How many people are visiting your website each month?

Most marketers can answer that without a lot of trouble. You jump into Google Analytics or Google Search Console (or basically any other website analytics tool), and it's likely to be one of your top reports.

But what about this one:

Who are the people visiting your website each month?

That, for many, results in a question mark.

That’s also what visitor identification software is designed to answer. 

Being such a valuable asset, it's of little surprise that the market for visitor identification software is teeming with options.

Which one is best for your use case?

That’s what we’re going to help you find out with our guide to the top 11 visitor identification software solutions for identifying prospects and capturing warm leads.

What Is Visitor Identification Software And What Is It For? 

Visitor identification software tells you who is browsing your website, when they’re doing it, and what pages they’re looking at.

The degree of precision with which a given software platform can achieve this goal varies. The “What content are they engaging with?” question isn’t so difficult. Uncovering the exact person who is on your site is a little harder.

It's not a perfect science, but there are ways for you to improve your visitor identification.

For instance, with Warmly enabled on your website, you’ll be able to uncover 15% of contacts that visit your site and 60% of companies. That’s without you doing anything.

If you start sending outbound emails with Warmly with a bit of tracking code embedded, you’ll be able to identify even more.

11 Best Visitor Identification Software Platforms 

1. Dealfront (formerly Leadfeeder) 

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Dealfront is a European-based go-to-market platform, perhaps better known by its previous name: Leadfeeder.

In fact, Leadfeeder was acquired by investment firm Great Hill Partners, who also acquired Echobot, merging the two solutions into Dealfront.

Leadfeeder brought the website visitor intelligence side of the equation, while Echobot’s sales intelligence, prospecting tools, and CRM integrations round out the suite.

Why Dealfront (formerly Leadfeeder) Is A Good Option

Dealfront is popular in Europe, which makes sense, given they’re based there.

Basically, it looks like they’re trying to create the ZoomInfo (more on them later) of Europe. All of their contact data is in the EU, and even commentary from leadership is pretty ambitious:

“We want to be the biggest in Europe….It’s going to take a few years, but I think we’re succeeding…We have long had customers all over the world.  After the merger, we will be able to offer something that no one else can.”

Unique(ish) in the market is that Dealfront offers a free tier rather than a trial, though it comes with some severe limitations:

• You can only seed data from the last seven days
• A maximum of 100 identified companies monthly

Where Dealfront (formerly Leadfeeder) Falls Short

It’s tough to predict what’s going to happen from here on out.

Mergers like this occasionally produce market-leading whales. More often, they lead to a halt in innovation and just another clumsy product in an already busy market.

We’ll wait and see, but here’s what we can say in terms of cons right now:

• Website deanonymization is very limited, with no timelines or further information other than “this company visited.”
• Company data isn’t as good as market leaders like 6sense

Dealfront (formerly Leadfeeder) Pricing

As of writing, Dealfront’s pricing model is still broken down into the two tools.

For Leadfeeder, it's either the not-that-usable free plan, or the paid plan at €139 a month. For their “Sales Intelligence” stack (so, Echobot), pricing is custom-built.

2. Lead Forensics 

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Lead Forensics is another point solution for website visitor identification. Starting up back in 2009, they seem to have been around the longest.

Why Lead Forensics Is A Good Option

Lead Forensics is a well-known name in the visitor identification software space, mostly because they’ve been around so long.

They’re London-based, so data across Europe and the UK is a strength compared to US-based solutions, but that’s about it.

Where Lead Forensics Falls Short

The fact that Lead Forensics is a legacy platform tends to work against it more than it does for it.

In sales conversations at Warmly, we’ve heard a lot of complaints about Lead Forensics’ data quality being poor and not super detailed.

Their integrations aren’t up to scratch, and it appears they aren’t really innovating.

Also, being a tool that dates back to 2009, the UI feels a little clunky and dated.

Lead Forensics Pricing

Lead Forensics has two tiers (Essential and Automate) but doesn’t share any details about what they cost—common among legacy tools.

3. Clearbit 

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Clearbit is one of the most well-respected names in contact data and intelligence.

They were recently acquired by HubSpot, which is a bit of a game-changer for Clearbit (for good and for bad).

Why Clearbit Is A Good Option

Clearbit does a lot more than just website visitor identification; they’re also a best-in-class sales intelligence platform and have seriously good contact enrichment.

They also have a fantastic prospecting tool for identifying buying committees.

What’s most intriguing about Cleabrit right now is that they were recently acquired by HubSpot.

If you’re a HubSpot user, this is great news. It means you pretty much get your CRM enriched (once the whole acquisition and integration process is complete).

But it does have a downside.

Where Clearbit Falls Short

Using Clearbit now pretty much requires you to use the HubSpot CRM.

For example, as soon as you sign up for a free trial, it asks you to integrate your HubSpot account. This is a huge departure from where Clearbit came from, which was essentially just an API for data access.

If you’re using any other CRM, then Clearbit is unlikely to be a valid contender for you into the future.

The other big drawback with Clearbit as a standalone tool is that it lacks strong out-of-the-box playbooks for sales workflows. It’s always been a developed-focused tool, which you can then plug into your existing enablement and engagement tools.

This might change with the HubSpot acquisition, however.

Clearbit Pricing

Clearbit has a really basic free plan and charges between $50 and $275 a month, depending on the number of “credits” you need.

4. Leadinfo 

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Leadinfo is another visitor identification tool undergoing a lot of changes.

They were recently acquired by team.blue, who describe themselves as “an ecosystem of successful brands working together across regions to provide customers with everything they need to succeed online.”

Take from that what you will.

The “ecosystem” has been steadily gobbling similar companies:

• Leadinfo acquired intent-based sales engagement platform Leadcamp to expand lead engagement functionality 
• WebProspector.de was added to the mix to expand the company’s integrations to well-known tools like Slack, Salesforce, and SalesLoft

This is clearly a space that’s undergoing a lot of consolidation right now. Point solutions that only deanonymize traffic are no longer sufficient; companies need engagement features and intent data as well.

Why Leadinfo Is A Good Option

The truth is that Leadinfo doesn’t look all that different from the Leadfeeder component of Dealfront.

They’re Europe-based, offer basic visitor identification, and have been recently acquired, which brings with it the rocky territory of having to stitch multiple tools together.

Pricing is super transparent, which is a nice change in this vertical.

Where Leadinfo Falls Short

As of writing, Leadinfo doesn’t do much other than simple website deanonymization.

That might change with the merges in play, but right now, customers are still left with the problem of what exactly to do with the information they’ve gained.

Leadinfo Pricing

Leadinfo offers transparent pricing and operates on a usage-based model.

This is great for smaller organizations, who’ll pay €49 per month for 100 website visitors. But it does mean that your costs scale quickly as you do. At 10,000 visitors, you’ll be paying €499 monthly.

5. VisitorQueue 

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VisitorQueue is a somewhat unique solution here in that it’s focused more on the marketing than the sales use case.

Why VisitorQueue Is A Good Option

VisitorQueue has two main cards to play:

1. Website visitor identification
2. Website personalization

The second one is what makes them unique in this space: you can personalize website content based on demographic information (once you’ve identified the visitor, of course).

Other pros include a decent number of integrations for building a connected tech stack and decent visitor data that’s more granular than solutions like Leadinfo or Dealfront.

Where VisitorQueue Falls Short

Being marketing-focused, VisitorQueue isn’t the ideal solution for the sales team.

It doesn’t offer any sales automation or engagement functionality. You’ll have to stitch it together with a sales engagement solution like SalesLoft or Outreach.

VisitorQueue Pricing

VisitorQueue pricing is complex but transparent.

You pay based on the number of monthly visitors you’d like to deanonymize (from $31 to $239 a month), then add $159 a month if you want website personalization functionality as well.

6. Snitcher 

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Snitcher is another website visitor identification software solution based out of Europe.

The unique difference with this tool is that it is primarily used by agencies who want to identify website traffic on behalf of their clients to attribute traffic growth to marketing campaigns.

Why Snitcher Is A Good Option

Snitcher is quite affordable, starting at just $39 a month. They have a usage-based model, so you pay based on the number of visitors you identify.

They also offer an IP to Company API, so you can just use Snitcher as the data source for your self-built tool.

Where Snitcher Falls Short

Like many of the visitor identification tools mentioned on this list, Snitcher doesn’t offer any data enrichment, third-party buyer intent data, or sales workflows and playbooks.

Snitcher Pricing

Pricing starts at $39 a month for up to 100 company identifications and scales up from there based on usage.

