In David Meerman Scott’s ebook Lose Control of your Marketing, he talks a lot about the spread of ideas. Note his ebook is a preview for his upcoming book called World Wide Rave, due out in March.
There are some great examples of how ideas spread in his ebook on the Top 10 unsigned bands from MySpace who just give away their music as a means of promoting themselves. Artists like Bec Hollcraft who know full well the goal is attracting enough attention and leveraging buzz marketing to get a record deal.
It reminds me of the Grateful Dead who were hip to this idea long before Bec was even born. They had special taper sections where deadheads could tape FOR FREE the bands show and reproduce it for anyone who asked (so long as there was no exchange of money, which was one thing the band was against).
Its brings into view the theory that the best way to spread ideas is to give them away for free …. then why do B2B marketers have whitepapers hidden behind signup form?
While I believe in the theory …. I am also a prime offender of the theory …. so I went back over our data to test this theory and here is what I found:
A third of the papers downloaded on our corporate site are protected
That means free whitepapers were downloaded 67% more than, what we like to call, protected whitepapers.
If you think about the last few products you purchased. Did you see an ad on TV? Did you answer a direct mail piece? Go to a tradeshow to learn more about it? If you’re like most people, you didn’t do any of those things …. you just went online.
82% of C level execs said they use search engines to get business information Source: B2B Magazine
So it begs the question – why are we marketing in the same old ways?
Tags: Buzz Marketing, Content Marketing, interactive marketing, Lead Generation, Lead Nurturing
Paul – I agree with you – partially.
I even had an extreme case last week where I was on a site that had a resource library with a login/password. That is really old school! I actually believe that adding a short, relevant form before a key piece of information is important as it’s part of the qualification process and should not frighten away those that are truly interested in your product/service. However, this process must be simplified so if the same web visitor tries to download another white paper for example, they should not have to provide the same information again. In addition, marketers should pre-populate forms as much as possible (especially if it’s a form that is accessed from an email). The goal for marketers is to make this as easy as possible for prospects but also to use forms to generate and qualify leads. In addition marketers should be able to measure which key pieces of content and how many touches resulted in generating opportunities and closed deals.
@chadhorenfeldt
Chad
I think you have some great points about marketers needing to make it easy but it doesnt truly embrace the world wide rave concept
here is my suggestion and what I am pursuing
how about removing the reg form completely and adding it to the thank you page with text like
If you liked this paper – you can sign up for regular updates of papers just like this by clicking here>
this way you get the benefit of the world wide rave and you get a chance to get the biz dev benefit
P
Thanks for the quick response! This is definitely worth testing. If you hear of any success stories on this, please DM me. When I attended a Marketing Experiments landing page session last year, we discussed a similar example to the one that you listed above but it was more around asking for additional pieces of information on the confirmation page. I will be watching for the World Wide Rave. This will definitely require a mind shift for marketers and the way that that they measure “success”.
@chadhorenfeldt