THE CONTENT

CONVERSION
PLAYBOOK:
YOUR GUIDE
TO CONVERTING
INBOUND
LEADS WITH
PERSONALIZED
EXPERIENCES
UBERFLIP GUIDE
The Content Conversion Playbook:
Yo u r G u i d e t o C o n v e r t i n g I n b o u n d L e a d s w i t h P e r s o n a l i z e d E x p e r i e n c e s

TABLE OF
CONTENTS

WRITING AND CONCEPTUALIZATION

MELISSA WANKIEWICZ

EDITING
LYNDA SPARK

DESIGN
BRIT THEIS
MELISSA CHAU

2 | Uberflip
The Content Conversion Playbook:
Yo u r G u i d e t o C o n v e r t i n g I n b o u n d L e a d s w i t h P e r s o n a l i z e d E x p e r i e n c e s

INTRODUCTION............................................................................................................................................ 5

SECTION 1: ATTRACT
DRAWING PEOPLE IN ........................................................................................... 7
Leveraging Buyer Personas to Create Experiences That Convert
Creating Persona-Focused Content ......................................................................... 10
Using Personas for Smart Targeting .......................................................................... 11

Where To Attract Inbound Leads ..................................................................... 12

Search ...................................................................................................................... 13
Social Media ................................................................................................. 14
Display Ads ............................................................................................................... 16

Strategic Targeting + Compelling Ads = Quality Clicks .......................................... 18

SECTION 2: CONVERT
MAKE THE CLICK COUNT ................................................................................. 19
Give The People What They Want .............................................................................. 21
What Makes for a High-Converting Content Experience? ......................................... 22

Making Content Discoverable for Inbound Search Traffic .................................... 25

Rethink How You’re Organizing Your Content ........................................................... 25
Encourage Netflix-Like Content Bingeing with Contextual Experiences ................. 27
Provide Opportunities for Further Engagement ....................................................... 28

Optimizing Experiences for Ad Traffic ..................................................................... 31

Get Personal with Your Ad Experiences ................................................................... 33

Leverage Your Tech Stack to Hit Visitors on All Channels ................................... 36

Retargeting Ads ....................................................................................................... 37
Chatbots .................................................................................................................. 38
Lead Nurturing ........................................................................................................ 40

Map Back to One Cohesive Experience ........................................................... 42

3 | Uberflip
The Content Conversion Playbook:
Yo u r G u i d e t o C o n v e r t i n g I n b o u n d L e a d s w i t h P e r s o n a l i z e d E x p e r i e n c e s

SECTION 3: MEASURE
EVALUATE THE IMPACT OF YOUR CONTENT EXPERIENCE ...... 43

Consumption .......................................................................................................... 45
Bounce Rate ....................................................................................................... 45
Source ................................................................................................................ 46

Engagement ........................................................................................................... 46
Average Session Duration ................................................................................... 46
Pages Per Session .............................................................................................. 47
Clicks on CTAs .................................................................................................... 48
Conversion Rate ................................................................................................. 49

Influence ................................................................................................................. 50
Lead Quality ........................................................................................................ 50
Attribution ........................................................................................................... 51
Impact on Pipeline .............................................................................................. 52
What Stage People Are Most Engaged ................................................................ 52

Your Content Experience Toolkit ................................................................. 53

Content Experience Platform ............................................................................. 54
Web Analytics Service ........................................................................................ 54
Marketing Attribution Software .......................................................................... 55
Customer Relationship Management Software................................................... 55
Marketing Automation Platform .......................................................................... 56

Final Thoughts: Personalized Content Experiences Drive Conversions ...... 57

4 | Uberflip
The Content Conversion Playbook:
Yo u r G u i d e t o C o n v e r t i n g I n b o u n d L e a d s w i t h P e r s o n a l i z e d E x p e r i e n c e s

INTRODUCTION
If we look back at the state of B2B marketing just 10 years
ago, it’s remarkable to see how much has changed. In the late
2000s, content marketing was really just emerging as a cate-
gory and brands were faced with the new challenge of creating
content that would garner the attention of prospective custom-
ers. At the same time, businesses were finding their way onto
social media too. When a company published a new blog post,
they’d spin up a quick tweet or Facebook post to drive traffic
to it. And some really savvy marketers may have even been
thinking about how to optimize their blog posts for search. But
again, if you were a marketer doing any of these simple things,
you were pretty much #winning.

Fast-forward to today, and content is no longer a nice-to-have

for businesses—it’s a must-have. For years now, experts have
been declaring the death of organic reach on social, and in a
world where 93% of all online experiences begin with a search
engine, optimizing content for search isn’t something mar-
keters can afford to ignore anymore. But just as the state of
inbound marketing has evolved, buyers have evolved too. Peo-
ple are constantly being sold to, and it takes a lot more than it
used to to not just capture someone’s attention, but keep it.

5 | Uberflip
The Content Conversion Playbook:
Yo u r G u i d e t o C o n v e r t i n g I n b o u n d L e a d s w i t h P e r s o n a l i z e d E x p e r i e n c e s INTRODUCTION

It’s our job as marketers to create experiences that our pros-

pects will actually want to engage with. But that’s something
that’s easier said than done. Getting someone to click through
an ad or search result is only the first step—the real challenge
is getting them to engage with your content long enough to
convert. To do this, we need to shift our focus to leverage
thoughtfully curated experiences as destinations. Why? Because
on-page elements like contextual calls-to-action, content recom-
mendations, strategic asset placement, and carefully planned
site navigation have proven to increase conversion rates.

In this guide, we’ll dig into some actionable ways you can start
attracting and converting your ideal audience by leveraging
segmentation and personalization to ensure you’re reaching
the right people in the right places, and serving them the right
content at the right time. From there, we’ll look at how to mea-
sure the success of your efforts by evaluating everything from
pages-per-session and time-on-page to attribution reporting and
pipeline influence.

Read on to find out how optimizing your content experience for

social, search, and ads will help you net a higher conversion rate
and start seeing more return from your content. Let’s dive in!

6 | Uberflip
The Content Conversion Playbook:
Yo u r G u i d e t o C o n v e r t i n g I n b o u n d L e a d s w i t h P e r s o n a l i z e d E x p e r i e n c e s

1
Section One

ATTRACT

7 | Uberflip
The Content Conversion Playbook:
Yo u r G u i d e t o C o n v e r t i n g I n b o u n d L e a d s w i t h P e r s o n a l i z e d E x p e r i e n c e s Section 1: ATTRACT

DRAWING PEOPLE IN:

Leveraging Buyer Personas to Create
Experiences That Convert

Having great content and a healthy advertising budget

does not matter if you’re not reaching the right people
and optimizing your web experience to cater to their
specific needs. That’s why identifying buyer personas
is the starting point of any effective inbound marketing
strategy.

Buyer personas allow us to get more personal with

our inbound marketing efforts and speak to specific
audience segments about their unique pain points,
which are significantly more likely to get clicks than
generic, one-size-fits-all ads or search engine results
page (SERP) snippets. (Seriously, a generic ad or
search result is basically the digital marketing equiva-
lent of shouting into a void.)

8 | Uberflip
The Content Conversion Playbook:
Yo u r G u i d e t o C o n v e r t i n g I n b o u n d L e a d s w i t h P e r s o n a l i z e d E x p e r i e n c e s

TARGETING CONTENT BY BUYER

PERSONA RESULTED IN A 171%
INCREASE IN MARKETING-
GENERATED REVENUE
SOURCE: MARKETINGSHERPA

Beyond high-level demographic traits like their business,

their career, their job responsibilities, and their most-visited
sites, a comprehensive set of buyer personas will include:

• How they are finding your website

• Which assets they typically convert on
• The number of touchpoints it takes before they convert

It’s important to base your personas on not just your ideal

customers, but also your current customers and how they
interact with your product or service. This will require some
digging into your CRM, leveraging client intel from your
Customer Success team, and potentially even surveying
some of your users.