7. Happierleads 

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Happierleads offers four products:

1. Reveal - Visitor identification
2. Prospector - Contact database
3. Engage - Email and LinkedIn outreach
4. Enrich - An API for contact data enrichment 

Interestingly, it's also available as a white-labeled tool built for the agile B2B marketing and sales team.

Why Happierleads Is A Good Option

The unique thing about Happierleads is that they appear to offer LinkedIn sequencing.

I say appear because they say they do, but don’t really offer any insight into how they do it.

For example, Warmly offers LinkedIn sequencing as part of our sales outreach functionality, and that’s sequenced through our partner Salesflow.

Beyond that, they’re another option for website visitor identification but don’t really offer anything unique in that regard.

Where Happierleads Falls Short

The biggest issue that appears with Happierleads is that their database is quite small, at just 180M contacts and 70M.

Best-in-class tools have contact databases in the billions.

They are an English company, so it's likely to be Europe or just UK-focused data. 

In any case, the database is limited for teams past a certain size, though Happierleads appears to be targeting the SME market anyway. 

For example, they don’t have any integrations and seem eager for you to use their own engagement platform rather than integrate with a point solution. 

They’re missing the AI chat functionality to round out sales engagement.

Happierleads Pricing

Happierleads is relatively cost-effective, with pricing starting at $120 a month.

8. Factors 

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Factors is a solid website visitor-tracking software with some unique revenue attribution functionality.

Why Factors Is A Good Option

Factors is built for the marketing team.

You start out with optimizing ads and learning about the customer journey. Factors also offers some solid reporting and marketing campaign attribution.

Marketing intelligence and contact data come from Clearbit, so it’s best-in-class, and they also have some seriously good integrations (such as G2 and 6sense).

Where Factors Falls Short

Being focused on the marketing use case, Factors isn’t ideal for sales teams.

For example, they don't have sales engagement functionality like email outreach.

Factors Pricing

Factors has a fairly usable free plan (actually free, not a trial), with more well-equipped paid options starting at $149 per month.

9. ZoomInfo 

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ZoomInfo is a beast in the account-based marketing space. Anonymous website visitor identification is just one arrow in their very stocked quiver.

Why ZoomInfo Is A Good Option

ZoomInfo is a full-stack GTM solution.

They’ve got visitor identification, intent data, marketing and sales ops features, and even a talent outreach and hiring suite.

The short answer to why ZoomInfo is a good option for visitor identification is this:

You’re already using ZoomInfo for something else.

Beyond that, it's not really a place to begin, and it’s certainly not suitable for startup sales plays or most small businesses.

Where ZoomInfo Falls Short

Aside from the fact that ZoomInfo is by far the most expensive tool on this list, a big drawback is that the buyer identification doesn’t actually tell you the exact person unless they’ve clicked a form or other link you’ve sent them.

Other solutions—Warmly, for instance—can help you identify exact site visitors without using previously-installed tracking code.

ZoomInfo Pricing

ZoomInfo creates custom pricing packages, which is pretty much the standard for such large tools.

What we do know is that most companies are paying at least $40k to set up workflows in ZoomInfo, with many annual bills digging into six figures.

10. Albacross 

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Albacross is yet another European visitor recognition solution. It does well at that, but not a lot else.

Why Albacross Is A Good Option

Albacross is a very widely-used tool for capturing warm leads. Many of our own customers have come over from Albacross.

Their integrations are good on the CRM front (HubSpot, Salesforce, etc.), but they don’t connect with outreach tools, which is a challenge for sales teams.

They also have a unique LinkedIn ads integration, and partner with Bombora (like Warmly) to enhance visitor identification with buyer intent data.

Where Albacross Falls Short

The biggest complaint we hear about Albacross is that their filtering isn’t as good.

For example, when Inbox Pirates approached Warmly to solve visitor identification, they found that Albacross would tell them someone visited from a company like Apple when it simply wasn’t true.

Beyond that, reports are that their data isn’t as robust as other solutions, and the big issue is that there is no SDR layer with sales outreach functionality. 

You can uncover who is on your website (with varying accuracy), but where do you go from there?

Albacross Pricing

Pricing for Albacross begins at €139 per month.

11. Warmly 

Warmly (yours truly) is a unique solution in this space.

Yes, we do visitor identification, but that’s only the beginning.

We believe that point solutions like Albracross and Leadfeeder don’t provide enough value to modern GTM teams. They tell you who is visiting your site but don’t give you much in the way of what to do with that information.

Warmly changes that.

Why Warmly Is The Ideal Visitor Identification Software Platform

Let me walk you through a typical workflow using Warmly, to help you understand the difference between us and other alternatives discussed here:

• A prospect from a target account lands on your website and is automatically anonymized using Warmly
• Contact data enrichment from best-in-class sources like 6sense and Clearbit, as well as third-party buyer intent data from Bombora tell you the makeup of your target account, who is involved in buying, and what intent signals they’re showing
• All of this data, along with insights into what content the visitor is engaging with, is synced back to your CRM and sales engagement stack
• The prospect is added to email and LinkedIn outreach sequences, tailored and personalized based on the data you’ve gathered
• AI chat on your website takes care of instant visitor engagement. When buying intent looks hot, a sales rep is notified via Slack integration and can take over the chat and even instigate a live video call.

Naturally, Warmly integrates with all of the tools you’re already using to execute sales playbooks.

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Why Warmly Might Not Be A Good Fit For You

At Warmly, we’re creating a new category: 

Account-based orchestration.

It’s about surround-sounding a prospect using an omnichannel approach, driven heavily by AI and automation and best-in-class contact and intent data.

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The key is that account-based orchestration is accessible to the SME, who typically doesn’t have the budget for all-out account-based marketing plays.

Which brings us to our drawback. 

Since we serve the SME market, we aren’t yet fully supporting the enterprise market with some of the features and integrations they’d ask for.

Warmly Pricing

Warmly offers 3 different plans:

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The majority of our customers are on the Business plan at $850 a month (billed annually). 

However, we know that many SMEs just want to get up and running. That’s why we built a seriously usable free tier.

You can get started with a free account right now without having to speak to a sales rep, so you can dive in and start seeing revenue growth immediately. 

Get started for free here.

In the ever-evolving digital marketing landscape, content marketing and SEO marriage emerge not as a mere partnership but as a harmonious symphony. It's a strategic alliance that blends the artistry of content creation with the analytical precision of search engine optimization.

In this article, we'll talk about the partnership between content marketing and SEO to understand how these two work together to help businesses grow.

Understanding Content Marketing

Content marketing is a strategic digital marketing approach that involves creating, distributing, and promoting valuable, relevant, and consistent content to a specific audience. 

The primary goal of content marketing is to attract, engage, and retain a target audience. Below are the critical goals of content marketing:

Building Brand Awareness - By consistently delivering valuable content, businesses can enhance their brand recognition and establish a distinctive identity in the minds of consumers.

Establishing Authority and Credibility - Creating high-quality content contributes to establishing authority and credibility, fostering trust among the audience, and making the brand a go-to source for information.

Engaging and Educating Audiences - By providing content that is not only interesting but also informative or entertaining, businesses can capture and maintain their audience's attention.

Nurturing Customer Relationships - Regularly delivering valuable content keeps the brand at the forefront of the audience's mind, fostering loyalty and turning one-time customers into repeat customers and advocates.

Content marketing is a long-term strategy that revolves around storytelling, building a brand narrative, and creating a positive customer experience. It is intricately connected with other elements of digital marketing, such as search engine optimization (SEO), working synergistically to achieve broader marketing goals and drive sustained business growth.

What is Search Engine Optimization?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a digital marketing strategy aimed at improving the visibility and ranking of a website in the organic (non-paid) search results of search engines. It is an ongoing process that requires continuous monitoring, adaptation, and optimization.

One of the key components of SEO is content creation and optimization. Create high-quality content that is relevant to your audience. If you produce valuable content that satisfies your user intent, people are more inclined to link to your material, which will help your website rank higher in search engine results. You can optimize your content using keywords in your title tag, meta description, and content for search engines.

How Does SEO and Content Marketing Benefit from Each Other?

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and content marketing are highly complementary, each playing a crucial role in enhancing the effectiveness of the other. Combining SEO and content marketing leads to a holistic digital marketing strategy. Here's how each benefits from the other:

How to Craft SEO-Optimized Content

Creating SEO-optimized content involves a strategic approach that considers both the needs of search engines and the preferences of your target audience. Here's a step-by-step guide to help you create content that is well-optimized for search engines:

Keyword Research

Start by conducting thorough keyword research to identify relevant terms and phrases. Use tools like Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, or Ahrefs to discover keywords that align with your content and have a reasonable search volume.

