MSP Marketing Myth "We need Whitepapers and Ebooks to Get Leads”

This is our last episode for the MSP Marketing Myths series. This one is about the myth that we need more landing pages, eBooks and whitepapers to generate leads. It's a lie and here's why.

 

There are a number of reasons the eBooks strategy doesn't work so well in 2019. Note that date. I'm being explicit about the present because a few years back, eBooks worked great for lead generation.

For example, back in 2012, when I was an inbound consultant for HubSpot, a benchmark conversion rate for an eBook download was 10%. Pretty good!

But today we're lucky to convert at 2.35%! What the hell happened? 

Here's what happened.

"Over the last two years [2017 & 2018] alone 90 percent of the data in the world was generated. This is worth re-reading! -Bernard Marr

The internet is exploding!

Think about it. A whitepaper may have been unique content in 2012, but today, we can find the same content in a thousand blogs. No need to fill out a form to get answers.  

Almost any topic we can imagine has a blog about it. It's no wonder conversion rates have dropped so drastically.

The other reason most eBooks stink for lead generation is that they are expensive campaigns. A whitepaper could take a good deal of your time to write, or a hefty penny to pay a specialized writer to complete. Meanwhile, there's more to the campaign than the eBook;  we need the following assets too:

  • Call-to-action button to drive people TO the landing page (COSTS MONEY)
  • Landing page with a form on it (COSTS MONEY)
  • Thank you page to redirect people to AFTER they fill out the form (COSTS MONEY)

Bottomline is this.

Whitepapers and ebooks have crappy conversion rates, and they are really expensive to make, which means this lead generation strategy needs a serious slap in the face.

Here's a different approach to getting leads.

Take the same amount of resources that you were going to invest in a whitepaper campaign and instead make 5 or 6 blog posts, have only one form in your blog that converts readers into blog subscribers and then call those leads!

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