Creating and Promoting Remarkable Content to Generate Leads [Customer Story]

A few years ago we at Laurelville began hosting a grief retreat for widowed individuals. While it is by all accounts a rich and meaningful event, the retreat certainly hasn’t been an easy sell when it comes to marketing. Attendance has ranged from 10 to 15 participants each year, making the retreat — however worthwhile it may be — hardly economically viable for us.

Given the niche audience we were trying to reach and our belief in HubSpot’s approach to inbound marketing by creating valuable content, we decided to work with the facilitator of the retreat to publish an eBook entitled Life After Losing a Spouse.

Result:  Our free eBook has generated 68 new leads in its first six months alone

 

Here’s how we did it:

Step 1: Create valuable content

We first identified what need our product (specialty retreats) addresses and built our eBook around that. It was helpful for us to partner with the retreat facilitator — a published author who has personal experience with losing a spouse — to provide helpful information to people who have become widowed. We also created a call to action and social media sharing links at the end of the eBook to encourage readers to learn more about the retreat and share the eBook with others.

Learn how to make a well-designed ebook.

Step 2: Build a landing page for the content using HubSpot’s landing page application

We used HubSpot’s landing page application to create a landing page explaining the value of the offer, as well as a form to collect some basic information about visitors who converted. After converting, our new leads were directed to a separate URL to retrieve the eBook. We then sent an automated email to these new leads containing the link to the eBook as well as information about the grief retreat.

Learn how to build an effective landing page in HubSpot.

Step 3: Create a Call-to-Action that links to your landing page.

In order to drive traffic to our landing page, we created a compelling call to action that encouraged visitors to download the ebook. We included an image of the eBook cover as well as a button that we created with HubSpot’s button builder.

Learn how to create a call-to-action button using HubSpot.

Step 4: Promote your valuable content using social media, email marketing, etc.

To increase our reach, we created some brand journalism and blog posts around the creation of the eBook. We shared this content on Facebook and Twitter, then distributed it via email to our newsletter subscriber list using HubSpot’s Email Manager. These efforts drove visitors to our landing page; an additional benefit was that we attracted inbound links and improved our search rankings for relevant keyword phrases.

Learn how to use HubSpot’s social media publishing tool.
Learn how to use HubSpot’s email marketing application.

The HubSpot tools we used the most were the Landing Page tool, Call-to-Action tool, Social Media Publishing tool, and the Email Manager.

Brian Paff is the director of communications for Laurelville Mennonite Church Center, a retreat, camp, and conference center in Pennsylvania’s Laurel Highlands. Laurelville has been a HubSpot customer since June 2011.