Understand User Intent

Analyze the intent behind the keywords. Consider whether users seek information, products, reviews, or solutions. Tailor your content to meet your target audience's specific needs and expectations.

Create a Compelling Title Tag and Meta Description

Craft a compelling title tag and meta description that includes your target keyword. Keep it concise (title around 60 characters and meta description within 155-160 characters ) and make it engaging to encourage clicks.

Optimize Heading Tags (H1, H2, H3, etc.)

Use clear and descriptive heading tags to structure your content. Include your target keywords in relevant headings to signal the hierarchy and topic relevance to search engines.

Craft High-Quality, Informative Content

Develop content that is comprehensive, valuable, and addresses the needs of your audience. Google rewards content that satisfies user queries effectively. Aim for longer-form content when appropriate, but prioritize quality over quantity.

Internal Linking

Include internal links to relevant pages within your website. This helps search engines understand your content's structure and improves users' navigation. Many internal linking tools, like LinkStorm, can help you. Use them to find broken links, identify opportunities for improvement, and optimize your site's internal linking structure. 

Optimize URL Structure

Create clean and descriptive URLs. Include your target keyword when relevant. Avoid using complex or lengthy URLs, as simplicity is preferred.

External Linking

Incorporate external links to authoritative sources when relevant. This adds credibility to your content. Ensure that the external links enhance the overall value of your content.

Regular Content Updates

Regularly update and refresh your content. Search engines favor fresh and current information. Add new insights, statistics, or relevant updates to maintain the relevance of your content over time.

2023 was a year of partnerships in website visitor tracking software. Leadfeader completed its merger with Echobot to form a new GTM platform called Dealfront. Factors.ai partnered with ABM platform 6sense, and CRM platform Hubspot ended the year by acquiring Clearbit.

Before its acquisition, Leadfeeder was a market-leading B2B lead generation software that deanonymized website traffic. The company merged with sales intelligence platform Echobot to form a complete GTM platform called Dealfront, focused on the European market.

With Leadfeeder doubling down on Europe, North American customers may wonder what their best options are for visitor intelligence in 2024.

Here is our round-up of the best Leadfeeder Competitors & Alternatives for Visitor Intelligence in 2024.

7 Leadfeeder Competitors & Alternatives for Maximum Lead Generation in 2024

• Clearbit (acquired by Hubspot) – Best for Budget Users
• ZoomInfo – Best for Mobile Numbers and Enterprise ICPs
• Factors – Best for Marketers
• Albacross – Best for EU Alternatives to Leadfeeder
• LeadMagic – Best for Middle Market
• Koala (getkoala.com) – Best for Beginners
• Warmly – Best for AI Sales Orchestration

Clearbit – Best for Developers & Budget Users

‎Clearbit was recently acquired by Hubspot. As of now, it’s marketed as Clearbit by HubSpot and remains available as a separate service.

The company has over 400K users and enriches more than 500 million records monthly. Clearbit’s de-anonymization platform is called Reveal. It does not do contact-level identification, but has a function called Capture that adds contact information for key decision makers in an integrated CRM. It also offers Data Enrichment that uses machine learning and QA to find context on companies and contacts.

Strengths of Clearbit

Clearbit has long been the de facto choice for developers who work with GTM teams. They are the most API-developer friendly.

Clearbit pairs well with marketing automation software. It integrates with HubSpot, Salesforce, Segment, Marketo, Pardot and Slack. HubSpot users have been able to use Clearbit as an app since 2019. Hubspot has indicated that it plans to integrate it natively through HubSpot’s CRM platform. As of now, Clearbit is still available as a standalone product.

Clearbit’s pricing structure has credit-based system which allows budget-minded teams to just pay for the features they need as they need it. It’s also rated highly for being easy to use and set up, as well as the quality of support.

Weaknesses of Clearbit

If you use Salesforce or any type of CRM other than Hubspot, there is some risk of your service being disrupted depending on changes the company makes going forward.

The main complaint for Clearbit users is pricing, which is not as upfront as Leadfeeder. Clearbit not have any unlimited plan. Customers pay for their usage, which can quickly add up at 2 credit per sales alert and even charges for CSV exports. There are also some features Clearbit does not yet track, such as contact-level website identification, Video tracking, File Download tracking, and Form tracking.

Clearbit Pricing

‎Clearbit has a different pricing structure than its competitors. The free level gives 25 credits a month, which can be spent on features like Sales Alerts (2 credits), CSV exports (1 credit per unique record) and Form Shortening (2 credits). Growth plans cost $50-275 for 125-1,000 credits per month. Companies that need more than that can contact their sales team for a custom arrangement. Clearbit is best for companies with a handful of very specific needs and would rather not pay a lot monthly for features they won’t use.

ZoomInfo – Best for Mobile Numbers and Enterprise ICPs

‎Compared to Leadfeeder, ZoomInfo has a much more involved setup plan and is significantly more expensive than its peers. While it has enjoyed a reputation of having the cleanest data, its high-end price structure is increasingly hard to justify with so many cheaper competitors coming up in the sales intelligence space.

Strengths of ZoomInfo

‎The ZoomInfo SalesOS platform claims to have the largest B2B database with more than 174 million verified emails and a relatively impressive 70 million direct dial numbers. For reference, Dealfront’s ICP-based targeting covers roughly 90 million contacts from 30 million (European) companies. ZoomInfo has a comprehensive data set with strong confidence and can be especially granular for some specializations. It does best with middle-market and enterprise-sized companies.

ZoomInfo started with contact identification and moved into other areas, like website ID, third-party intent data, and chatbot. This is likely because as a public company, they need to constantly increase their net retention revenue (NRR) and introducing new features is the best way to do that. Unfortunately, it’s swelled into a very big (read: expensive) bundled package.

In addition to SalesOS, their RevOS operating system also includes MarketingOS, OperationsOS, DaaS, and TalentOS, which may be helpful for customers who want an all-in-one solution. Given it’s white-glove sales process, ZoomInfo also offers the ability for more personalization than other LeadFeeder alternatives on this list.

Weaknesses of ZoomInfo

ZoomInfo is easily the most expensive LeadFeeder alternative starting at $15,000/year for 3 seats. Their contract also requires that you delete all the data if you stop using them, so you will have to start all over with a new company if you switch over.

ZoomInfo is not useful for tracking companies smaller than 100 people. They also have a reputation for suing former customers who continue using data sets after they have stopped renewing their contracts.

ZoomInfo is not especially remarkable at website identification, which makes sense as it is not their bread and butter. Similar to Clearbit, ZoomInfo’s contact-level identification data comes through acquisitions. However, the service is integrated into everything else, so if a company comes to the website, ZoomInfo can simply pull up the contacts of all the buyers who work there. In this case, their extensive data set covers a hole in their data, but it will cost you.

ZoomInfo benefits from name recognition, which is a double-edged sword as they also have more exposure to lawsuits. Unlike many of its competitors, it is publicly traded which may limit its ability to move quickly. The multiplatform approach may also be a weakness as it spreads their customer care and product investment in multiple directions.

ZoomInfo Pricing

Pricing is only available by contacting the ZoomInfo pricing team. However, word on the street is that plans start at $15K a year.

‎ZoomInfo requires users to sign up and request pricing, but plans usually start at $15,000 a year for 3 seats. There appears to be no self-service option, which is fine if you prefer a high-touch sales process.

Factors – Best for Marketers

Factors started as a marketing and attributions product, a side of which is account intelligence. Their focus is figuring out which campaigns or content is bringing in the high-intent accounts and pushing it back into the marketing sequence.

There is, however, significant overlap in use for salespeople. Factors can offer context such as what channels the accounts are coming from, what the journey is for the account, and provide statistics. They can identify what campaigns and pages convert better.

Strengths of Factors

Factors has direct integration with 12 tools and softwares including HubSpot, Salesforce, 6Sense, Clearbit and Leadsquared. You can also connect to Webhooks like Make.com or Zapier to access other tools and integrations.

Factors has also recently partnered with Clearbit, which strengthens both company’s data sets. They are GDPR-compliant on principle, which can spare it from some of the roadblocks ZoomInfo has faced when going public. Factors also has an AI-powered feature called “Explain” that offers insights and root cause analysis.

Weaknesses of Factors

Factors is a “privacy-first, GDPR compliant solution” which means they only provide IP-to-company data and not individual website visitors, phone numbers, or mail IDs unless that user has filled out a contact form with that information.

Given its priority on privacy, Factors is more focused on understanding funnel conversions. Their website analytics tools track ad performance and users' journeys as they move through pages. It is an excellent tool for marketers who need analytics, but not as much for sales people and orchestration. They also do not have any automation for prospecting, unlike competitors Koala or Warmly.

