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:
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.
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!