The best advice we can give when it comes to personas

is to start with one core buyer persona and build out from
there. It can be tempting to create as many as you can think
of in order to cast the widest net for outreach, but you’re
actually not doing yourself a favor here. Having too many
personas makes it difficult to differentiate between them,
making targeting and segmentation harder on you. As a rule
of thumb, try to stick with three or four buyer personas at the
most.

Allow us to introduce you to Uberflip’s buyer personas!

Have an idea of which one you are?

9 | Uberflip
The Content Conversion Playbook:
Yo u r G u i d e t o C o n v e r t i n g I n b o u n d L e a d s w i t h P e r s o n a l i z e d E x p e r i e n c e s Section 1: ATTRACT

MARKETING MARY DEMAND JENN STRATEGIC SAMANTHA

Creating Persona-Focused Content

Every piece of content you create should map back to

a specific buyer persona—and in some cases, you can
create something that will appeal to them all. Whenev-
er we publish a new piece of content at Uberflip, we tag
it in the backend of our content experience platform
with the persona(s) it’s intended for. This makes it easy
to filter when it comes to building out persona-specific
experiences.

Beyond that, it’s important to also think about the

types of content that appeal to each persona as they
progress through the buyer journey. When it comes to
purchasing your product or service, who will have to
convince their boss, or their team? What objections
does a particular persona usually have, and how can
you ease their concerns? Having a strong understand-
ing of each persona’s needs will help you answer their
questions before they have them, and keep them from
looking elsewhere.

10 | U b e r f l i p
The Content Conversion Playbook:
Yo u r G u i d e t o C o n v e r t i n g I n b o u n d L e a d s w i t h P e r s o n a l i z e d E x p e r i e n c e s

Using Personas for Smart Targeting

After identifying your ideal buyer personas, you can start

leveraging what you know about them to create more
personalized ads and digital destinations. This infor-
mation can inform everything from the channels you
advertise on to the creative assets and copy you use. The
more detailed you can get, the better!

Some channels, like LinkedIn, will allow you to target by

job title or skills, while with Google Ads you can target by
keyword or topic searches. Either way, it’s important to
have a holistic picture of the types of people you’re trying
to attract so you can adjust your targeting strategy to
appeal to them on each channel.

Let’s look at the most common places marketers are

attracting inbound leads and what you’ll need to consider
in order to start drawing people in from each channel.

11 | U b e r f l i p
The Content Conversion Playbook:
Yo u r G u i d e t o C o n v e r t i n g I n b o u n d L e a d s w i t h P e r s o n a l i z e d E x p e r i e n c e s Section 1: ATTRACT

HOW TO ATTRACT
INBOUND LEADS

As nice as it would be to have customers coming

directly to you, the reality is that the majority of your
inbound web traffic is likely attributed to search
results, online advertising, or social. The thing is, if
you don’t take an individualized approach to not just
engaging each persona, but each persona on each
channel, you’re basically throwing time and dollars
out the window. Your strategy for each needs to be
adapted to both browsing habits and the nature of the
platform they’re coming from.

12 | U b e r f l i p
The Content Conversion Playbook:
Yo u r G u i d e t o C o n v e r t i n g I n b o u n d L e a d s w i t h P e r s o n a l i z e d E x p e r i e n c e s

SEARCH

When people are looking for content through search, their

intentions are typically more purpose-driven. They’re looking
for an answer to a specific question or for more information
on a particular topic. So while keyword planning and URL
structure are certainly important strategies for getting your
website to appear in search results, there are some additional
steps you need to take to ensure that people actually click
through to your content.
KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE
This is where your buyer personas come in. Ensure that you’re
not only optimizing for content that your audience cares
about, but you’re also speaking the right language. Tech
companies, for example, typically have audiences comprised
of developers, architects, systems admins, or other individual
contributors who are looking for in-depth, practitioner-fo-
cused content. This is a group you’re probably not going to
engage with inspirational thought leadership pieces, so you’d
want to optimize your content accordingly.

PROVIDE VALUE UPFRONT

Chances are, your competitors are trying to rank for the same
keywords you are, so if you want to make sure you’re getting
click-throughs instead of them, you need to write compel-
ling SERP snippets that show searchers exactly what they’re
going to get by clicking through to your site.

TARGET FEATURED SNIPPET OPPORUINTIES

Featured snippets appear above the top search results in

position zero, on top of the number one result. This spot can
be earned by optimizing your content to answer important
questions quickly, building brand visibility through voice
search, and driving more traffic.

13 | U b e r f l i p
The Content Conversion Playbook:
Yo u r G u i d e t o C o n v e r t i n g I n b o u n d L e a d s w i t h P e r s o n a l i z e d E x p e r i e n c e s

We knew a lot of people were asking this, so we optimized for it. While this snippet
doesn’t dig into the nitty gritty, it gives people enough information to know that
they’ll find the full answer to their question by clicking through to our website.

SOCIAL MEDIA

Your social media followers can sometimes be a tricky

audience to engage, particularly in the B2B space. It can
be discouraging to think about how your company’s ebook
launch post is sandwiched in between photos of someone’s
new puppy and someone else’s newborn baby—but that
doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it, it just means we need to put
extra care into crafting messages and using creative that will
make someone pause and click.

While search is about answering questions, social media is

about capturing people’s attention with questions they didn’t
know they needed the answer to. They aren’t looking for
anything in particular; they’re just browsing. So every post you
put out needs to catch their eye—especially your paid posts.
Some things to keep in mind are:
KEEP IT CONCISE

Ain’t nobody got time to read a lengthy explanation of what

you’re promoting. Save that for once people actually click
through to your website. Instead, make sure your post shows
the value of clicking through (much like a SERP snippet) and
leaves people wanting more.

14
The Content Conversion Playbook:
Yo u r G u i d e t o C o n v e r t i n g I n b o u n d L e a d s w i t h P e r s o n a l i z e d E x p e r i e n c e s

The best Facebook posts abide by

Twitter’s wordcount. This ad from
Shopify Plus is both short and sweet!

MAKE IT EYE-CATCHING

Social is highly visual, so make sure that whatever you’re

putting out there is something that will stop thumbs
from scrolling and make them click that “Learn More” or
“Download” button.
ENSURE IT’S CONSISTENT

If you have a brilliant flashy ad running that links to a

less-than-remarkable-looking content experience, you’ll get a
lot of clicks, but also a lot of bounces. It’s important to make
sure your social post or ad matches the experience they’ll be
getting on your site.
PRACTICE SMART TARGETING

When it comes to paid social, make sure you’re segmenting

your ad audiences by persona as well as stage of the funnel.
Showing relevant ads to someone at the appropriate stage
in their buying cycle will not only improve your click-through
rate, but will build people’s trust in your brand’s ability to cater
to their needs.

15
The Content Conversion Playbook:
Yo u r G u i d e t o C o n v e r t i n g I n b o u n d L e a d s w i t h P e r s o n a l i z e d E x p e r i e n c e s Section 1: ATTRACT

DISPLAY ADS

If you’re like most people, you probably tune out the majority
of display ads you see. It’s one of the most common forms
of online advertising, and most people have become
desensitized to them. So there are a few ways to make
your display ads stand out to ensure you’re both capturing
attention and getting those clicks.