Many users also complain about data export features, which does not currently allow sharing individual reports, customizing data formats, or even specific data fields. This may not be ideal if you intend to integrate Factors.ai with other systems.

They also do not have chat bot features and have not indicated they will move into the space, which may be a consideration for sales people who want more of an orchestration platform.

Factors Pricing

‎Factors has a free tier that allows up to 100 identified accounts and 5K visitors monthly. They have three tiers of paid accounts. The lowest paid plan is $149/month, allowing up to 500 identified accounts and 10K visitors. The Growth and Professional levels allow 5K and 10K unique accounts per month, respectively. Any needs greater than that requires contacting them for a quote.

Albacross – Best for EU Leadfeeder Alternative

Albacross is a top LeadFeeder alternative in the European market.

‎Albacross is an E.U.-based service that focuses on first-party intent data, which includes tracking account engagement such as the pages users visits and how long they spend there. It claims to have built the "largest proprietary IP-to-company mapping database globally" with "tens of thousands of users." For customers targeting the European market, Albacross is a great alternative to LeadFeeder.

Strengths of Albacross

Albacross claims their "database maps 3+ billion events monthly" and that internal tests show an identification rate "1.7x higher than most intent data platforms" according to their website.

Like Factors, Albacross is GDPR-compliant, which is a requirement for working with companies in Europe, where it is based.

Albacross offers native integration for HubSpot, and third-party integration with Salesforce, Google Sheets, Mailchimp, Intercom, HubSpot, Mailshake, lemlist, Slack, and Zapier. Their API had 100% uptime in 2022. Like many competitors, Albacross is working with AI and machine learning to refine their data accuracy.

Their tracking method uses a custom script while LeadFeeder uses Google Analytics, which is not specificially designed for lead generation. Albacross also keeps a lead history of up to 90 days compared to 30 days with LeadFeeder.

Weaknesses of Albacross

Albacross lacks options for automating the sales process. It also has relatively few and inefficient integrations with other tools. It does connect to Salesforce, but only via a third-party. API integrations are also only available on the higher-level Growth plans.

Like Leadfeeder, Albacross is based in the EU and better at segmenting for European ABM campaigns, which may not be ideal for North American ICPs.

Albacross also does not offer a free tier. Their lowest paid tier costs $79/month and offers what many of its competitors offer for free. If you want to identify more than 100 companies a month, you will also have to talk to their Sales team to put together a Growth plan.

Albacross Pricing

‎Unlike many of its competitors, Albacross does not have a free tier. However, it does offer a 14-day free trial. It’s basic tier costs $79/month and allows up to 100 unique accounts, which is equivalent to the free tier of both Leadfeeder and Factors.ai.

LeadMagic – Best for Middle Market

‎LeadMagic was started in 2022, and already has a good reputation for first-party intent data as a B2B lead generation tool. It is often compared to the Clearbit Reveal tool, but with a monthly plan that can yield significant savings with high usage.

Strengths of LeadMagic

LeadMagic has an API that works with Segment or Google Analytics, which makes it a good API developor-friendly option for companies that need more usage than they can get with Clearbit. They also claim to be "only Visitor Identification Software that will let you own our data" which means, unlike ZoomInfo, you won't get a cease-and-desist after cancelling your subscription for using any lists they generated.

Weaknesses of LeadMagic

LeadMagic can be integrated with your CRM, but only through Zapier. Their pricing is per seat, so costs can add up if you have a large sales team.

LeadMagic Pricing

Like Clearbit, ‎LeadMagic has usage-based pricing starting at $69 for up to 100 leads. However, they also offer unlimited premium plans starting at $139/month on an annual basis or $169 month-to-month. If your company is identifying more than 400 unique companies a month, you would save money by adopting either the monthly or annual plan.

Koala – Best for Beginners

‎Like Warmly, Koala offers a freemium product for small companies. The founders were the former Chief Product Officer and Head of Engineering at customer data platform Segment who wanted to apply the principles of Segment to lead generation on a website.

Koala is extremely PLG-driven. They have very little web presence (not even a G2 review profile) other than their website, though they do post frequently to their changelog. Their website also does not allow you to book a demo. Instead, they lean into the freemium model and prompt users to upgrade to the Team level in the program.

Strengths of Koala

Koala is known for having a very clean and UI. They do a good job of filtering and identifying visitors, which syncs easily back to your CRM. It hooks easily up to sales engagement software, so users can automate messaging via email. Koala also has some innovative features including real-time Slack alerts. Koala has a forgiving price structure, which makes it a great place to start playing around with a strategy for visitor intelligence and lead generation.

Weaknesses of Koala

Koala appears focused solely on visitor identification. They do not provide customer intent or job change tracking. While Koala is working on some cool features such as Outreach integration, they lack some splashier features such as chat bots or LinkedIn messaging automation. Koala also does not use third-party vendors for data enrichment, so they are not able to identify as many prospects at the contact level as some of its competitors.

Koala Pricing

Koala has a very forgiving price structure that is aimed at product-led growth. The free level gives 3 seats and allows users to see up to 250 identified accounts and 10,000 events monthly. The Team level starts at a relatively inexpensive $175/month and allows users to see up to 1,000 accounts and 500,000 events. If you need more than 3 seats, you will have to contact the sales team for a Business level plan.

Warmly – Best for AI Sales Orchestration

Warmly's AI Sales Orchestration comes with many innovative features that you may not need or be ready to integrate into your workflow.

‎Warmly is an AI sales orchestration platform that includes website identification. The company has been around for 5 years, but is a relative newcomer to visitor intelligence after a pivot in 2023. Warmly's use of third-party OMB partnerships allows it to identify a market-leading 65% of website traffic.

It's partners include 6Sense and Clearbit for enrichment data, though we may see the company move towards developing some of that internally. As of now, the partnerships seem symbiotic. 6Sense is the default enterprise service provider for intent data, but there is substantial market share in SMB and middle-market for Warmly to grow. In fact, 94.4% of Warmly’s reviews on G2 Crowd is from Small-Businesses compared to Leadfeeder’s 75.9%.

Warmly appears to be competing most closely with Koala for the SMB and middle-market customers. However, Warmly does have the advantage of an AI chat bot feature which puts them in the arena with Qualified and Drift. This makes Warmly an excellent alternative for non-Enterprise companies that want that sales channel, but are not big enough to use Qualified or Drift.

Strengths of Warmly

Warmly's use of third-party OMB partnerships allows it to identify nearly 65% of website traffic, just edging out Factors. It is also positioned to capture down-market clients for Qualified, Drift, and 6Sense, which is reflected in their symbiotic partnership with the latter.

Their AI sales orchestration platform has features sales customers may like, including automated LinkedIn and ChatBot messaging. They are also available to non-Enterprise clients with a generous free-level and a flat monthly subscription that will cover most customer needs.

Weaknesses of Warmly

While Warmly currently leads the market in identifying website traffic, it's accuracy depends on OMB partnerships for enrichment data that may change or go away—particularly with HubSpot's recent purchase of Clearbit.

Warmly's lowest paid level is also significantly more than all of the competitors in this list except ZoomInfo. This is somewhat made up for by a generous free-level that will allow most customers to try the software.

Some users complain it can do a better job of filtering out bots and noise from website traffic, though customers can currently set alerts to only let salespeople know when a visitor is within their ICP.

Warmly is also very much focused on signal-based sales orchestration and may not be a good fit for people who have very simple website identification needs or are not ready to/interested in automating their sales process.

Warmly Pricing

Warmly is one of the pricier LeadFeeder competitors, but its website intelligence is built into a full-scale AI sales orchestration platform.

‎Like Koala, Warmly offers a freemium model. The free level allows users to identify 500 leads/month, which is 5x more than Leadfeeder or Factors, and twice as much as Koala. For $850/month, users can go up to 25,000 leads a month, which should be plenty for most SMB/middle-market customers until they need to upgrade to a custom Enterprise plan.

LeadFeeder Competitor Pricing Chart

‎

‎Conclusion of Best LeadFeeder Alternative

A. Summary of Leadfeeder's Advantages

With the acquisition by DealFront, LeadFeeder now covers more than 66 million companies around the world, including 30 million companies and 83 million contacts in Europe. LeadFeeder (now DealFront)'s focus on Europe gives it a significant advantage to alternatives based in other regions.

B. Pros & Cons of Leadfeeder Competitors & Alternatives

If you are not in Europe or selling to European customers, you will not be able to take full advantage of LeadFeeder (Now DealFront)'s extensive database.

