In my last post I described how you can run effective lead nurturing campaigns with a limited amount of original content. While this advice runs contrary to the messaging of many marketing automation vendors, I assure you that it’s being put to use successfully by many companies today. By summarizing and linking to 3rd party content you can build trust and awareness in a manner that gets results. It’s a simple matter of getting more resourceful when getting more resources is not an option. Today I’d like to show you some examples from the real world I’ve encountered in just the last few weeks.

Summarize & Link to 3rd Party Content

Our first example comes from Small Business CEO, a blog that “provides resources and knowledge for the small business CEO”. We’d never heard of this group until we started seeing a bunch of traffic to our blog being referred from their site. I checked it out and found that an assistant editor named Amanda Stillwater had summarized and linked to a post we published back in June of this year. Our blog post consisted of tips on email subject lines. Amanda wrote up three brief paragraphs telling her readers that well crafted subject lines matter, agreed with our post and linked to it. It likely took her no more than 10 minutes to author her post – her great content – once she found our post and decided its content was good for her audience. The results? We saw a significant number of unique visitors click through to our blog, many of which poked around further on our site. Good for us. But what about Amanda and Small Business CEO? How did they benefit?
Based on the number of visitors that clicked through it’s clear that their readers felt the topic was useful to them. One commenter on their site thanked them for “the link to an interesting resource”. Amanda Stillwater, in this case, generated very little original content on her own and yet was clearly (and correctly) perceived as providing access to helpful information.
This technique would have achieved the same effect if her three paragraphs had been distributed via lead nurturing software. As part of a proper lead nurturing campaign, each recipient would have been scored based on whether they opened the email and whether they clicked through to the underlying content. The resulting scoring and behavioral data could then be used to better segment her audience ensure to the relevance of future content, whether original or 3rd party.