BE RELEVANT

Even more so than other advertising platforms, relevance is

essential to making a display ad stand out. Some platforms
offer IP address targeting which means you can get super
personal about a particular company’s interests or pain
points. (Be careful with this one though, because there’s a
fine line between making something stand out and making it
super creepy.)

This Demandbase ad calls out

Uberflip by name and speaks to a
particular marketing challenge.
It’s definitely hard to ignore!

16
The Content Conversion Playbook:
Yo u r G u i d e t o C o n v e r t i n g I n b o u n d L e a d s w i t h P e r s o n a l i z e d E x p e r i e n c e s

BANK ON BRAND RECOGNITION

If you’re retargeting customers or website visitors and there’s

an element of your brand that would stand out to them, use
it! Display ad audiences are usually doing something else
entirely, so make sure you’re leveraging strong branding to
build recognition and ensure people are connecting each of
your ads to the others.
ALWAYS, ALWAYS SIMPLIFY

Display ads are not the place to tell your brand story. Most
display ad placements are small, making anything more
than a few words overwhelming and hard to read. An ad with
clean design, concise messaging, and a clear call-to-action is
always the most effective.

17
The Content Conversion Playbook:
Yo u r G u i d e t o C o n v e r t i n g I n b o u n d L e a d s w i t h P e r s o n a l i z e d E x p e r i e n c e s Section 1: ATTRACT

STRATEGIC TARGETING + COMPELLING ADS =

QUALITY CLICKS

Any modern marketer is no stranger to the likes of social

media advertising, Google Display Network, AdWords, and
SEO tools to effectively reach, engage, and convert audienc-
es. But how often are you served ads or content that you: a)
completely ignore or b) wonder what targeting misstep made
you see it in the first place? If we get better at targeting and
optimizing for these placements, we’ll be more likely to bring
in qualified traffic that will actually convert.

While organic search and social strategies are certainly

important to optimize, we need to be especially strategic
about the ad experiences we create for paid search, social,
and display ads. When we’re paying for each click, we want
to make each of them count. What happens post-click, well,
that’s a whole other strategy.

18 | U b e r f l i p
The Content Conversion Playbook:
Yo u r G u i d e t o C o n v e r t i n g I n b o u n d L e a d s w i t h P e r s o n a l i z e d E x p e r i e n c e s

2
Section Two

CONVERT

19 | U b e r f l i p
The Content Conversion Playbook:
Yo u r G u i d e t o C o n v e r t i n g I n b o u n d L e a d s w i t h P e r s o n a l i z e d E x p e r i e n c e s

MAKE THE CLICK COUNT

WITH PERSONALIZED
EXPERIENCES

When it comes to content, 85% of marketers report

that lead generation is their primary goal. At the same
time, we’re faced with the challenge of marketing to a
customer base where 38% of people will stop engaging
with a website if it’s unattractive. So while most of us
are on the same page about using content to generate
leads, there’s a chance that your website is actually
standing between you and that goal.

If you’re a marketer who finds yourself scratching your

head at why your bounce rate is so high, or why you’re
getting so much traffic on your site but very few people
actually converting, this section is for you. You may
have a perfectly good website. It may even be great.
But today’s buyers don’t want good or great, they want
highly personalized content experiences that will guide
them through their customer journey.

20 | U b e r f l i p
The Content Conversion Playbook:
Yo u r G u i d e t o C o n v e r t i n g I n b o u n d L e a d s w i t h P e r s o n a l i z e d E x p e r i e n c e s

Give the People What They Want

If today’s buyer wants personalized content, that’s what you’re
going to give them. But without a strategy in place, that can be
something that’s much easier said than done.

It’s also important to remember that personalization doesn’t

necessarily mean your landing page has a “Hi Steve from ABC
Company!” splashed across it for each unique user. It can
mean that your content is delivered in a way that feels custom-
ized for the channel a person is coming from, the business
area they’re in, or their browsing habits.

So in this section, we’ll look at what you need to focus on to

convert inbound traffic coming from search, social, and display
ads, along with some kick-butt examples that will get your
gears turning.

21 | U b e r f l i p
The Content Conversion Playbook:
Yo u r G u i d e t o C o n v e r t i n g I n b o u n d L e a d s w i t h P e r s o n a l i z e d E x p e r i e n c e s Section 2: MAKE THE CLICK COUNT

What Makes for a High-Converting

Content Experience?

Before we look at what will appeal to visitors coming from

each channel, let’s take a look at what makes for a high-con-
verting content experience in general. Besides looking good,
there are some extra steps to consider if you want people to
actually engage with your content.

YOUR CONTENT’S ENVIRONMENT

This is how your content is packaged and presented to the

world. We judge books by their covers, wine by the label, and
we judge content the same way.

When you look at your blog or website, consider these

questions:

• Is it aesthetically pleasing and attention-grabbing?

• Is the presentation and layout engaging?
• Is it consistent with what I’d expect from this company or
brand? Does it look professional?

22 | U b e r f l i p
The Content Conversion Playbook:
Yo u r G u i d e t o C o n v e r t i n g I n b o u n d L e a d s w i t h P e r s o n a l i z e d E x p e r i e n c e s

CONTENT STRUCTURE

Structure isn’t about how each individual blog post is laid out,
it really refers to how all of your content (blogs, videos, ebooks,
infographics—you name it) is organized and whether or not
someone is able to find what they need when they come to your
site with a question.

In order to evaluate your blog, resource center, or website’s

structure, ask yourself:

• Is the content organized in a way that’s intuitive for your

customers and prospects?
• Is it easy to navigate? Do you have a search bar and functional
navigation bar?
• Has information been grouped together by topic, role, or industry?
Is your content discoverable in more than one place?

23
The Content Conversion Playbook:
Yo u r G u i d e t o C o n v e r t i n g I n b o u n d L e a d s w i t h P e r s o n a l i z e d E x p e r i e n c e s Section 2: MAKE THE CLICK COUNT

ENGAGEMENT

The environment and structure of your content, or what we

refer to as your content experience, can either compel action
(more clicks, more video views, and more form submits) or
lead to a dead end. As a marketer, you’re going to want the
former.

In order to determine how engaging your content experience

is, think about:

• In what ways do you compel action?

• Have you used personalized and contextua calls-
to-action?
• Are you recommending more relevant content?

24
The Content Conversion Playbook:
Yo u r G u i d e t o C o n v e r t i n g I n b o u n d L e a d s w i t h P e r s o n a l i z e d E x p e r i e n c e s

Making Content Discoverable

for Inbound Search Traffic
Content discoverability refers to how you structure your
content. SEO is a practice that helps you rank on Google,
but your content’s discoverability is what’s going to get your
search traffic to stay on-page and actually convert!

Rethink How You’re Organizing Your Content

Ordering content from newest to oldest has always been the
“standard” way to go about organizing your blog content, but
when you think about it, very few people would actually be
able to tell (or even care) if a great blog post was published
last week or last year. What does matter, however, is wheth-
er people coming in through search know how to find what
they’re looking for when they do land on your blog or website.

There are a few different ways to organize your content.

The most popular are by type or format (ebook, blog, video,
infographic), by persona or job title, by topic, by industry, and
by vertical, but you’ll need to do some experimenting to find
out what works best for you. At Uberflip, we’ve tried a few,
but we’ve also dug into the data to see what works best for
our customers. In The Content Experience Report, we found
that marketers who organize their content by topic see 2x the
number of views than those who organize their content by
type. Crazy, right?

25 | U b e r f l i p
The Content Conversion Playbook:
Yo u r G u i d e t o C o n v e r t i n g I n b o u n d L e a d s w i t h P e r s o n a l i z e d E x p e r i e n c e s Section 2: MAKE THE CLICK COUNT

It’s also important to make sure your content can be found

through a search bar. If you don’t have one, there’s really
never been a better time than right now to set one up. Even
the most well-organized content can be overwhelming to
someone in search of a specific answer, and a search bar
allows people to quickly find it.