There are many competitors, including newer entrants like Warmly and LeadMagic, in the North American market that offers a interesting mix of features that may matter to sales teams, such as Outlook integration, automated LinkedIn messaging, chat bots, and more.

C. Final Recommendation for Best LeadFeeder Alternative

The best Leedfeeder alternative depends on your B2B data needs. SMBs who are new to website intelligence may prefer a slimmed-down plan like Clearbit or Koala. Sales and marketing teams that work closely together may be interested in website tracking with a marketing focus, such as Fathom. For companies looking to jump with two feet into AI may be interested in a sales orchestration package like Warmly.

It wasn’t all that long ago that account-based marketing was a fairly obscure approach practiced only by enterprise sales teams targeting whales at other equally large companies.

Today, account-based marketing (ABM) is a widely accepted practice and one that’s used not only by enterprise-level companies but also by mid-sized and small businesses alike.

The thing with ABM is that it's not exactly something you can just tip a toe in like you can with something like digital advertising or outbound email.

To be successful with account-based marketing, you need to go all in, which means you’ll need buy-in from every stakeholder on your leadership time.

And, naturally, they’ll all ask the same thing before signing off:

What are the benefits of account-based marketing?

That’s the exact question we are going to answer in this guide, diving deep into the six important and tangible benefits of running an ABM playbook:

• 1. Aligns sales and marketing toward a common goal 
• 2. Allows for a more focused use of resources 
• 3. Creates a more customer-centric experience
• 4. Opens up a world of personalization 
• 5. Can lead to shorter sales cycles 
• 6. Sets you up for long-term customer relationships 
• Account-based orchestration: Moving beyond ABM 

1. Aligns sales and marketing toward a common goal 

The tension between sales and marketing teams is a thing of legend.

It's kind of weird when you think about it. Both teams are, in the end, working toward the goal of closing more customers.

There really shouldn’t be any turbulence here. 

But there often is, and that generally comes from a disconnection between the two teams that work in siloes and only on part of the problem.

The sales and marketing problem

Marketing works to attract new prospects to the company and capture leads. Sales then takes those leads and tries to convert them into customers.

And that’s where the issue emerges.

Sales blames marketing for poor quality leads. Marketing blames sales for not doing enough with the leads they’ve generated.

But with an account-based marketing approach, this divide disappears.

The ABM solution

In ABM, you choose the accounts you go after. There is no “lead generation” in the traditional sense, as you define from the get-go who your target audience is going to be.

Then, sales and marketing must collaborate to attract and close deals. There is no “marketing to sales handoff.”

In the early stages of an ABM playbook, marketing might run personalized digital ads, while sales executes outreach via email and LinkedIn. 

Further down the sales funnel, the sales team might be engaging in demos and presentations while marketing supplements with additional educational email content.

Members from each team work in parallel rather than in series, and they work together toward the same goal: closing target accounts.

In fact, the alignment between sales and marketing that ABM brings is so strong that some organizations forgo the distinction altogether and merge the two departments into one GTM (go-to market) team:

(Image Source)

2. Allows for a more focused use of resources 

One of the biggest problems with the traditional marketing model is that your use of resources is relatively unfocused.

Sure, you have a defined target audience and ICPs (ideal customer profiles) that you’re going after. But the truth is that beyond that, your “targeting” is incredibly broad.

Most of the people your ad campaigns, emails, and content marketing efforts get in front of aren’t in the market to buy right now, even if they fit your customer persona.

Worse, you don’t even know if you’re getting in front of the decision-maker.

Consider, for example, a prospect coming across a blog post you’ve written and then promoted on social media.

That prospect signs up for a sales demo—great news, a warm lead.

But after going through the whole presentation, your salesperson learns that they don’t actually have the authority to buy, and so the whole process needs to happen again with the decision-maker.

Account-based marketing flips this on its head.

Finding KDMs from day one

You know who the key decision makers (KDMs) are in a given organization because you’ve used a tool like Warmly or Demandbase to pull account-level data and build a list of multiple stakeholders that might be involved in the deal. 

Then, your ABM efforts (be they personalized marketing outreach via LinkedIn InMail or a series of ads via your marketing automation platform) go out to those prospects specifically.

All of this means that every dollar you spend on account-based marketing strategies is incredibly focused and spent only on the specific accounts that you want to start a conversation with.

3. Opens up a world of personalization 

One of the biggest benefits of ABM campaigns as a B2B marketing strategy is that you can run incredibly personalized campaigns.

We’re not talking about using the prospect’s name in your email campaigns here.

We’re talking:

• Using advanced marketing tools to deliver personalized ads across multiple platforms
• Target multiple stakeholders at the same time with a personalized and role-based email copy
• Using unconventional tactics like direct mail and personalized gifting to attract attention

Here’s an extreme example to illustrate my point.

When software design firm Intridea targeted Ogilvy as a key account in their account-based marketing campaign, they went as far as uncovering the daily commute of the decision-maker at their soon-to-be new customer and ran a custom billboard on the side of the street.

(Image Source)

4. Creates a more customer-centric experience 

A well-executed ABM approach almost always leads to an enhanced customer experience when compared with a traditional marketing playbook.

In the traditional marketing approach, every customer sees the same marketing programs and tactics.

Sure, the content they see might be tailored to their current stage in the customer journey, but it's very rarely personalized to them specifically.

But an ABM experience is all about that specific customer and is customized to individual accounts.

As a prospect, all of the content you engage with is personalized to your company and even to you and your role. 

And when you speak to a member of the sales team, they aren’t giving you a blank slate templated pitch. They know who you are, and what success means for you in your role and at your company, and will deliver a tailored pitch that speaks exactly to those needs.

It also blends seamlessly with an omnichannel approach, where you’re targeting multiple stakeholders in the buying committee with the right messaging at the right time via the right channel.

That's critical because these days, there are more stakeholders than ever before, so the complexity of the deal has increased exponentially.

You need solutions that give you signals as to who’s hot and warm in the committee and when they are thinking about you to know when and how to engage.

This customer-centric approach ultimately leads to more effective campaigns that close faster. Speaking of which… 

5. Can lead to shorter sales cycles 

Many advocates of an ABM process claim that it has helped them achieve a shorter sales cycle.

(Image Source)

This is going to be true in many cases, though we should be careful to say that there are a number of different variables here.

The target audience you’re going after has a huge impact. 

Enterprise companies (who are more commonly the target of ABM campaigns) close slower than mid-sized organizations, as they often have large and elaborate buying committees.

Your sales process itself also has some cards to play here, as do the specific account-based marketing activities you choose to engage in.

On the whole, however, if you:

1. Define your ideal customer profile correctly
2. Build realistic account lists with accurate account data
3. Supplement that with third-party buying intent data
4. Execute well-timed and personalized ABM tactics that speak to ICP needs

You should see shorter sales cycles from ABM compared to what you would otherwise see from a non-account-based approach. 

6. Sets you up for long-term customer relationships 

Perhaps the most important of the six account-based marketing benefits discussed here is the fact that you’re building stronger relationships than you would be with a traditional motion.

In a traditional marketing model, a given prospect isn’t considered a customer until you actually close the deal. Up until then, they’re just a lead.

This inevitably frames all discussions up until contracting as sales conversations. 

An ABM motion, on the other hand, doesn’t really use the lead/customer division; they’re considered an account from the beginning.

And because all of your marketing and sales activities are personalized to that specific account, you’re essentially using that as the starting point of your relationship-building efforts.

This relationship is then transferred over to the customer success manager (or key accounts manager, depending on your chosen nomenclature). Their job is to nurture and grow the customer relationship rather than create it, which ultimately has a positive impact on customer retention rates.

This distinction is why many account-based marketing teams choose to take a land-and-expand approach.

The land and expand model

The idea with land-and-expand is that your initial sales efforts aren’t about closing the biggest deal possible. They’re just about getting a foot in the door.

You might sell your lowest-value product or most commonly used feature and narrow in on that to get a relationship established and a deal closed.

Then, your CSM looks for opportunities to upsell to a more robust plan or cross-sell additional features as the relationship flourishes, the trust your client has for you grows, and they begin to see value from using your product.

This is a fantastic tactic to add to your startup sales playbook, as it means you can get a door opened with just a single product or even an MVP and expand revenue from there.

Account-based orchestration: Moving beyond ABM 

Account-based marketing clearly offers a number of important benefits.

Most importantly, being a personalized approach, a successful ABM strategy ultimately leads to higher ROI and stronger customer relationships than a traditional marketing motion.

While we’re fans of ABM programs in general—as compared to a more traditional alternative—we also believe there’s a better way, one which we call account-based orchestration.

