alcohol addiction. This particular clinic was called Southern Indiana Clinic and it was an opiate treatment facility. And so, let's take a look this was an A/B test of landing pages.
Here's the control landing page. If you look at it, it had some challenges in communicating the value to the people that they could serve. There's bad stock photos, for example. People see those bad stock photos, they don't relate to them. They're not really looking at the type of people like them. There's a bad call-to-action, lots of anxiety in that call-to-action was to get a free assessment, bad navigation, confusion, there's a lot of friction. So, let's take a look at the treatment.
We'll take a bit of a closer look at that treatment there, and we can see they did a better job of communicating the value to those it could serve. They added credibility. That's a real picture of a real person. It's got a little story under there. It's probably hard to read. They better sequence the information you would need to know before making such a big decision like probable possibly contacting an opiate facility, and really, they were trying to reduce the anxiety there. It's a big, tough decision to make.
Markey: It's really tough.
Burstein: But here's what I really like. Here's what we can all think about. These are examples of how he told people he can't serve. "Hey, we're not right for you. You should find another solution." So, by talking about the schedule and we have it quotation marks because we're trying to show what the potential customer or potential patient might be thinking when they're looking at that page, and by seeing that, they might be thinking, "Hey, this doesn't fit my schedule," so right away they're telling people, "Hey, it doesn't fit your schedule, you're not a fit, you shouldn't contact us."
Another thing, you know, you said some patients are looking for a private doctor's office. That's great for them. That's not what CRC does. That's not what Southern Indiana Clinic does. We can't serve them best. We want to show them, "Hey, we're not right for you."
Markey: And, I think that's a big thing like you say when you can tell people that you don't you can't help them or they're not right for you I think they will believe you when you say you can't help them. I know especially Jon and the team at CRC really work on trust. It's not a lead for them, and these are patients. These are real people, and people able to build that trust is very important for them I mean, for any marketer, but especially for something like this.
Burstein: Absolutely, that's show the trust results in so they had a 19% increase in inquiries which is pretty much what they call their lead, so that's pretty good. They got 19% more leads, but here's where it really gets powerful. 19% more leads, they got 66 more admissions. That would be an actual closed deal for them.
So again, by making that value proposition more exclusive, more focused on those they could serve, the actual leads are getting in not only were they able to get in more leads by telling people that they could serve them better, they're able to get better leads that actually become what their final goal is, which is an admission.
For many marketers on the phone, it might be a sale or something along those lines. Taking a deeper look into what Jon did, here are some of his PPC advertising testing. We had a question from Heather. She's a marketing assistant. She wants to know something that relates to value proposition and product: how do you differentiate the two-in-one ad? So, let's take a look at that, and I think the real answer is, you don't differentiate the value proposition from the product.
Your overall company has a value proposition. There's a core value proposition to your company and then your product has a sub-value proposition of that, so that plays off of the overall value proposition in your company, but is unique in a way to that product, and we can get deeper and talk about how there should be unique value propositions for, also, each process you're asking your customer to do and each customer really.
But looking at how Jon did this in his PPC test, so company logic versus customer logic, and what we're talking about here again is that, don't assume you know your customer. It's very hard for marketers. We get so attached to our products, we essentially drink the Kool-Aid.
Markey: We really do.
Burstein: And we think our products are great, so the company logic they had is we have the most doctors, therefore we have the best care, and it's easy to feel that way, like they would be great. If you're the market leader, you've got the most doctors in the industry. You'd be touting that everywhere.
Here's the thing they were kind of testing to see if that was true. Maybe people don't care. Maybe it doesn't matter to have the best doctors. Maybe it matters to have the doctor that will serve my wife or my husband best if she has an addiction, and so they tested it against that customer logic to make sure this is someone an organization that will really care for my loved ones.
So, you can see some of the differences there. Get a free assessment, call now, consider a top recovery clinic versus the traditional alternative therapies, which Jon's team felt tied into the actual taking care of the patient a little better. That was a branded PPC ad.