Lastly, you’ll want to look at the menu headings you have

across your navigation bar. We’ve seen as few as two and
as many as six—but the marketers who had more headings
saw as much as a 200% increase in content views. Why?
The more opportunities you can give someone to spot what
they’re looking for, the better.

TrendKite has organized their PR Resources Hub by resource type, topic, industry, and solution, giving
people plenty of ways to find what they’re looking for.

26 | U b e r f l i p
The Content Conversion Playbook:
Yo u r G u i d e t o C o n v e r t i n g I n b o u n d L e a d s w i t h P e r s o n a l i z e d E x p e r i e n c e s

Encourage Netflix-Like Content Bingeing

with Contextual Experiences
The way you segment your content can not only help your
audience find it, but also determine how much of it they
consume. Creating a dedicated experience for each topic
or pain point makes it easy to push people from one piece
of content to the next. Just think about how Netflix does it.
Immediately after you’re done watching an episode, it sends
you to another. As marketers, we can replicate this experi-
ence by immersing our customers and prospects in a content
experience tailored to fit their needs.

A particularly effective way to achieve this is by organizing

by persona or job title like Trimble has below. As soon as
someone lands on their site, they can select their unique role
and find resources that speak to their specific interests or
problems.

Trimble has their content organized by topic, resource type, and job title. Visitors can select their job
title from the “I am…” dropdown and find themselves in an experience that’s perfectly tailored to their
needs and challenges in that role.

27 | U b e r f l i p
The Content Conversion Playbook:
Yo u r G u i d e t o C o n v e r t i n g I n b o u n d L e a d s w i t h P e r s o n a l i z e d E x p e r i e n c e s Section 2: MAKE THE CLICK COUNT

Provide Opportunities for Further

Engagement
While there’s a good chance that anyone coming to your
website through search is looking for a specific answer to
their question, that’s not to say that you can’t strategically
place some opportunities for further engagement to try to
get them to stick around.

Say someone lands on the homepage of your blog right now.

Have you given them the chance to engage with you further
if they like what they see? On the homepage of our Content
Hub, in addition to our featured content, we’ve strategically
placed some calls-to-action for webinars and ebooks our
visitors may be interested in, as well as a subscribe CTA
where people can fill in their information and join our email
list without ever interrupting their scroll. By doing this, we’re
able to take advantage of inbound traffic and capture leads
at first visit.

28 | U b e r f l i p
The Content Conversion Playbook:
Yo u r G u i d e t o C o n v e r t i n g I n b o u n d L e a d s w i t h P e r s o n a l i z e d E x p e r i e n c e s

Check out another example of what we’re doing on our

Content Hub below. If someone lands on a piece of content
in our account-based marketing stream, they’re shown a
call-to-action to download an ebook on a similar topic, and
directed to some recommended content based on what
they’re currently viewing.

Whether you’re leveraging AI or manually setting up content

recommendations, you want to make sure you’re giving users
an opportunity to engage with a next step if they want to.

Here’s another example from HubSpot. As you scroll through

this blog post, there’s a flyout that appears in the bottom
right for a downloadable asset. But the flyout only appears
once you get to a certain point in the page.

29 | U b e r f l i p
The Content Conversion Playbook:
Yo u r G u i d e t o C o n v e r t i n g I n b o u n d L e a d s w i t h P e r s o n a l i z e d E x p e r i e n c e s Section 2: MAKE THE CLICK COUNT

If the user isn’t quite ready to fill out an ebook form (but
they’ve indicated they’re still interested by getting to
the bottom of the page), there are three recommended
articles to be viewed next.

If you continue through this process, HubSpot will

eventually stop recommending new blog posts and
suggest another gated asset. After viewing a few
pieces, a search visitor will likely be more warm to the
idea of giving you their information, now that they have
a better idea of what you’re all about.

When mapping out content recommendations, you’ll

also want to outline a strategic engagement path. Don’t
just keep sending people to more and more top-of-fun-
nel content. If they’re that engaged, give them an end
goal! Since B2B buyers typically consume five pieces of
content before making a purchase decision, five steps
are a good place to start when building out a content
journey. No matter where prospects start to engage with
you, your recommendations should gradually get more
product- or service-focused so that they eventually end
up at a demo request, free trial, or consultation with a
sales rep.

30 | U b e r f l i p
The Content Conversion Playbook:
Yo u r G u i d e t o C o n v e r t i n g I n b o u n d L e a d s w i t h P e r s o n a l i z e d E x p e r i e n c e s

Optimizing Experiences
for Ad Traffic
When people come to your website through ads, they have com-
pletely different browsing habits than anyone coming to your
website through search. This is because search traffic is pur-
poseful, and anyone coming in through ads may not know why
they found themselves on your site, they just know that some-
thing about your ad grabbed their attention. That said, there’s a
good chance they don’t know anything else about you. So for the
sake of your bounce rate, you need to make it your mission to
provide value upfront to traffic coming from ads.

A lot of marketers make the big mistake of using generic ad

destinations rather than dedicated experiences. Say you’re trying
to get someone to download your latest ebook. Your team has
put together a killer asset, you created a great set of ads, and put
a hefty chunk of marketing budget into distribution with the goal
of generating net new leads. But where are you sending your
ad traffic? If you’re about to say landing page—stop right there.
There’s a better way.

It’s time to consider creating an experience separate from your

website or blog to use as an ads destination. You can tap your
web team on the shoulder and have them build out some micro-
sites for you, or look into software that will allow you to build
out content experiences on your own. Either way, you’re going
to need more than a landing page to truly engage (and convert)
visitors, and this way, you’ll be able to have more control over
the entire buyer journey.

31 | U b e r f l i p
The Content Conversion Playbook:
Yo u r G u i d e t o C o n v e r t i n g I n b o u n d L e a d s w i t h P e r s o n a l i z e d E x p e r i e n c e s Section 2: MAKE THE CLICK COUNT

The most important elements your experience should include are:

A CLEAR CALL-TO-ACTION

What are people supposed to do when they land on your page? Fill
out a form? Watch a video? Make sure your direction is obvious
enough that the user doesn’t get confused and leave.

COHESIVE EXPERIENCE

Much like not having a clear call-to-action, a disjointed experience

can throw people off. Does the branding on your ad match the desti-
nation you’re sending people to? Does your copy provide them with
any additional context?

NEXT STEPS

If your content resonates with people, you’ll want to give them an

opportunity to self-nurture by engaging with even more. If someone
is particularly interested, a curated content experience will empow-
er them to skip through nurture stages.

Let’s dig into an example of this. We created this experience for one
of our ebooks. When someone clicks through a social or display ad,
they’re sent straight to the PDF, which is embedded in its own experience.
To gate it, we’ve set up an overlay CTA. This way you can still collect
leads without sacrificing your experience for a boring, old landing page.

Once someone has flipped through the ebook or downloaded it

for later, the CTA on the side of the page encourages them to click
through for more must-reads on the same topic. (If they like your
content, they’ll be hungry for more!)

32 | U b e r f l i p
The Content Conversion Playbook:
Yo u r G u i d e t o C o n v e r t i n g I n b o u n d L e a d s w i t h P e r s o n a l i z e d E x p e r i e n c e s

After clicking through, they’re taken to a stream of support-

ing content. Ideally, this would be the same content you plan
to use in your email nurture for the asset, but you’re giving
people the opportunity to binge it all at once if they want
to. Who are we to stop a prospect from hitting MQL status
faster?