Account-based orchestration takes an ABM campaign to the next level and encompasses a more holistic approach that aligns both marketing and sales efforts. 

(Image Source)

It incorporates various technologies (many of which are ABM tools), data-driven insights, and a heavy dose of AI and automation to execute at scale without needing a huge team.

Read more: The Rise of Account-Based Orchestration in the Age of AI and Automation.

We built Warmly to help small and medium-sized organizations access account-based orchestration on an SME budget, combining the best of advanced AI and best-in-class data with well-timed human intervention.

With Warmly, you can:

• Deanonyomize site traffic to know exactly who is on your site and what content they’re engaging with 
• Add identified prospects to an automated omnichannel outreach sequence on LinkedIn and email
• Capture immediate intent with an AI-led chatbot
• Get notifications via Slack when it is time for a sales rep to jump in and take over the chat

What’s best about Warmly?

You can get started for free, right now, without speaking to a sales rep or getting thrown into a sales funnel. 

Get set up with Warmly today, and start seeing ROI in minutes.

Learn how Behavioral Signals tripled their enterprise sales pipeline in just one month using Warmly:

How Behavioral Signals sourced $7M in enterprise pipeline since using Warmly.

The main difference between demand generation and lead generation lies in their scope and focus within the marketing funnel.

While demand generation sets the stage by creating interest in your product and raising brand awareness, lead generation follows up by capturing and converting that interest into sales opportunities. 

As such, they’re both critical components of an efficient marketing strategy.

So, when it comes to demand generation vs lead generation, it’s fair to say you need both, as the success of your lead generation greatly depends on the quality and efficiency of your demand generation.

In this article, we’ll explain the key differences between demand generation and lead generation, helping you determine when to apply which process to get the best results.

If you’re not a big fan of reading, here’s a quick breakdown of key takeaways. ⤵️

TL;DR

• Demand generation is geared toward raising brand awareness and generating demand and interest in a company’s offering. 
• Lead generation focuses on identifying and capturing prospects who have already shown interest in your offering and nurturing them into conversion.
• As such, demand generation and lead generation differ in terms of:
• Scope & goals.
• Target audience they’re aimed at.
• Key activities they encompass.
• Funnel stage they operate in.
• Metrics by which they’re measured.
• Startups and newcomers to the market should focus on demand generation to establish a presence and educate them. In contrast, more established businesses should focus on lead generation to convert existing demand into sales.

What is the difference between lead generation vs demand generation?

When discussing demand generation vs lead generation, there are several key differences to consider.

Scope & goals

The first big difference between demand generation and lead generation lies in their scope and objectives.

Demand generation campaigns have a much broader approach that encompasses a wide range of sales and marketing processes because they focus on:

1. Creating a market for your offering by educating the public about the pain point you solve.
2. Raising brand awareness by:

• Producing quality content that shows how your product solves a particular issue.
• Using social media platforms to reach and engage with a broader audience and build rapport.
• Optimizing online presence to ensure your product appears at the top of search results when prospective customers research topics related to your product.

A lead generation strategy, on the other hand, takes a more focused approach geared toward:

1. Identifying and capturing potential prospects.
2. Moving them from awareness or mild interest to active brand engagement and readiness to convert.
3. Scoring and qualifying leads lets marketers recognize and prioritize those most likely to convert.

Demand generation is a longer-term process that takes more time to generate tangible results.

Insightful social media posts, like this one on LinkedIn from our CEO, Max Greenwald is a great example of demand gen in action:

In contrast, lead generation is a shorter process that targets a specific audience group (i.e., qualified leads) and aims to achieve immediate results.

Target audience

The next difference to remember when designing lead and demand generation strategies is the target audience.

Demand generation campaigns are geared toward much wider audiences that include:

1. Companies and individuals who are not actively looking for a solution right now could benefit from your offering at some point (i.e., businesses and stakeholders that match your ICP).
2. Companies and individuals who are aware of a certain problem to an extent but haven’t yet started actively searching for a solution.
3. Individuals and companies in the earliest stage of their buyer’s journey have identified a problem and begun gathering relevant information and exploring their options.

Conversely, lead generation campaigns focus on more specific audiences, i.e., companies and individuals who have already shown some level of interest or intent in the company’s offerings, such as:

1. Website visitors, especially those visiting high-intent pages (pricing, specific features, demo page, etc.) or recurring visitors that repeatedly return to your website.
2. Content engagers, including people who have downloaded your guides, case studies, etc., or have attended your webinars and similar events.
3. Email and newsletter subscribers.
4. Social media followers.
5. Individuals who have engaged with your email or social media campaigns (e.g., clicked through marketing emails, commented on social media posts, etc.).

Due to this difference, demand and lead generation also differ in terms of activities that marketing teams take.

Activities

Since it’s designed to create awareness, educate the market, and build interest in a company’s products or services, B2B demand generation includes tactics like: 

• Content marketing, including various free resources, such as blogs, case studies, whitepapers, guides, etc., with the aim of establishing your brand as an industry thought leader.
• Social media marketing builds brand awareness and drives traffic to your website by posting engaging content, interacting with followers, running targeted ads, and more.
• SEO helps create a strong online presence and improve your company’s visibility in search engine results, making it easier for potential customers to come across your offering when searching for relevant information. 

Effective lead generation consists of tactics designated for capturing contact information from potential customers and qualifying them for sales follow-up, including:

• Gated content enables you to collect relevant lead information by offering leads valuable resources in exchange for their contact information.
• Creating high-converting landing pages designed to spark visitors’ interest and compel them to fill out web forms or book a demo or a meeting.
• Email campaigns that help nurture and engage leads with personalized emails tailored to their needs, behavior, level of interest, etc.
• Calls to action (CTAs) that guide qualified leads toward completing an action aligned with the stage of their buyer’s journey (e.g., an action that captures contact information or urges them to sign up for a free trial or book a demo, etc.).

4. Funnel stage

Another crucial difference between demand generation and lead generation is the funnel stage at which B2B marketing teams undertake them.

Due to its nature and objectives, demand generation operates at the top and middle of the marketing funnel - the awareness and interest stages.

On the other hand, lead generation campaigns cover the middle and bottom of the sales funnel - the consideration and conversion stages.

5. Metrics

Different KPIs and metrics measure the success and efficiency of demand generation and lead generation.

To determine how well your demand generation strategy is performing, you should monitor:

• Website traffic is a primary indicator of how well your demand-generation efforts are driving awareness and attracting interest. You should especially keep an eye out for:
• Visitors that fit into your ICP.
• Returning visitors.
• Visitors that spend more time on high-intent pages.  
• Engagement rates help you evaluate how compelling and relevant your content (e.g., blogs, social media posts, etc.) is to your target audience based on whether and how they interact with it (likes, comments, shares, subscriptions, etc.). 
• Brand awareness measures how familiar your target audience is with your brand and how easily they recognize it. You can assess it through surveys or by tracking the frequency and sentiment of online brand mentions.
• Content consumption that tracks how your content is consumed and engaged with across channels, providing insight into what topics and content types perform well and which need to be improved.

At the same time, lead generation is measured by tracking:

• The number of generated leads monitors the total number of leads collected through various lead generation channels and activities.
• Conversion rates measure the percentage of leads who complete a desired action, such as filling out a form or signing up for a demo.
• Cost per lead calculates the average cost of generating a single lead, helping you assess the financial efficiency and sustainability of your lead generation efforts.
• Lead quality, which evaluates how likely leads are to convert into paying customers by measuring their intent level, ICP fit, etc.

When should we focus on demand gen vs lead gen?

Choosing between demand generation and lead generation depends on your business's current needs, market conditions, product development stage, and overall market presence. 

Lead generation, on the other hand, is better suited for the middle and bottom of the sales funnel. It focuses on companies and individuals that have already shown interest in your product or are highly likely to be interested in it based on certain ICP attributes.

As such, lead generation can be more beneficial for businesses that have already generated sufficient demand and interest in their offering and are now looking to monetize it.

Here’s a helpful guide on when to focus on each. ⤵️

Focus on demand generation when:

1. Launching a new product or entering a new market - It’s essential to build awareness when you’re at an early stage with your product, educating your target audience about your brand, the problems it solves, and the general value it brings to the table.
2. You need to create or improve brand awareness - Demand generation can help establish your brand’s position and enhance brand visibility, especially if you’re in a highly competitive industry that requires an efficient way to cut through the noise.
3. Educating the market—If your product is highly innovative, complex, or tackles a niche issue, educating your potential audience on all the benefits it can bring them can go a long way.

