Great content is a lead magnet. However, connecting with your leads when they engage with your content is a challenge. This is how we use our own product (and a few others) to engineer for timely interactions.
Content marketing is a powerful channel for acquiring leads. A whitepaper, case study or a recorded demo will help to nurture future customers. Naturally, we want to know the people who engage with our content, so we can follow up with them. That’s why good content is often hidden behind a contact form, i.e. tell us who you are before we give you this content.
We want information about the lead, but it’s not the best experience for the person on the other end. No one likes to fill out long forms. Even more so, when the value of what you’ll get in return is vague.
And here’s the problem. Customers will often leave or provide fake information to avoid spam.
We’ve experienced this problem too, and this is how we solve it with our own product and a bit of design thinking.
1. No “paywall”
We want our customers to engage with our content. We also want to engage with them. But we don’t want the “paywall” to stand in the way. Instead we’ll ask for their information later, when it’s timely and relevant.
2. Display content online
When it comes to printed word, you’d often download an actual file to your computer. This brings an extra few steps of locating the file and then opening it with a native application. More importantly, we lose touch with the customer.
Instead, we want to present our content online, where it’s a click away. But also, so we can track interaction with our content in order to engage user when it’s most relevant.
3. Engage at the right time
That’s the magic sauce. We want to be there for our customers when they engage with our content. To answer questions, address concerns and suggest next steps.
Here’s how it actually looks for the customer:
Under the hood
How can you replicate this experience for your content? There a few components.
First, we used a custom short domain to track link opens. You’ll notice the address starts with sglr.co. It points to a simple GitHub page, which you can spin up in 5 minutes.
This page houses three snippets of code.
One opens whatever link you throw at it in an iframe. In essence, it’s like opening a browser window in another window.
The second is our Signalayer player, which displays messaging campaigns on that page.
Finally, the third is a snippet for a chat widget from Smooch. It connects to Slack and lets us keep the conversations going.
Bringing it all together
In this example, we use our product intro deck. It’s a PDF file we’ve uploaded into DocDroid. It gives you a link to your document with a convenient viewer, which works in the browser.
We then open this link in an iframe on our Github page.
Now, we use our own product – Signalayer – to set up a Notification messaging campaign. It’s set to trigger 15 seconds after user has loaded the page. Alternatively, you can target scroll to a particular slide.
Signalayer campaigns are flexible, links and buttons can perform various actions. In this case the link Start chat opens Smooch chat widget.
And there we have it. Let us know if you’d like to try this with your content. We’ll give you a quick demo and help you get everything set up.