Make sure that you’re leveraging your marketing automation

platform to track when a known user is skipping through
nurture stages, though—that way you can exclude them from
receiving emails about content they’ve already engaged with.
Talk about a bad experience!

Get Personal with Your Ad Experiences

People are more likely to convert on an ad if it resonates
with them so, if possible, it’s best to start segmenting your
ads by persona as early as possible. If you know who your
ideal customers are, you can even make prospecting ads
feel more targeted by appealing to a particular persona’s
pain points or goals. In this case, personalization can be as
simple as sharing something relevant that makes a person
want to engage with you.

When it comes to segmentation, it can get complicated (and,

let’s be honest, expensive) to split up your ads and distribute
budgets in a way that will make a true impact, but even starting
with two segmentations is better than one generic ad.

33 | U b e r f l i p
The Content Conversion Playbook:
Yo u r G u i d e t o C o n v e r t i n g I n b o u n d L e a d s w i t h P e r s o n a l i z e d E x p e r i e n c e s Section 2: MAKE THE CLICK COUNT

Drift creates experiences specifically designed to engage their Facebook audience with Drift Insider
videos. The way this video is cut and titled for social just screams, “Click me!”

Depending on the platform you’re using (LinkedIn, Facebook,

Terminus, AdWords, and Google Display Network are probably
the most common advertising channels in the B2B world), there
are a number of demographic and technographic criteria you
can use to target your audience. And if you use your own data
or leverage a technographic provider like Datanyze, the pos-
sibilities are virtually limitless. The most common targeting
criteria includes:

• Industry • User intent

• Company size • Similar audiences
• Company name • Interests
• Job function • Skills
• Location
• Keywords
• Topics
To get started with ad segmentation, you’ll first want to decide
which criteria you want to segment by. It can be anything the

34 | U b e r f l i p
The Content Conversion Playbook:
Yo u r G u i d e t o C o n v e r t i n g I n b o u n d L e a d s w i t h P e r s o n a l i z e d E x p e r i e n c e s

tech stack you’re working with allows—career level (executives vs.

managers), company size (solopreneurs vs. small businesses),
industry (automotive vs. healthcare), or marketing technology
(Marketo vs. Pardot). Then, you’ll want to spin up different versions
of your creative and messaging that target each unique group.

Here’s an example of a display campaign we ran at Uberflip. We

used Datanyze to identify which marketing automation platform
our top prospects used, then segmented our ads to target the top
three. We didn’t call out anyone or their companies by name—we
didn’t even have to know much about them—but this small level
of personalization got people’s attention.

From this par ticular

campaign we ran us-
ing Terminus, we saw a
6-13% engagement rate
on all ads.. When peo-
ple clicked through, they
were sent to an experi-
ence that provided more
context. You’ll notice in
the Uberflip + Pardot ex-
ample below that the branding is aligned, the content is relevant,
and there are a few pieces of content for an interested user to
interact with.

35 | U b e r f l i p
The Content Conversion Playbook:
Yo u r G u i d e t o C o n v e r t i n g I n b o u n d L e a d s w i t h P e r s o n a l i z e d E x p e r i e n c e s Section 2: MAKE THE CLICK COUNT

Leverage Your Tech Stack to Hit

Visitors on All Channels

When it comes to converting inbound leads, marketers often

focus heavily on optimizing for form fills or demo requests on
their websites, but forget that there are a ton of other channels
to lean on to push visitors further down the funnel. If someone
lands on your website through search or an ad but fails to con-
vert—or maybe they do convert and you want to push them to
consume the next asset in their buyer journey—there are a few
smart ways you can continue to engage them without scaring
anyone away.

36 | U b e r f l i p
The Content Conversion Playbook:
Yo u r G u i d e t o C o n v e r t i n g I n b o u n d L e a d s w i t h P e r s o n a l i z e d E x p e r i e n c e s

Retargeting Ads
Retargeting ads can serve two primary purposes: to capture
the attention of someone who landed on your site who you
want to bring back and convert, or as a way to consistently
deliver valuable content to your audience across all platforms.

As long as someone lands on your site once (provided you

have the appropriate tracking pixels installed), you can hit
them up with ads on other channels to try to bring them back
and get them to convert or engage with you further. The smart-
est way to do this is to place retargeting pixels on specific
pages of your site, then tailor your messaging and creative
based on their engagement level with specific pages. When
someone lands on your homepage or any top-of-funnel blog
posts, for example, retarget them with more high-level brand
awareness ads. Anyone who looked at your product pages can
be shown more specific ads about how your product can help
them achieve their business goals.

Retargeting ads are also a great way to build trust, engage

customers and prospects, and move them down the funnel
faster. Some people may spend more time on LinkedIn or
Facebook than in their inbox, and it makes for a frictionless
way to share new content. Don’t worry about people getting
annoyed with your ads—if you’re providing value, they’ll be
excited to see them knowing you provide great experiences.

How you execute this varies depending on the platform you’re

using, but there’s virtually a limitless number of ways you
can segment and retarget your audience based on where
they are in their buying cycle, engagement level, demograph-
ic or technographic data, the pages they’ve visited, and the
campaigns you have running.

37 | U b e r f l i p
The Content Conversion Playbook:
Yo u r G u i d e t o C o n v e r t i n g I n b o u n d L e a d s w i t h P e r s o n a l i z e d E x p e r i e n c e s Section 2: MAKE THE CLICK COUNT

Remember when we showed you TrendKite’s PR Resources Hub on page 26? They’re retargeting us
already! This is a great example of how to bring back website visitors who don’t fill out a form on their
first visit.

CHATBOTS
Conversational marketing is on the rise and the strategic ways
marketers are taking advantage of it are growing every day. When
it comes to inbound traffic, chatbot conversations can be a more
organic way to give people the extra push they need to convert.
There are a ton of creative examples of how to use chatbots to
engage visitors, but for the purposes of this guide, we’ll be focusing
on two in particular: chatbots that warm up unknown visitors (from
search, social, and prospecting ads) and chatbots that engage
known visitors (from social followers and database targeting or
retargeting ads) and push them further down the funnel.

CHATBOTS FOR UNKNOWN VISITORS: SEARCH, SOCIAL, AND

PROSPECTING ADS
In this particular example of AdRoll using Drift, we can see they’re
using a bot to qualify leads as prospects visit their website. For
net-new visitors, this 1) makes for a more engaging and interactive
experience with your content and 2) helps you determine how to
treat this person and what content to show them.

38 | U b e r f l i p
The Content Conversion Playbook:
Yo u r G u i d e t o C o n v e r t i n g I n b o u n d L e a d s w i t h P e r s o n a l i z e d E x p e r i e n c e s

This bot asks the same qual-

ifying questions that a sales
rep would ask when trying to
identify a prospect’s fit for your
company, so it’s not just a fun
and interactive element. This
information will ultimately help
speed up sales cycles and give
people a better overall experi-
ence with your brand.

CHATBOTS FOR KNOWN VISITORS:

SOCIAL FOLLOWERS, DATABASE
TARGETING, AND RETARGETING
Chatbots aren’t just for lead gen-
eration. They can be used to help
convert leads into sales-ready
prospects sooner. Oftentimes
the premium assets that will help
a lead hit MQL status faster are
gated behind a form. Someone
who registers for a webinar, for
example, is probably a lot more engaged than someone
who passively skims a top-of-funnel blog post. In order to
reduce any friction in the experience and make it as seamless
as possible, a chatbot can be leveraged to identify known
visitors so they can skip the signup process and consume
more content.

Another way to lever-

age chatbots for any
known visitors that
land on your site is
to use progressive
profiling. Connecting
your chatbot to your
marketing automation
platform enables you
to ask additional ques-
At Uberflip, we’re leveraging a Drift chatbot for known contacts
to skip the webinar signup form for our webinars.