Focus on lead generation when:

1. You already have an established market presence - Lead generation is more beneficial for businesses with a clearly defined market and a known brand, as it allows for capturing and nurturing qualified leads from an audience already aware of your product and possibly interested.
2. You want to nurture existing interest - If you already have an audience of individuals or companies interested in your offering, apply lead generation tactics to nurture those leads and guide them to conversion.

Pro tip: You can also use lead generation tactics to attract and convert your competitors’ audience. If a certain market segment is interested in your competitors’ offering, chances are they are a good fit for you, too. Therefore, it’s always a good idea to keep an eye on the competition’s performance and monitor leads’ buyer intent across digital channels.

1. You’re looking to optimize marketing spend - Lead conversion focuses on specific, high-ROI goals, enabling you to achieve ROI and measure it more accurately than with demand generation.

Keep in mind, though, that the key to success lies in striking the right balance between the two. You can’t expect your lead generation to succeed if you haven’t adequately prepared the market for your offering.

A combination of demand and lead generation strategies is critical for the best results, especially for startups that have yet to establish their brand presence.

You can best understand this through a practical example.

Case study

VioletX, a fast-scaling startup in the virtual CISO space, applied both demand generation and lead generation in its journey, enabling it to experience a 400% growth year after year.

It relied on Warmly, a signal-based revenue orchestration platform, to help them tackle various segments of demand generation and lead generation, including:

• Website traffic tracking enabled VioletX to determine whether its website is attracting its intended audience or if its messaging and awareness-raising strategies need improvement.

• Data-driven website redesign - Using insights Warmly provided, VioletX’s team enhanced its website and landing pages, making them better suited for its audience and their needs.
• Understanding website intent - Warmly allowed VioletX’s team to gauge which website visitors were most likely to convert based on how they interacted with their web pages, content, chatbots, etc.
• Gaining insight into third-party buying intent - Warmly tracks visitors’ buying intent across levels, including the topics they research on the web, visits to competitors’ pages, interactions with their ads, etc., enabling VioletX to get a complete picture of a lead’s readiness to convert.
• Streamlining communication - VioletX’s sales team was able to reach out to the hottest leads while their interest was at its peak, thanks to Warmly’s automated and live engagement features. It was also enabled to nurture qualified leads who weren’t ready to convert yet by including them in personalized outreach sequences.

Refresher

Although the aim of this article isn’t to define lead generation and demand generation, a small reminder of what each strategy entails can’t hurt, helping you better understand their nuances and use cases.

What is demand generation?

Simply put, demand generation is a marketing process that creates awareness and interest in a company's products or services. 

It consists of a broad set of activities designed to reach and engage potential customers at the top and middle stages of the marketing funnel, from initial brand awareness to generating interest and engagement. 

What is lead generation?

Lead generation is a more focused marketing process designed to identify and nur

ture potential customers for a business's products and services. 

It involves specific activities geared toward capturing prospects' interest and converting them into leads who have provided their contact information, allowing sales teams to take over and design personalized sales strategies.

Wrapping up

Understanding the differences between lead generation and demand generation - including different methods they employ, specific goals, and ways of measuring their impact - is essential when deciding which strategy to apply.

However, to get the best possible results, you should use both approaches, depending on your brand’s size, online presence, target market, and business objectives.

Hopefully, this guide helped you decide when to use demand generation vs. lead generation and which tactics to use for each.

Good luck!

If you need a tool that can help you generate demand, capture qualified leads, and convert them, Warmly might be the best choice.

Book a live demo with our team and find out what Warmly can do for you today.

Cold outbound is a staple in the B2B sales community.

But it comes with an inherent problem:

Nobody you’re speaking to knows a thing about you, your brand, your product, or what you can do for them. And you don’t even know—until you speak to them—whether there’s a real use case for what you’re selling.

There’s a better solution: B2B demand generation.

Demand generation flips the model on its head, so that when your sales reps do get to speaking with a customer, the demand is already. 

They know who you are, trust what you’re saying, and have already determined (at least preliminarily) that they need what you sell.

This article serves as your ultimate guide to B2B demand generation.

We’ll begin by getting on the same page regarding what demand gen is (and isn’t), explore why it's a more valuable approach to revenue growth in the long term, and then dive into 6 steps to build your own B2B demand generation strategy.

What is B2B Demand Generation? 

B2B demand generation is a revenue growth strategy (that is, it's across both sales and marketing).

Its principal goal is to build demand for your product or services. By demand, we mean that prospects:

1. Know about your brand
2. See you as an industry expert and trusted advisor
3. Understand—to an extent—how your product can help them
4. Show some interest in purchasing or at least learning more

When you adopt a B2B demand gen approach, you position your company as a media brand, producing and distributing high-quality content across various disciplines and channels.

Trust is core to demand generation. 

The marketing efforts your company engages in are no longer exclusively promotional. You’re not just pitching ads and outbound email campaigns.

You’re creating educational content that provides prescriptive and actionable advice that your target audience finds valuable. 

You cover top-of-funnel topics that capture the attention of customers who aren’t in the market, right down to bottom-of-funnel topics like choosing between you and your competitors.

Then, you capture that demand by being present on the channels where in-market buyers are active. For this reason, B2B demand generation is often divided into two components.

B2B Demand Creation

Demand creation encompasses all of the activities you engage in to expand your brand presence and get in front of new eyeballs.

This is mostly content creation, publishing, and distribution, meaning B2B demand creation overlaps quite significantly with the practice of content marketing.

The principle goal here is to educate the 95% of your total addressable market (TAM) who aren’t in the market to buy right now, but could have a use case for your product.

B2B Demand Capture

Demand capture is about capitalizing on the demand you’ve created and turning that into prospects in your sales funnel.

Some content approaches (such as targeting bottom-of-funnel keywords in your SEO strategy and content plan) fit within the demand capture paradigm, but you’ll also include advertising tactics such as PPC ads to target high-intent buyers.

The principle goal of demand capture is to convert the 5% of your TAM that is in the market into paying customers.

Lead Generation vs. Demand Generation 

Lead generation is typically pitted against demand generation as the “traditional” alternative.

In a lead generation-focused approach, marketing’s goal is to create as many leads as possible, with little attention to how qualified or interested that lead actually is.

Sure, some brands separate leads into different categories (PQL/MQL/SQL is a common division) to designate different levels of buying intent. But the focus is always on the number of leads generated for a given category, and that’s what marketers are measured on.

Demand generation differs in that it's about quality over quantity (though more is still better). Quality, in this case, is used as a synonym for “high buying intent.”

The goal of demand gen isn’t to capture as many leads as possible. It's to ensure that the leads that are captured are as warm as possible. That is, they are warm to your brand, maybe even to the sales reps they’re talking to, and have demonstrated buying intent for your product.

This doesn’t mean that the idea of B2B lead generation efforts should be thrown out entirely, however. Sales reps still need new prospects at the top of the funnel to keep their pipeline moving. 

But lead gen should happen within the context of demand generation and is better thought of as demand capture.

Inbound vs. Outbound Demand Generation 

B2B demand generation marketing activities can fall into both inbound and outbound camps.

While some marketing teams may have a preference for one or the other (inbound marketing tactics tend to align nicely with the idea of building a media brand), your demand generation program can 100% include a combination of both.

Under the inbound umbrella, B2B marketers can use classic strategies like:

• A blog content strategy, including distribution and content syndication efforts
• Social media marketing tactics like regularly posting and engaging with posts from similar brands in your vertical
• Podcasts (your own or appearances on existing shows)
• Attending live events such as trade shows 

On the other hand, traditional marketing campaigns that fit under the outbound umbrella can also be a valid part of a successful B2B demand gen strategy, such as:

• Cold calling
• Outbound email marketing campaigns 
• The purchasing of intent data
• Direct mail

Why Invest In A B2B Demand Gen Strategy? 

Investing in demand generation (and prioritizing it over other revenue strategies) delivers three important benefits:

1. Greater positive brand affiliation: Your efforts are largely focused on educating the market and providing helpful advice, thereby positioning your brand as a trusted thought leader.
2. Warmer leads: Because you’re active in the industry and communicating with the 95% of your TAM who aren’t in the market, you’re more likely to be top-of-mind when prospects enter the buying cycle, making your sales process faster and driving conversion rates up.
3. Long-term organic customer acquisition: After a couple of years of investing in different demand generation strategies, you’ll essentially be able to turn off all paid B2B marketing activities, and you’ll still see solid revenue acquisition as a result of those up-front efforts.

How To Build A B2B Demand Generation Strategy 

More important than deciding between different B2B demand generation tactics is getting your strategy aligned.

In the following six steps, we’ll walk you through how to design a successful demand generation strategy, as well as cover the most important channels and tactics for attracting B2B buyers.