Here's the non-branded PPC ads and you can see also an element they had was the luxury, the exclusive luxury of the facility which they felt they were really proud of and felt people would care about. Let's take a look at some of those results. These are pretty astounding. I don't think I've ever seen PPC results this incredible ...
Markey: Never.
Burstein: I think Jon even mentioned on the stage that he repped from his search engine which is blown away because they had never seen results like this. He got a 14,000% increase for his branded PPC ads. He had a 44.2% click rate. That means that almost half of people that were exposed to that search engine results page clicked on that PPC ad, which is just phenomenal, even as non-branded PPC ads, 3,300% increase really impressive.
And I think again, we can all learn about this is focusing on sequencing, what your customer is thinking at that time, so what is a customer really thinking when they're going through that step of the process when they see that PPC ad and not guessing what that is, but testing to try to learn and see what that really is.
Markey: So, we're talking a lot about testing and this is another example. Jacob Baldwin, from search engine marketing manager at One Call Now, and he does way more than just search engine marketing. He, I know, did the entire website redesign there and One Call Now, they do sort of communication broadcast messaging over the phone to places like communities and churches and schools and inclement weather and that sort of thing. So that sort of unique prospect and what his focus was making it as easy for possible for visitors to convert and he discovered that through testing.
He brought us through a couple of different tests. But, what he was trying to do was really concentrate his free trial process, and he wanted to reduce the number of steps in that, but also wanted to take a fresh look at what was in that creative.
So this is the example of the homepage, and actually, we got a question from Louie, he's the president of his company, asked, "When it comes to getting people to register online, is a landing page really more effective than a homepage with an obvious registration form?" Because you got to think, especially lead gen marketers, we meant to get that form to them right away so they can fill it out.
That being said, your homepage is tough. It's valuable real estate. It's often hard to fight for your little plot there. In this case, Jacob took a different approach. He put the free trial obviously very front and center and then put the form right behind that. This is actually one of several tests he did on the homepage. This is a quadrant type call-to-action and we talk about multiple calls-to-action. They may be equally weighted, may not work but he also tried one with three. He actually started with 11 in this space, so this is sort of where he landed at this point.
So, when you jump into the free trial, two things he noticed, and I think it's really something to be said because us marketers like Dan said, we drink the Kool-Aid, we see our pages all the time, we see the same stuff and it just starts to just blur a little bit. So when he looked at it with fresh eyes, he said, "Gosh, my free trial the call-to-action is 'Check Out,' which doesn't really make a lot of sense." It's something you'd see on Amazon.com or something like that.
And also, we see just above that, there's a dollar sign. There's a subtotal and a total and just a little bit of anxiety there even though there's no credit card involved. We're not asking for any money whatsoever, so he just shortened the steps and then just tweaked that call-to-action to start your free trial, just much clearer, much less friction or anxiety and removed those dollar signs. And he saw great results, so 55.3% increase in lead capture. That's through the free trial sign-up process, so really, his takeaway there is don't make your visitors work unnecessarily hard to convert.
And the big thing, like Dan said, is we're marketers. We live and breathe our products and our pages and our channels, everything, every day. Take this lens test, but also come at it from a customer focus point of view.
Burstein: This ties into a question we just got from Laura. She asks, "When it comes to registration form fields, if your objective is getting the highest number of leads, is there any research to support what the optimal number of fields is and what those fields should be? Also, any insight into how to implement progressive disclosure with greater success?" So, I want to bring it back to this page, because I wanted to mention two things, so yes if you're just looking for the highest number of leads, it's strip that form down to the bare basics.
Markey: In the email.
Burstein: Yeah, basically, just ask for email or whatever contact you need. That would be absolutely it because when we're thinking of form fields, don't just think of the form field specifically. You have to think about what the potential customer might be thinking when they're doing through them and there's usually friction. There's anxiety involved in those form fields, so as much as you can reduce that you're going to get more leads.
