One day, David Cancel, the founder and CEO of Drift, approached the company’s CMO and announced that the corporate website would no longer have locked, gated content, meaning content accessible only after signing up for a subscription. He said, “I think we need to get rid of all lead forms.”
It’s easy to imagine Dave’s (the Marketing Director) surprise, as he is the one responsible for attracting, generating and qualifying leads for the sales team. How is he supposed to do this without lead generation forms?
But once David explained his position, everything became much clearer:
“I think marketing has lost its way a little bit. We’ve lost the importance of a great story and really connecting with people. We live in a content-driven world. Everyone wants more and more content, more and more content. And then SEO. Then keyword rankings and keywords. Algorithms and conversion optimization. All of those things are still important to marketing, of course, but somehow I think we’ve lost our way. Marketing today has become a gaming system and is all about quick wins.”
Content Without Limits: What Happens If You Ditch Lead Forms?
Over the past year, Drift has had to invent a new approach to marketing and sales. And it all started with the removal of all lead generation forms from the site.
Below are 5 important conclusions that the company's employees made based on the results of this work.
1. Content is more effective without lead forms preceding it.
Eliminating lead forms required a rethinking of the company's entire content marketing strategy.
The traditional approach was to continually publish concise, attention-grabbing content on the company blog, but to make the truly valuable content that would be an extension of all this content available only after a subscription, registration, etc.
The main goal was to publish as many articles as possible that were related to the “main” material, which would serve as a kind of bait and convince people to fill out the lead form.
This is exactly how hundreds of marketing teams around jamaica phone number data the world operated in the last decade. And it’s why many corporate blogs have become veritable content factories. But instead of creating content that would be truly valuable and useful to the prospect and contribute to building trust, many marketers were simply busy writing articles whose purpose was to get a lead.
Last year, Drift's marketers took a slightly different approach.
First, they started publishing only 1-2 posts per week (while many companies publish more than 5 articles per day).
Secondly, content began to be perceived as a branding tool rather than a means of lead generation. The emphasis was on creating beautiful and interesting stories rather than on keywords and SEO.
Third, marketers began tracking qualitative metrics more than quantitative ones (positive feedback from customers or industry peers is an indicator that content was well received and resonated with audience needs).
Fourth, a new marketing guide has been written that anyone can download for free. It's called Hypergrowth by David Kensel.
Of course, if marketers had followed the usual algorithm, they would have been able to attract a lot of new customers, but then they would not have received this feedback from customer success manager Isabella Krell:
Testimonial from Customer Success Manager Isabella Krell"He responded to my email, and it was the Hypergrowth book that convinced him to use Drift. I signed up for Drift about a month ago, but hadn't used it yet. David's book convinced me to go back and review the service."
As you can imagine, if the book had not been freely available, the conversion might not have happened.