39
The Content Conversion Playbook:
Yo u r G u i d e t o C o n v e r t i n g I n b o u n d L e a d s w i t h P e r s o n a l i z e d E x p e r i e n c e s Section 2: MAKE THE CLICK COUNT

tions that will help qualify and more effectively target leads in
your database.

LEAD NURTURING
Once you have someone’s email, there’s a lot you can do on
the nurturing front to help push your inbound leads further
down the funnel, direct them to more gated assets and,
again, leverage progressive profiling to help you collect more
information about them. Progressive profiling is typically an
extension of dynamic form fields and allows you to ask more
questions to gain information about a particular lead each
time they fill out a form on your site.

When it comes to nurturing inbound leads, it’s likely that

the most common type of nurture you’ll be employing is a
post-download nurture. When a net-new person fills out a
form on your site, you want to warm them up to the idea
of you before you start hitting them with product-focused
messaging. A good way to do this is to email them follow-
up resources that provide a friendly introduction to you and
your business

40 | U b e r f l i p
The Content Conversion Playbook:
Yo u r G u i d e t o C o n v e r t i n g I n b o u n d L e a d s w i t h P e r s o n a l i z e d E x p e r i e n c e s

To effectively nurture inbound leads, it’s important to be

able to collect information like job title or company size—
not just so you can determine whether or not they’re an
ideal customer fit or so your sales team can prospect
them down the line, but so that you can distribute target-
ed content and essentially get your leads to choose their
own content adventure. Much like ad experiences, serving
up relevant content is essential to getting maximum
engagement. And by using content engagement data,
you’ll be able to trigger the right workflows in your MAP
to provide one personalized experience after the next.
People are way more likely to keep engaging with you if
you’re sending them resources that are actually relevant
to their needs.

41 | U b e r f l i p
The Content Conversion Playbook:
Yo u r G u i d e t o C o n v e r t i n g I n b o u n d L e a d s w i t h P e r s o n a l i z e d E x p e r i e n c e s Section 2: MAKE THE CLICK COUNT

Map Back to One Cohesive Experience

Hitting visitors on multiple channels can be a great way to
engage inbound leads and website visitors, but if it’s not done
right, it can be confusing and messy for the person on the other
end. Seriously, you don’t want to be sending mixed signals at the
beginning of a brand new and fragile relationship. That doesn’t
bode well for anyone.

To get ahead of this problem before it even starts, make sure your
team is aligned. Ensure your retargeting ads match the experience
your inbound leads are getting from your nurture emails, and any
post-conversion experience is consistent with what leads saw
from you when you were trying to capture their attention. You
don’t want newly converted leads to think you were pulling out all
the stops just to woo them, only to drop the ball once you actually
got their information.

In some instances, it may make sense to go truly multichannel

and set a singular destination for social, display, and email. This
works especially well when you’re trying to engage inbound leads
with a particular campaign and can hit all new leads with similar
messaging on all the channels they’re using.

42 | U b e r f l i p
42
The Content Conversion Playbook:
Yo u r G u i d e t o C o n v e r t i n g I n b o u n d L e a d s w i t h P e r s o n a l i z e d E x p e r i e n c e s

3
Section Three

MEASURE

43 | U b e r f l i p
The Content Conversion Playbook:
Yo u r G u i d e t o C o n v e r t i n g I n b o u n d L e a d s w i t h P e r s o n a l i z e d E x p e r i e n c e s

EVALUATE THE IMPACT

OF YOUR CONTENT
EXPERIENCE

Once you have your campaigns set up, and you’re

driving leads to your website and they’re converting on
assets, the next step is to dig into some metrics to see
if what you’re doing is actually working.

We know what you’re thinking. Measure the “impact

of an experience”? Sounds made up. But there are
actually some key metrics you can dig into that will
paint a comprehensive picture of how your visitors are
consuming and engaging with your content, as well as
how those campaigns influence your overall business
goals.

44 | U b e r f l i p
The Content Conversion Playbook:
Yo u r G u i d e t o C o n v e r t i n g I n b o u n d L e a d s w i t h P e r s o n a l i z e d E x p e r i e n c e s

Consumption
Consumption metrics are the foundation of all of your content
metrics. They’re what will give you a baseline understanding
of whether or not people are actually landing on your content,
how long they’re spending there, and what they’re taking in (if
anything) while they’re on your site.

While this particular set of metrics doesn’t give you any insight
into how your content experience is actually impacting your
business, what it will do is give you an idea of whether or not
people are actually clicking through search, social, and ads to
land on your page. When it comes to consumption, we’d sug-
gest using a web analytics tool like Google Analytics. We’ve
outlined some key metrics you’ll want to look at below.

Bounce Rate
Your bounce rate is a metric you want to keep as low as possi-
ble. It indicates the percentage of visitors who navigate away
from your website after only viewing one page. The average
bounce rate for B2B websites is a bit higher than the typical
B2C site and sits around 61%. That said, a good bounce rate
for content sites falls between 40 and 60%, so if your bounce
rate is in that range or lower, it’s a good indicator that your
content experience is doing what it’s supposed to do—getting
people hooked.

If you’re seeing a higher bounce rate even after optimizing

your content experience, don’t panic. It may take some trial
and error to determine which calls-to-action fit where and what
copy drives the most clicks. Just make sure you’re document-
ing every change you’re making so you have a detailed picture
of what worked and what didn’t.

45 | U b e r f l i p
The Content Conversion Playbook:
Yo u r G u i d e t o C o n v e r t i n g I n b o u n d L e a d s w i t h P e r s o n a l i z e d E x p e r i e n c e s Section 3: MEASURE

Source
Looking at sources at page level will give you some insight
into what channels assisted with the consumption of your
content so you can optimize for them. Once you dig in, you’ll
probably notice that people coming from different channels
have different browsing habits. For example, people coming to
your site through an organic LinkedIn post may be more likely
to spend longer browsing around an experience while sitting at
their desks on their lunch breaks than people coming to your
site through a display ad and consume only one or two assets
before they bounce. When you dig into the user behavior of
visitors coming from each channel, you’ll be able to be more
strategic about what you’re putting out on those channels.

Engagement
When it comes to evaluating your content experience, en-
gagement metrics are probably the most telling. Presenting
opportunities for engagement is an essential element of a
high-converting content experience, after all.

Digging into your engagement metrics allows you to really

start to piece together a story of how your visitors are inter-
acting with your digital experiences and enables you to start
taking note of any patterns you’re seeing. These are the key
metrics you want to look at to evaluate how people are engag-
ing with your content and how to improve their experience.

AVERAGE SESSION DURATION

Looking at the amount of time people are spending on your
website per session is a good indicator of how compelling
your content is, how well-organized it is (or isn’t), and whether
or not it answers user questions.

If you’re seeing session durations of upwards of two to three

minutes but you also have a high bounce rate, this tells you
that your content is compelling, but you’re not giving users an
appropriate next step to continue engaging with you.

46 | U b e r f l i p
The Content Conversion Playbook:
Yo u r G u i d e t o C o n v e r t i n g I n b o u n d L e a d s w i t h P e r s o n a l i z e d E x p e r i e n c e s

It really depends on how much content you have on a page, but

for some campaigns, we’ve seen session durations upwards
of five minutes. A good way to ensure your visitors are staying
engaged is by using different media formats. Don’t send people
to a curated collection of eight blog posts when you could use
videos, podcasts, and infographics to tell your story and keep
them interested for longer.

