Quick Case: when content goes social

It’s been about four months since we published the B2B Content Marketing Workbook and we thought we’d report back on how the campaign has worked so far. It was the first time we’ve used social media as a vector for our content marketing and so makes a nice case study.

The Campaign
The above tweet is Exhibit A.  We ‘pimped’ our recent B2B Content Marketing Workbook on Twitter, in LinkedIn groups and with some judicious (and always relevant) comments on blogs we like. We also blogged about it ourselves, put out an online press release and featured it in an email newsletter to our own list.

The tweets got lots of re-tweets. One of these got us invited to guest blog on Savvy B2B Marketing and to do an interview on Connect the Dots by ClickDocuments.  And David Fideler, founder of the B2B Lead Nurturing group on Linked In, gave the book a rave review — (“The single best overview I’ve yet seen on strategic B2B content marketing…”).

All this activity then got us on the B2B Marketing Magazine radar.  They invited us to do a Webinar on Content Marketing with them (with hundreds of attendees) — you can watch it here (it’s about half way down the listings).  And a followup article (out soon).

The eBook itself took a few days to write (but a few years to be able to write). Design took less than a week (not counting Stuart’s faffing around) (bloody Stuart) (worth it though).  Pimping took about 10-15 hours over the course of a few weeks.

The Results:

• Over 600 downloads to date. About 60% are from other marketing agencies or freelancers (never a bad thing). But lots are from B2B marketers we didn’t know before and are happy to be connected to.
• About seven new business conversations – that came straight off the back of the workbook. Some are rather exciting (and all are warmly welcomed).
• An invitation to design an eBook for Marketo – we’re big Marketo fans and Laura Mishima was a pleasure to work with on The Definitive Guide to Lead Nurturing. Our work on this also generated interest from other companies.
• A tangible piece to use in new business meetings – it’s nice to leave something behind that captures our approach to what we do best.
• Proof that we take our own medicine – it’s hard to recommend content marketing to clients if you don’t practice it yourself.

So, all in all, a successful campaign built on the exact principles that we discuss in the eBook itself: create something that your prospects will find useful; present it in a clear, compelling way; promote it all around the Internet, especially on relevant social media; and stand back.

(BTW… Got the eBook yet?)