Tom Pick, a consultant with KC Associates, shares how he generated an 80% increase in conversions for his client’s whitepaper lead generation campaign using PDFSalesLeads.
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Vitrium: Tom, can you tell us about your company, your role within it and the products, services, and solutions you provide?
Tom: I am with an agency called KC Associates. We work exclusively with B2B technology companies here in the Twin Cities. And I do a few projects outside of KCA as well. There’s some clients who don’t fit with the KCA model.
I help clients with online-marketing initiatives. So that can be anything from social media, to search engine optimization, to online lead generation, which is where the PDFSalesLeads product comes in. I help them publish whitepapers and then promote those to generate leads, as well as webinar registrations and other incentives for response. But whitepapers tend to be a big part of the B2B online lead-generation work that I do.
Vitrium: What are some of the ways you publish documents online?
Tom: We have helped clients in various ways. We’ve done video, podcasts, e-books. But whitepapers are certainly the most popular and common option, particularly on the lead-gen side. We do other types of collateral as well- case studies, product sheets, product briefs, and PR. But again, a lot of it comes back to the white papers for thought leadership, marketing, and lead generation.
Vitrium: What are some of the hurdles you experienced with publishing documents meant for lead generation and tracking before PDFSalesLeads?
Tom: The classic story of “between a rock and a hard place.” When we’ve published whitepapers and other things with no gating factor — in other words, just freely available — we get a lot of downloads. But of course none of those can be tracked. We don’t know who downloaded the product unless someone happens to call or otherwise raise their hand and say, “Hey, I was one of the people who downloaded this.
For lead-generation purposes we’ve often put up contact forms to gate the content. So a person had to give us their name, email, and company name before downloading the whitepaper.
That’s great for generating leads, but the problem is the download rate falls way off when you do that, because there are a lot of people who may not want to divulge that information upfront. They have an interest in the content, but it may not be a sufficient interest to give away their information or they may be worried about having a salesperson contact them right away.
So if we don’t gate it, we get lots of downloads but no leads. If we do gate it, we get leads but the number of downloads goes way down. And that’s one of the biggest challenges or frustrations that we’ve faced in trying to balance getting valuable content out there to the market on behalf of clients while also generating leads for them.
Vitrium: What’s the objective of your latest whitepaper?
Tom: The objective of this latest whitepaper was lead generation. It was from a company that provides sales training. They work with a lot of big-company technology partners. Sometimes directly with those companies, but more often with the smaller resellers on the local level who are out selling these technology products on behalf of some of these big technology vendors, and helping them to improve their sales practices, particularly their sales-leadership practices.
So this whitepaper was really about what should an effective sales leader be doing, and it’s a very helpful paper for thought leadership, marketing, and lead generation.
The objective of the lead generation was trying to reach the sales-group leaders, managers and vice presidents, and get them to download the whitepaper because it’s helpful information for them, but also get their contact information to see if they may be interested in more comprehensive sales-leadership training.
Vitrium: How did you discover PDFSalesLeads?
Tom: I had originally been contacted by someone from Vitrium about another product called Docmetrics, and I had taken a look at that product and actually written a blog post about it at the time. But for various reasons it wasn’t quite the right solution for the companies I was working with, so I never used that product with a client.
However, I kept in touch with the folks there, and when PDFSalesLeads was announced I was invited to take a look at that as well. It fit very well with a client I was working with at the time, and we decided to give that a try. It’s worked very well.
Vitrium: When PDFSalesLeads came into the picture, what features did you see as an advantage for you?
Tom: It was very seamless in terms of it being technology platform-independent. So whether people were using Windows, Mac, or something else wasn’t an issue. It worked regardless. It also didn’t require flash plug-ins to work, so it was a very elegant solution in terms of not imposing anything additional on the user, the person who downloaded the whitepaper, in order to complete the form and view the content.
Vitrium: What were some of the goals you wanted PDFSalesLeads to help you achieve?
Tom: The goal was to solve that quandary of gated versus un-gated content and try to get the best of both worlds – to get a lot of downloads, but also to generate a higher percentage of leads than what we were getting with traditional gated contact forms.
Certainly the biggest advantage has been a significant increase in the number of leads that were generated. A nice feature of the product is that it does allow the skip button. So the user has the option of whether they want to provide the information or not after they’ve already read part of the document. If they still feel strongly about it at that point, they can click the skip button and still get the benefit of the content, and hopefully contact the company down the road.
But again, with using PDFSalesLeads versus using a standard contact form, we’ve gotten a significant increase in the percentage of people who are willing to provide contact information and become sales leads.
Vitrium: What problems could PDFSalesLeads solve for you? And did it solve them?