PAGES PER SESSION

When it comes to content experiences, pages per session is a

crucial metric. The whole point is to create binge-worthy experi-
ences that will capture people in an infinite scroll and send them
through a journey that they can’t tear themselves away from—
so the more pages you’re able to get visitors to engage with,
the better!

To promote our recent trends report, we created this experience

and filled it with supporting content to help marketers implement
the trends that were highlighted in the report. Five of the assets
were one-minute tip videos our team created in-house, and the
rest were assets we already had on our blog.

47 | U b e r f l i p
The Content Conversion Playbook:
Yo u r G u i d e t o C o n v e r t i n g I n b o u n d L e a d s w i t h P e r s o n a l i z e d E x p e r i e n c e s Section 3: MEASURE

After distributing this particular experience, we found that

people were engaging with an average of 6.74 pages per
session. Considering anything above two pages per session is
classified as a win in the B2B world, we knew that this experi-
ence was particularly impressive. While this stream of content
is very top-of-funnel, we included a webinar recording for
anyone who was interested in learning more, as well as a CTA
that linked to more content to move a highly engaged visitor
further down the funnel.

CLICKS ON CTAS

Say it with us: Tracking links are your best friend! UTM param-
eters shouldn’t just be used to see how people are landing on
your page, but also what they’re doing once they get there. It’s
a fact that most people won’t make it through the entirety of
an 800-word blog post, so we place next-step CTAs beside or
throughout the body copy. If you’re tagging each placement,
you’ll be able to identify which is converting the most.

Looking at call-to-action clicks versus actual conversions will

give you an idea of if and where your visitors are dropping off
before they get to a gated asset. If you’re seeing a low click-
through rate, try spicing up your copy and creative. If you’re
seeing a high click through rate but a small number of people
actually converting once they land on your asset, you’ll want
to look at the experience on that page. Is it clear what a user is
getting, and how they’re receiving it? Are there too many form
fields? Is your page layout too busy? Does your landing page
have too much information on it? All of these could contribute
to why someone is clicking on your CTA but not actually
converting. Determining which one will involve some
experimenting!

48 | U b e r f l i p
The Content Conversion Playbook:
Yo u r G u i d e t o C o n v e r t i n g I n b o u n d L e a d s w i t h P e r s o n a l i z e d E x p e r i e n c e s

CONVERSION RATE
Ah, conversions. Impressions and clicks are great, but conversions
are what we’re really here for, aren’t they? We want people to fill out
the forms on our gated pieces of content, subscribe to our emails,
and register for our webinars so that we can nurture them and
eventually pass them off to sales to close a deal.

There are a number of factors that could be standing in the way of

your content experience and a solid conversion rate, ranging from
not having a direct-enough ask, to making the journey between
landing on a page and filling out the form too complicated.

In the previous section of this guide, we suggested using overlay

CTAs to gate your content so as not to interfere with the rest of
your content experience. We’ve found that gating your content this
way results in 7x the conversion rate of a traditional landing page.

As we put in all this effort to bring our audiences inbound, we need

to focus on providing an experience to keep them there, not send
them outbound to a static landing page.

49 | U b e r f l i p
The Content Conversion Playbook:
Yo u r G u i d e t o C o n v e r t i n g I n b o u n d L e a d s w i t h P e r s o n a l i z e d E x p e r i e n c e s

Influence
Too often, content is considered to be just a brand-awareness
play or a top-of-funnel lead driver rather than the engine that
feeds every stage of the buyer journey. When we shift our focus to
creating experiences rather than creating content, this becomes
all the more true. Proving content’s influence on pipeline is what’s
going to change your organization’s perspective of it. News flash:
Content DOES help close deals!

So let’s recap quickly. After looking at your consumption metrics,

you know you’re getting people to actually land on your page.
When you move on to looking at engagement metrics, you can see
that people are spending time on your pages, clicking around, and
filling out forms. And that brings us to influence, and the million
dollar question (or maybe the ten million dollar question—we don’t
know what your revenue goals are!). How is your content impact-
ing the bottom line?

LEAD QUALITY
Lead quality is what allows you to identify how likely a lead is to
become a customer. There are a number of factors to consider
when determining lead quality, but the most common are things
like seniority, company size, and revenue.

It’s important for you to understand the quality of the leads your
content is generating so that you can make informed decisions
about what you’re writing about, how you’re presenting it, and
where you’re promoting it. That’s why it’s key to know the per-
sonas you’re going after, what they care about, and where they
spend the most time online.

If you’re finding your lead quality is off, it’s probably time to make
some adjustments. Don’t go rewriting your latest ebook right
away though—it can be as simple as tweaking your ad targeting
or framing your content in a different way. No matter what you do,
not all of your leads are going to fit your ideal customer profile,

50 | U b e r f l i p
The Content Conversion Playbook:
Yo u r G u i d e t o C o n v e r t i n g I n b o u n d L e a d s w i t h P e r s o n a l i z e d E x p e r i e n c e s Section 3: MEASURE

but it’s a good rule of thumb to ensure your content and

demand teams are aligned when it comes to expectations
around the percentage of ideal customers you can reach
and engage with each channel. With social and search as
distribution channels, it’s likely that you will pull in a higher
ratio of unfit leads because that outreach is less targeted,
but for paid channels, you should be aiming to reach more
qualified accounts.

ATTRIBUTION
The purpose of marketing attribution is to tie revenue to
channels and activities along the buyer journey. There are
a few different types of attribution models, the most com-
mon being first-touch, last-touch, and multi-touch. Your
organization may decide to go with one or more of these
approaches, but it’s good to know how each will impact
how a deal is credited to your activities.
FIRST-TOUCH

First-touch attribution is exactly what it sounds like. It’s the

credit assigned to the first marketing touchpoint. Applying
a first-touch attribution model means that for top-of-funnel
activities like prospecting ads and paid search, first-touch
attribution will assign 100% of the deal value.
LAST TOUCH

Again, this is exactly what it sounds like. The opposite of

first-touch, last-touch attribution assigns 100% of the deal
value to the last marketing touch before an opportunity
was created. Say someone is highly engaged with your
brand, clicks on all your emails, and reads all your blog
posts. But filling out a lead form to download an ebook is
what pushed them over the edge to sales. That’s what will
get 100% attribution.

MULTI-TOUCH:
This attribution model is different than the other two in
that it assigns a share of the credit to multiple touchpoints.
There are countless ways to approach multi-touch attri-
bution, based on the number of steps credited and the

51 | U b e r f l i p
The Content Conversion Playbook:
Yo u r G u i d e t o C o n v e r t i n g I n b o u n d L e a d s w i t h P e r s o n a l i z e d E x p e r i e n c e s

percentage attributed. Some models evenly distribute credit

throughout the funnel, while other models assign larger or small-
er shares to certain touchpoints along the buyer journey.

IMPACT ON PIPELINE
It’s great to have content that educates and engages your audi-
ence, but if your efforts aren’t influencing deals, it’s difficult to
prove content’s ROI and get your team (and, most importantly,
your boss) to think of it as more than just a top-of-funnel activity.

To see how your content is impacting opportunities you have

in the pipeline, the best way is to simply look at people who
are in the open opportunity stage and see if they’ve consumed
any of your content. It doesn’t necessarily have to be their first
touch with your business in order to be meaningful, and looking
at what point in their journey they’ve engaged with your blogs,
ebooks, and other resources can actually give you a lot of insight
into how you’re impacting the funnel. Some questions to consid-
er include:

�Did most people consume your content before or after

they moved to the opportunity stage?
�How long are sales cycles for people who’ve engaged
with your content versus those who haven’t?
�In how many instances was your content someone’s
last touch before they spoke to a sales rep?