Now, as it comes to progressive profiling and that sort of thing, one thing to think about, too, is even before you get to progressive profiling, you can have a two-step process, so in this case, it wasn't just the form fields, but like Pamela said, changing a button, so don't just look at your form fields. What does your button say? Is your button communicating the value of the next step? Is your button communicating the value of submitting, even if it's just that email address, and then once they're going to that next step, you can ask some more information right there.
So for example, if you're just asking for an email address, the next step might be, "Hey, give us some more information about you so we can send you only what's relevant," and that way you can help start to segment your list and if they're interested in and, as Laura suggests you know if you have the technology set up that each time you send them a valuable piece of information you can progressively build up that profile and you don't need to get it all at once.
Markey: And KC, too, I think had the assessment.The assessment call-to-action, like if people feel like you're going to call them immediately, it makes it real tough, so that call-to-action is really important. Your information's safe. We're not going to call you. I'm getting something of value by doing this will make a big difference as well.
Burstein: Yeah, so Pamela's point form fields are important. Getting the right number of form fields, but more important than that really is communicating that you'll be getting more value from taking this action than the cost to you. And, even if it's just an email address, there is still a cost there. We're all worried about getting spam.
We have Joe, founder of the Content Marketing Institute there. It's a great pleasure. He's one of the key people when it comes to content marketing and what I really like when he talked about it's not what your marketing. It's how you're marketing it. So, content marketing people think about it as this specific thing and I want to do content marketing, and it’s more how you do content marketing.
Are you truly doing it? This ties into a question we have here from Phyllis. She's a demand gen consultant. She says, "Good content is so critical to lead generation." I couldn't agree more, Phyllis. How do you balance the desire for leads registrations with the desire to give good content away without required registration?
So, I think it really all comes down to the funnel. As we were looking at the funnel here and determining what your funnel is and what the path is to your customer, so we all probably agree that at the very top of the funnel, we want to keep things ungated because we want to bring attention and interest to our sites. We also want to encourage virality. We want to encourage sharing. We want to encourage people to engage before they know enough to trust us.
Once they trust us, then this is what Joe calls messy middle there, you have to determine at what level did you really need to ask for information. I would suggest as late as possible because you want to keep providing as much value as possible, without, as we talked about before, throwing that cloth onto it, but once you even do have that registration from that disclosure, again it's not just asking for that registration, it's clearly communicating value. Why should they take that next step with you?
Even if this is far from where they're purchasing from you, it's still a cost, providing that information. They might think they're being called by Sales. They might think they're getting a lot of sales emails. So, make sure you communicate that value why they should take the next step after they have looked at some of our totally free top of the funnel pieces that don't require registration, why should they get more engaged with you.
And then, a really interesting thing that Joe talked about is don't stop don't stop at the sale. A newspaper is a subscription. It shows up on your driveway every day. There's not a campaign to send you newspapers until eventually you buy a thing and then they just totally forget about you, so you can see kind of Joe's double helix funnel.
So, it doesn't end at the sale. It starts again then, once you've already sold to people, making sure they're satisfied, making sure you can retain them, helping to upsell, turning them to evangelists, which is what you ultimately want to do so they can flip and then send out a lot of your totally free no registration required top of the funnel information.
Markey: Absolutely.
Burstein: So if you're very interested in content marketing, one of the things he said is start by defining the outcome. I think that's a challenge that a lot of content marketers have, they're not sure exactly sure what they're going to do with their content marketing. They just know they should be doing it, blogging, putting stuff out there. This was an example. Indium corporation. They were an engineering firm and here's an example of their objective. You know, again, not to sell. It's not to sell a product. It's not to do anything for Indium, but it's to help the audience. In this case it's engineers and they identify a challenging question for them which is around soldering.