Tom: Obviously it eliminates the need to build a contact page and all the code that goes behind that in order to capture all the data and route it appropriately via email, or directly integrated into a sales contact system. It’s very easy to use, and it’s very easy to set up a form without any type of programming. It eliminates the need to build a contact form and a secure directory on the website. So it’s an easy solution from that standpoint.
It’s also nice the way the leads are delivered. It’s in a friendly Excel format, which is easily importable into Salesforce.com or ACT or any other contact-management system that a client may be using.
Vitrium: How are you using PDFSalesLeads to generate sales leads from your whitepaper?
Tom: We found a better response rate with the third page. So for most of the campaign that we’ve run with this particular whitepaper, we have used the PDFSalesLeads form as page three, or just after page two, of the whitepaper.
We did include the skip button. It has really increased the percentage of people who are willing to provide their contact information versus using a standard contact form. The increase in sales leads has been pretty close to a quarter, for both the downloads and the number of people who were willing to raise their hand. So we felt it was valuable to have the skip button in there.
It’s nice that the form has the company’s branding, so it looks very professional and reinforces the branding when someone sees the form. It provides a level of confidence that it’s OK to go ahead and fill out the form, and it’s safe to do that. The numbers have shown that the leads have increased and people are comfortable filling that out.
Vitrium: What are the results you’re enjoying with PDFSalesleads?
Tom: The particular campaign that we used this on was actually using both paid search and organic search, as well as social-media-driven hits to the landing page. So we had people coming in from various sources.
Based on our previous work, before we were using PDFSalesLeads, we had about a 4.7% blended conversion rate. It was a little less for the paid ads, a little bit more for the organic traffic, but that was about 4.7%. After implementing PDFSalesLeads, that increased to almost nine percent, about 8.6%, which is roughly an 80% increase in the conversion rate, from 4.7% to 8.6%. So a very nice bump.
An 8.6% blended conversion rate for a whitepaper like this, based on our experience, is a very strong conversion rate. It’s increased leads and increased business for the company.
During a two-month campaign, we would have anticipated about 40 leads from this, it’s a fairly small company. But prior to PDFSalesLeads, using a standard contact form we would have anticipated about 40 leads over the two-month period. We actually got about 74 leads, almost double that, with an additional 34 leads just based on using PDFSalesLeads in this situation.
The sales cycle for this type of training can be rather long, so I think we still will see some of the results from that. We’ve already picked up a couple of new customers, which, for a small organization is significant, from using PDFSalesLeads. And in addition, there are other discussions ongoing that certainly could result in more customers in the future as they work through the sales cycle.
The ROI is certainly significant. PDFSalesLeads is very cost-effective. The first $200 that we spent on PDFSalesLeads generated several thousand dollars worth of business. So the ROI on using this was very significant.
Vitrium: What are your future plans for using PDFSalesLeads for your other whitepapers or PDF documents?
Tom: For this particular client, I can’t imagine going back to the old way. I don’t think this particular client would ever launch another whitepaper campaign without utilizing PDFSalesLeads and going back to a standard contact form. Given the results that they’ve seen, they are definitely sold on the product. This would be the only way that they would publish a whitepaper for lead generation going forward.
In addition, the results that we have achieved from this have gotten the interest of a number of additional clients that will be probably looking at trialing PDFSalesLeads over the next couple of months, and certainly doing at least a test. In the case where they have multiple whitepapers, perhaps trying this out with one and tracking the results of it.
PDFSalesLeads has definitely gotten their interest. The significant increase in lead-conversion rate that we’ve seen is a big plus, and it gets people’s attention.
Vitrium: If you were at lunch with a fellow consultant or executive looking for a solution like ours, what would you share with them?
Tom: I would say that for any type of a whitepaper lead generation campaign that they’re running from a banner ad or a specific text ad placed on a website, or even for an organic campaign, that they definitely give PDFSalesLeads a try. Maybe run the campaign for a few months with a standard contact form and then switch over to PDFSalesLeads so that they have some data to compare it to, and see what kind of results they get with it.
It’s a little bit trickier to use with AdWords, just because one does lose a little bit of granularity with the Adwords reporting. And in order to keep an accurate tab on how AdWords campaigns are doing, it’s a little more work upfront. It takes setting up multiple landing pages and things, but it can still be well worth that additional effort upfront on an AdWords campaign because of the increase in conversion rate.
I would advise even people using AdWords to perhaps set up a trial campaign and give PDFSalesLeads a try and see what kind of results they get with it. Because based on our results, it can be a significant boost in the conversion rate, which means a significantly higher ROI on online-advertising or AdWords programs.
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