This was back in 2015, a time when MobStac was still working on getting its B2B lead generation plan in place. We had just switched domains from the highly competitive mobile apps space to beacons, a BLE technology that was already stirring up the proximity market space like no other before.

Being a SaaS company that has always openly adopted the content-driven strategy to drive itself forward in the market, we at MobStac were very sure that focusing all our efforts into nailing the right B2B lead generation is the right step ahead.

After all, MobStac was one company that tested the waters in the beacon marketing space by publishing a series of highly insightful blogs (that continue to see a lot of traffic to this day), way before we decided to switch from the mobile domain. These were the blogs that helped us engage with business leaders across various verticals and get a feel of the potential that a beacon solution would hold for them.

Before we dive deep into how we made the leap and sprung our lead generation plan into action, here’s a sneak peek on the kind of challenges that we were faced up against. This will help you gain a better understanding of why our content strategy plan worked flawlessly.

The Challenges

If you happen to be working at an early stage SaaS startup, chances are that you have probably run into one of these challenges yourselves at some point of time.

(1) The shift in company objectives

Back then, Beaconstac, our beacon platform was still in its early days. Everyone at our product team was busy tweaking the platform in order to make a full stack beacon solution that would cater to the proximity marketing needs of businesses across various verticals.

Needless to say, with the product getting fast in shape, our company objectives soon shifted from ‘Brand Recognition and Exposure’ to ‘Lead Generation’. And we, at the content marketing team of Mobstac, found ourselves up against a tight deadline to make this shift happen — in a little over a quarter, or in other words, a little over a span of 3 months.

(2) Small team, Big goals

Like any other startup, the content marketing team at Mobstac then constituted of a small group of dedicated content champions. We were a team of five people — a Content Marketing Manager, a Senior Marketing Associate (yes, that’s me), two Content Marketers and a Graphic Designer. At that point of time, in Nov 2015, we were generating a total of about 365 leads/month, with a blog traffic of about 9,596 users.

But in order to make content fuel our company’s growth while driving sales at a higher rate than any other marketing tactic, we needed to rev up our content marketing strategy. Needless to say we were looking at increasing our lead counts by 2x by the end of Q1 2016.

(3) Being an early bird has its cons

When MobStac made the switch into beacons, we had the badass advantage of being one of the early companies to be blogging highly insightful pieces on the impact of beacons in the proximity marketing space and how they were fast changing how businesses reached out to their customers. We also did a few guest blogs on leading media publications such as Internet Retailer, Proxbook and so on.

While all of that went a long way into helping Mobstac make a brand name for itself in the beacon market, it didn’t really back us up much on driving our lead generation plan to the next level.

We were under high pressure to ideate and come up with content pieces that would connect with our target audience, faster than ever before. And being one of the early companies to actually kick start a blog dedicated to everything about beacons, we didn’t have much of places to look up to for inspiration.

How we put our content strategy plan into action

Needless to say, we found ourselves in the dire need to come up with a content strategy plan and put it into action, if we were to help MobStac tread ahead on the road to world domination. To make things more challenging we were up against a tight deadline. Here are few of the major highlights on how to set the ball rolling:

(1) Equipping every writer on board with an extensive content marketing arsenal

In most companies, a content writer’s job is limited to writing blogs or other forms of content, editing those content pieces and publishing them — all while sticking to a tight deadline.

However, at Mobstac, we have realized that blog writers need to be fueled to do a lot more than solely focusing on getting the next piece of content to market by deadline. They need to have a deep understanding of critical content performance insights such as:

How do leads generated by various forms of content scale on in terms of being an MQL (marketing-qualified-lead) or a SQL (sales-qualified-lead) ?

Which blogs generate the most traffic?

What are the keywords that your content already ranks high for? And what other keywords should you be aiming at?

Is referral traffic driving leads into your system?

Is there any correlation between blog format and channels that generate most leads?

In order to empower our content champions with the same, we ensured that they are involved in everything, right from pitching topics to writing and publishing blogs to coming up with blog promotion plans, to lead gen analysis and content analysis.

Result -

Effective content marketing isn’t a ‘hit or miss’ practice. This data driven approach empowered our content writers to step out of the dark and gain a solid understanding of what parts of your content strategy plan are and what parts aren’t working. Digging deep into such metrics played a critical role in helping them work on their content shortcomings and churn out top-notch quality content pieces.

As a result, we were able to grow our leads by 107% while focusing all our efforts solely on inbound marketing. That’s right! We were able to pull it off without having to shell out our marketing budget on any kind of paid marketing campaigns.

(2) Generating more meaty downloadables

One of the easiest hacks to catapulting your lead generation plan to new heights is to gate your quality content pieces such as Webinars, Ebooks and Whitepapers. To fuel our mission we decided to schedule a total of 4 gated content pieces — 1 Ebook, 2 webinars and an online course — in Q1 2016. Now, this might sound like a lot of work for a team of 4. That’s where the need to work smartly comes into the picture.