AT WHAT STAGE ARE PEOPLE MOST

ENGAGED?
Engagement metrics are one thing, but it’s especially helpful to
be able to determine at which stage of the buyer journey people
are most engaged with your content. Looking at this will give you
a good idea of whether you’re showing people the right content
at the right time.

The way you track this depends on what tool or approach you’re

52 | U b e r f l i p
The Content Conversion Playbook:
Yo u r G u i d e t o C o n v e r t i n g I n b o u n d L e a d s w i t h P e r s o n a l i z e d E x p e r i e n c e s

using, but what you’ll ultimately want to do is ensure that all of

your content is somehow tagged with the stage of the funnel it’s
intended to engage. Whether you’re sharing the links with your
Marketing Ops team to flag, tagging in your content experience
platform (CEP) or CMS, or using a spreadsheet to track links, it’s
a good rule of thumb to revisit it each week to make informed
decisions about how you’re marketing your content and how
you’re creating new assets in the future.

Your Content Experience Toolkit

Our CMO at Uberflip often talks about the importance of hir-

ing the right people, determining the right processes, and only
then investing in tech. We’ve reached the point in this guide
where we’ve got the right people on board (you and your team,
obviously), we’ve walked through how to create killer content
experiences to convert inbound leads, and now it’s time to talk
tech.

We’ve highlighted some technologies to consider that will help

you prove the ROI of your content.

53 | U b e r f l i p
The Content Conversion Playbook:
Yo u r G u i d e t o C o n v e r t i n g I n b o u n d L e a d s w i t h P e r s o n a l i z e d E x p e r i e n c e s

CONTENT EXPERIENCE PLATFORM

A content experience platform isn’t the only way to create

personalized content experiences, but since that’s what it was
built for, it’s definitely the easiest way (especially when you
start to execute at scale).

All of the strategies in this guide can be achieved using a tra-

ditional CMS if you get a little creative and get your web team
involved. But the real benefit of using a CEP is that you’re able
to regain control of your marketing channels by housing all of
your content in one place, easily build contextual content col-
lections, distribute purpose-built destinations across different
channels, and gather insights by integrating your marketing
automation platform and other tools. Think of it as your tradi-
tional CMS on steroids!

When it comes to measuring the success of your efforts, the

CEP’s analytics are going to be the best indicator of how much
people are engaging with your content experience. The advantage
of using in-platform analytics is that they’re designed to track
metrics in a different way than a traditional analytics platform and
will give you a holistic view of things like engagement paths, PDF
page views, and impressions of particular on-page elements like
CTAs and content recommendations. Plus, it’s a lot easier to look
at your metrics all in one place, leveraging the tool you used to
create your experiences!

Check out this checklist if you’re considering investing in a

CEP!

WEB ANALYTICS SERVICES

Google Analytics is by far the most popular tool for measur-

ing your web traffic. It’s a great way to track and understand
visitor behavior, identify what they’re looking for, and determine
whether or not your website is suiting their needs, especially
if your business isn’t ready to invest in a content experience
platform just yet.

54 | U b e r f l i p
The Content Conversion Playbook:
Yo u r G u i d e t o C o n v e r t i n g I n b o u n d L e a d s w i t h P e r s o n a l i z e d E x p e r i e n c e s Section 3: MEASURE

If you’re not using a CEP, you’ll really need to lean on Goo-

gle Analytics to pull data like time-on-page, CTA clicks, and
pages-per-session to see how people are moving through
your experiences.

A major benefit of using this web analytics service in partic-

ular is that even if you’re not super familiar with it, there are
a ton of resources to help you get started. That’s why it’s so
widely used.

MARKETING ATTRIBUTION SOFTWARE

Marketing attribution software allows you to track and

measure touches on your marketing channels and map
them to the full funnel. It’s really what will help you connect
the dots from first touch to closed-won and attribute dollar
values to particular marketing activities.

Your marketing attribution software is an important part

of your content experience toolkit because it’s what will
empower you to track inbound leads from the first time
someone clicks on one of your blog posts through the entire
buyer journey. It’ll help you justify ad campaign spend, make
informed decisions about how you’re engaging users on
particular channels, and ultimately see how your hard work
is impacting the bottom line.

CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP
MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE

All smart marketers understand the importance of not just

knowing how many people engaged with your content, but
which people engaged with content. That’s what your custom-
er relationship management software will empower you to do.

Salesforce is probably the most commonly used CRM, but your

organization may also be using something like HubSpot or Mi-
crosoft Dynamics. When it comes to measuring the success
of your content, your CRM is how you’ll create campaigns
for your assets to see how many people downloaded it,
where they came from, and who they were.
55 | U b e r f l i p
The Content Conversion Playbook:
Yo u r G u i d e t o C o n v e r t i n g I n b o u n d L e a d s w i t h P e r s o n a l i z e d E x p e r i e n c e s

Marketing Automation Platform

Your marketing automation is really what will help you

take your content experience to the next level, and actual-
ly plays an important role in being able to execute and
evaluate the success of your experience.

As part of your content experience toolkit, your MAP will

play two primary roles:

• It will allow you to gather insights from your

campaigns
• It will help you segment your audience to deliver
personalized content experiences

Your marketing automation platform is what ultimately

connects all of your marketing tools. It’s what will show
you what was viewed or downloaded and by whom, and
whether or not the people you’re attracting are a good
fit for your organization. Integrated marketing in general
would be really, really hard to do without a MAP.

Beyond helping you track success, your MAP will also help
you slice and dice your contacts in order to serve person-
alized and segmented experiences on your website, in
ads, and by email.

56 | U b e r f l i p
The Content Conversion Playbook:
Yo u r G u i d e t o C o n v e r t i n g I n b o u n d L e a d s w i t h P e r s o n a l i z e d E x p e r i e n c e s

FINAL
THOUGHTS
You probably noticed that throughout this guide there was very
little mention of how to actually write content that converts.
That’s because since the emergence of content marketing as a
category, that’s really all we’ve been doing. At this point, most of
us can whip up some snappy copy for a web page or publish a
well-researched blog post. But the area that most marketers are
neglecting is the overall experience. And that’s what really counts
when it comes to generating leads and, ultimately, pipeline.

57 | U b e r f l i p
The Content Conversion Playbook:
Yo u r G u i d e t o C o n v e r t i n g I n b o u n d L e a d s w i t h P e r s o n a l i z e d E x p e r i e n c e s

Great content may drive people to our websites, but in order to

create customers out of inbound traffic, we must be strategic
when creating digital experiences for the unique personas coming
in through search, ads, and social. While the purpose of content
marketing is to naturally attract customers by publishing relevant
and interesting material, there are certain things you can do to
tweak your overall content experience that will propel prospects
through the buyer journey faster.

It really all comes down to creating contextual, binge-worthy ex-

periences that lock our visitors into an infinite scroll of content.
Building a relationship with an inbound visitor has always been
thought of as a long game—show them top-of-funnel content,
stick them in an email nurture, and hope they convert eventually.
But with the power of personalized content experiences, we can
accelerate that process.

So now that you know the types of experiences you need to

convert visitors from your top traffic sources, it’s time to start
creating them on your own. We challenge you to really think like
one of your customers (or future customers) before launching
any type of experience. Set aside an afternoon to put yourself
in a customer or prospect’s shoes and navigate through—from
landing page to booking a meeting with sales. Sure, it’s a little
more work than sending someone to a static page and calling
it a day, but with this playbook in your back pocket, there’s no
question that you’ll start seeing a higher conversion rate on
your content and seeing more return from the hard work you’re
putting into it.

58 | U b e r f l i p
Ready to create your own
high-converting content
experiences? Request an
Uberflip demo to see how
you can get started!

Request a demo

uberflip.com