Lead generation is extremely important in a business-to-business environment. Sales teams rely on these leads to meet their quotas, but the big question that always comes up is, “How are we going to bring in the leads?” Today, content tends to be one of the most popular ways of driving leads as businesses use white papers, case studies, email newsletters, blog posts, ebooks, and infographics to drive people into a company’s sales funnel.
PAETEC, a former Fortune 1000 business communications company that was acquired by Windstream in August 2011, went the route of a paid email marketing campaign with eMedia. This program consisted of the company using white papers, written by our PR team at Martino Flynn, that focused on issues that were viewed as being important topics among its IT and telecom customers: HIPAA and electronic health records, protecting a network against malware, and additional security solutions beyond the use of only a firewall.
But no project is complete without a few challenges popping up along the way. eMedia selects the recipients of the newsletter, so it was up to us and PAETEC to properly identify and describe the type of individual they were interested in courting, given the content of the white papers. Also, the white papers were originally drafted in 2010, but were never published until 2011. Before the eMedia campaign, edits and tweaks needed to be made to ensure that the content matched the most current trends, remaining relevant in an ever-changing tech world. A third challenge that occurred was understanding the language of the IT/telecom industry. The topics for each white paper were highly technical, so multiple interviews were conducted to fully understand the topic and solution. We also relied on extensive secondary research that would complement the material collected from the subject-matter experts.
During the interviews with PAETEC’s subject-matter experts, we sought to learn why the issues are important, the actions that businesses need to take to address the trends, and what the solutions are that PAETEC offers to companies to meet these needs. We then worked with eMedia to set up the campaign that would send these white papers to appropriate targets working in either the healthcare IT industry or the mainstream IT industry. The results from the campaign were very positive, especially when compared to PAETEC’s previous online marketing efforts. PAETEC ended up receiving 806 new qualified leads from the eMedia campaign, at a fraction of the price PAETEC had paid for leads in the past.
Based on this success, Martino Flynn is currently in the midst of a new six-month campaign for another client, proving that with the right content, the right leads can be captured. In addition, in June 2012, the PAETEC eMedia campaign earned a PRism Award in the “Other Writing Projects” category from the PRSA Rochester Chapter.