So, when you're looking at your content marketing, it's not about how you can drive people through a funnel. It's how can you help people so they will want to engage with you more, and then just to take the next step and do what he calls a content marketing mission statement and he gives on example here for
Inc. magazine, which I think we're all familiar with. And this is their mission statement where they're talking about what the whole point of
Inc. magazine is and it's not to sell. It's to do things like provide resources. It's to inspire. It's to engage with that core target audience, and it also gets into what they're going to deliver, and what, as we talked about at the engineering firm, what's the ultimate outcome for the audience. Again, it's that outcome for the audience, not the outcome for our company.
Markey: And it keeps you on track. I think not only the marketer and then anybody that produces content within your group, anybody that comes over and says put a sales piece in the content blog. You just really create that mission statement and it keeps you true to what you're trying to accomplish.
Burstein: And then finally, when we talk about content marketing, Joe talked about finding that bigger story.
It's a challenge when you see all the time with lead gen marketers who have nothing to talk about that will engage with their customers. Our products are boring. We had a great case study we did before with a company that was a concrete company and I think and then we called the case study watching concrete dry because it did this really fascinating YouTube video shows all the ins and outs of what it takes to make a concrete factory in a concrete plant.
And here's the another example Joe showed us, which I would not have thought me and Pamela sometimes would make this is Facebook really the place for some really obscure B2B lead generation marketer? This is Maersk Group. If you're unfamiliar with them, they do freight, shipping and if you can see on the screen they have a million and a half likes on their Facebook page. And here's how they did it. They found that people were really interested in the background of shipping, what's involved in shipping. I mean, we kind of take it for granted that all these things end up around the world. We have products from China, we're sending to Europe or whatever, so they showed the background of it and here it's just a beauty shot of their …
Markey: Shipping containers. It's beautiful.
Burstein: And by doing it, the interesting thing is, not only did they engage customers. They engaged their own employees. Their own employees became really proud of showing off, "Hey, here are the things that are involved in my job. Here's the types of things we're doing." I know you hear that challenge all the time, too, from marketers, how to engage employees in their content marketing, so when you find that storyline when you find one that's really core to your company, you can really engage the employees more.
Markey: That example serves even more than just the lead gen. If you notice there the comment that they've placed there next to the photo is about job openings, so it can serve many areas of our organization if you get that content out there and get your people paying attention to what you've got going, even if it's shipping containers.
Burstein: That's a good point. Another example here, LinkedIn page. You know LinkedIn I tend to think data, very heavy information. They're using beauty shots of their ships. So again, a very interesting way to engage, maybe giving you some ideas to engage. So we're going to do one last one. We're going to fly through this one, but doing your keyword research really pays off. And this will be really interesting to you if you every have a disagreement with Sales about anything ever.
So this is from Marie Wiese. This is where a GrandTech.com, they're B2B systems integration company, so what they did was, they went to the sales team and they said give us some keywords. What do you think are some keywords that will be very powerful? And they came up with things like manufacturing, infrastructure, CPU data and you can see some of the clickthrough rates for those. Then, they did this very intense data deep dive. They looked at the data analysis. They looked at what people were clicking on, and the interesting thing was they got twice the clickthrough, and so the powerful thing to me is often for marketers, Sales is able to say, "Hey, we know the customer better. We talk to the customer every day. What you're doing is wrong and you know, unfortunately we don't have sales people on the line."
Sales people should get the glory when they hit their numbers, but blame Marketing when they don't. Marketing is always doing something wrong. So, by being data driven, by doing some of the things we've already talked about here, by testing, by really learning about your customers, you can show that data and show that proof and say, "Hey, you have that gut instinct, it's great." Here's what we really learned about from the data. So, I think that's the final takeaway. Data always helps in a conversation, even with Sales.
Markey: Yes, absolutely. Data always wins.
Burstein: So with that, thank you for taking the half hour to join us today.
Markey: Yes, and you missed, if you were there, hopefully we had a chance to see you, but if not, hopefully we'll see you like I mentioned in February at Email Summit and I think we've tweeted the all these links and put everything, the SlideShare is available, so I hope to speak to you again soon.
Burstein: Yeah, you can see those on #SherpaWebinar. And please fill out the survey at the end. It helps us improve these webinars.
