Content or Lead Generation – which one yields better results?

When it comes to growing your business, especially in the SME category where budgets and resources tend to be particularly limited, the question of content vs leads comes up far more frequently than you might think.

Of course the marketing mix is infinitely more complex and reducing the discussion to these two areas might seem far too simplistic. But great depth and scope exist in both terms, content and leads, and spoiler alert, I believe they need to mesh together tightly in the context of your wider business development strategy in order to produce results. This blog, aimed more specifically at sales leaders in SME organisations, focuses on why that’s the case.

But first, what do we mean by content? I refer here to the inventory of all the material you have at your disposal. From thought leadership, to product information, web pages, infographics, press releases, webinars, videos, user manuals, etc. If you’ve not done so already, a really useful exercise is to categorise the content you’ve built according to your key buyer personas, and the stages of the buying cycle. That way you can quickly identify gaps, for example you might see that your inventory covers the awareness stage for the “IT Manager” segment, but your sales representatives lack material to back their pitch to the executive category at the evaluation stage.

It goes without saying that a content management system that displays and searches for the right information becomes essential when your content library reaches a certain size. Otherwise sales representatives and account managers will spend far too long looking for the right document (and often find the wrong one), instead of talking to your prospects and clients to generate revenue.

Much more can (and will in a future blog) be said about content marketing, but hopefully this gives a bit of context to the first part of this article.

Now, lead generation… What do I mean by that? For the sake of this blog, I’ll restrict the definition to the various campaigns focused on generating new prospects for your business. Tradeshows, pay-per-click campaigns, placements with targeted media, … Again, I promise you a future blog detailing my views on lead generation, as well as demand generation. But generally speaking, it is critical to organise a wide-ranging set of campaigns that generate or convert the right leads, in the right regions, for your key buyer personas at all stages of the buyer cycle, throughout the year.

The outcome of these campaigns tends to be a list of contacts, a good proportion of which will be targeted prospects (or something went very wrong in the process!). The recently-implemented GDPR regulation has considerably complicated your ability to contact or import these contacts into your CRM system without the appropriate consent but this just means you need to bear this in mind when executing your campaigns. More about this in a previous blog you can find here.

Inevitably you’ll encounter the sales vs marketing conversation of “is this really a lead?”. Years of experience (including a few moments where I admit I might have lost my cool) have taught me to see any potential gap as a constant opportunity to align marketing and sales objectives, and ensuring processes are in place to optimise lead quality at every step. After all, marketing professionals have as much interest in generating useless leads as sales professionals have in contacting them!

Now that I’ve shared with you a few thoughts on the importance of both content and leads, I’ll go back to what I mentioned at first – you simply cannot choose. If your budget is restricted, then split it (a few other key items need to go on the list too I’m afraid for a successful marketing plan that delivers results). But by no means should you decide to sacrifice content for leads or vice versa. And the main reason for that is, campaigns (in almost all cases) need powerful and relevant content to generate and nurture the right leads, but without the channels to get the word out, content will fail to deliver ROI. The combination of these two pillars of the marketing mix can be extraordinary, but only with:

• the right strategy to drive it all

• a continuous endeavour to align sales and marketing

• careful consideration given to the format you choose for specific channels

• transparency at every level

• never-ending - quarter after quarter - commitment to delivering not only to marketing metrics, but to business KPIs.