1. Develop Positioning and Messaging 

Your first critical step is to work on how you position your brand within the market and the messaging you’ll use to communicate your unique point of difference.

This messaging will flow through every aspect of your B2B demand generation campaign, which is why it needs to happen first.

Let’s use ourselves as an example.

Warmly competes broadly in the account-based marketing and sales space. 

But we’re unique in that we serve the SMB market, are AI-first, and offer a crawl-walk-run approach that allows customers to get set up and start seeing results within minutes.

This messaging is present across all channels, from our home page:

To blog posts about Demandbase competitors:

To webinars our GTM participates in and then shares on LinkedIn:

Wynter, a B2B message testing platform, shares some great advice on this in their article How positioning and messaging build your go-to-market (GTM) strategy.

It’s worth reading in full, but here’s the quick five-step checklist for making sure your messaging is on point:

1. ​​Clarity: Does your audience get it?
2. Relevance: Does it help them solve [key issue]?
3. Value: Does it make the [key issue] urgent?
4. Differentiation: Does it give them a reason to choose you over competitors?
5. Friction: Have you removed all possible objections and addressed potential doubts?

2. Design A Content Production Plan 

This next step is the big one. 

Alongside developing and marketing a product, you’re also going to be building a media brand.

What this means is that you’re going to be producing, publishing, and distributing a ton of content across a variety of content types, including

• Blogs
• Videos (such as how-tos and webinars)
• Podcasts (your own as well as appearances on others')_
• Guides
• Templates 
• Case studies 

GTM analytics tool HockeyStack is the king of this. Their media brand, “The Flow” is literally like Netflix for B2B.

The most effective demand-generation efforts are content-heavy. It’s so important to great demand gen that we developed a five-part series on building a content factory to help you produce and publish at scale.

Check out the first installment here: Building A Content Factory (Part 1 of 5).

From there comes distribution (aka content syndication).

3. Get Active On Social 

Without a doubt, your best channel for content distribution is social media.

Obviously, the specific platform you choose to use will depend on where your audience is active, though, in the B2B context, this is most likely to be LinkedIn and X.

At Warmly, we’re all in on LinkedIn.

Our entire leadership team posts multiple times a day. We share each others’ posts, tag each other in our own, and leverage the audience of our brand partners to maximize reach.

Then, we repurpose the content we’re already creating, optimizing it to be appropriate for the channel.

For example, our Head of Sales Keegan Otter recently published this article: 4 Powerful Omnichannel Sales & Marketing Examples

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Then, he edited the video down to a brief 9-minute walkthrough and shared it with his LinkedIn audience:

4. Build Out Relevant Email Campaigns 

Email is a no-brainer channel used in everything from startup sales playbooks to enterprise marketing campaigns.

While email has a place in the context of B2B demand generation, you’ll want to avoid being overly promotional. 

Instead, use email as a way to distribute thought leadership, promote helpful free tools, share best practices, and ultimately connect with ideal customers at target accounts.

Here’s a solid example from Clearbit (shared in their walkthrough on how they run targeted demand gen):

This email nails two things:

1. Contextual content recommendation (you read that, how about this)
2. Shows you how the product works rather than selling it (our tool told us this about you)

5. Create Meaningful Brand Partnerships 

Building long-term partnerships with other relevant brands is a crucial component of a solid B2B demand generation program.

Here’s how it works:

You identify brands that are in your broad space but aren’t direct competitors. For us, that’s tools like Salesflow, Sendspark, and Letterdrop.

These are all solutions that are broadly in the GTM industry, meaning they share similar kinds of customers to us but aren’t directly competing for the same share of wallet.

We can then collaborate on content, promote each other's thought leadership posts, and borrow from each other’s brand awareness, equity, and social capital to build demand for our own product.

We’ve already covered a couple of examples above where this happened. 

In step one (Develop Positioning and Messaging), I called out a webinar I appeared on, collaborating with Bethany Stachenfeld of Sendspark.

In step three (Get Active On Social), the video that Keegan shared on LinkedIn included a brief snippet on how we actually use Sendspark in our own GTM motion.

We even have a case study on Sendspark’s website, which details how we use the platform as part of our account-based orchestration process.

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Hockeystack provides another great example of how meaningful brand partnerships can be used as part of a B2B demand gen approach.

This video series called The Loop sees Hockeystack partner with experts from Cognism (a B2B data platform. 

Here, Hockeystack benefits not only from the expert-level content published on their site, but borrows some of the positive brand affiliations Cognism has built and transfers it over to their own brand.

6. Optimize Your Site For Demand Capture 

Don’t forget the second half of B2B demand gen: demand capture.

You’ve spent all this time, money, and effort on building a media brand to develop trust with customers and build demand for your product, now it's time to see some ROI from it.

Here’s how:

1. Deanonyomize site traffic with a tool like Warmly to understand who exactly is on your site and what pages they’re engaging with
2. Integrate best-in-class third-party intent data to enable personalized sales outreach
3. Use AI sales chatbots to engage with site visitors and notify sales reps via Slack to get involved when the prospect is hot
4. Launch complex pricing plans that dynamically adjust to the visitor using tools like Wingback.

Want to dive deeper into how to engage with prospects to capture demand? Check out part three of our warm leads manifesto here.

Capture Demand With Warmly 

The most successful B2B demand generation campaigns will be those built on a solid foundation of ICP-focused content.

Nailing your messaging and customer targeting, then going all in on content production and distribution will help position your brand as a thought leader and develop positive brand associations so that when a prospect is ready to buy, you’ll be top of mind.

Then its all about demand capture. That’s where Warmly, the account-based orchestration platform, comes in.

With Warmly, you can deanonymize site visitors, track engagement behavior, enrich account data with best-in-class firmographic and intent data, and engage visitors with an AI-led conversational chat solution.

Want to start seeing results in a matter of minutes?

Check out how Kandji booked two qualified meetings in just 8 minutes using Warmly.

They’re targeting cold leads, people who often don’t know a thing about the product or question and definitely aren’t in the market.

But what if you were running on Premium?

Well, your pipeline would be moving faster, and you’d be closing more deals and growing revenue faster.

That’s what happens when you fuel your sales team with warm leads, prospects who’ve already shown at least some degree of intent or interest in your product.

In this comprehensive guide, we’ll be walking you through our tried-and-tested strategy for generating warm leads. (At Warmly, it’s been so successful that our inbound meeting calendar is booked up for the next two months!)

But first, let’s set the record straight.

What Is A Warm Lead?

This is one of those questions that has more than one answer.

The simple answer is this:

A warm lead is a sales prospect that has shown interest in your brand, product, or services.

That simple answer provides the clue as to why the question is actually more complex than it appears on the surface.

What Do You Mean By “Warm”?

How much interest does a prospect need to have shown in order to be considered a warm lead? And what do we consider “showing interest”?

Is someone who has signed up for an email newsletter just as “warm” as someone who was browsing the pricing page? And are those two just as warm as someone who just booked a demo?

And what about activities like downloading an ebook?

Is that considered “showing interest” in your product? Or are they simply demonstrating interest in the information inside of that guide?

What About Brand Affiliation?

One important note is that people often forget that "warm" could also mean a strong affiliation with your brand.

If someone has watched your video content, listened to thought leaders in your company speak, or read a solid content article you put out. I'd argue that that person is "warm" to your brand, especially in today's age of sales, where credibility is the new currency.

We are migrating away from the "How" to the "Who" economy.

‎In the "How Economy," companies would compete to get information in front of the right people at the right time. In the "Who Economy," companies battle for influence.

The golden era of B2B SaaS sales has ended, and the B2B sales funnel looks very different. True influence (and, therefore, conversions) comes from trust. It’s why 91% of B2B purchasers’ buying decisions are influenced by word-of-mouth.

So, for all intents and purposes, "warm," by our definition, is a function of:

• Buyer stage for your product or service
• Level of trust and affiliation with your brand

For all of this complexity, there is no standard across sales teams in different companies as to what a warm lead actually is other than the fact that it is not a cold lead.

Warm Leads vs. Cold Leads

Understanding more about warm leads’ counterpart—cold leads—can help us come up with a better definition.

A cold lead is any sales prospect who hasn’t actively signaled interest in your product or services. They haven’t engaged with your site, social media profiles, or content, and they quite possibly haven’t even heard of your brand before.

You have their details (like an email or phone number) because you’ve bought a list of cold sales leads or done some sales prospecting to create your own.

They may or may not be in the market for your product, nor do you know if they even have a solid use case for it (though you probably have firmographic data to infer that).

Through this lens, we can say that warm leads are categorically better than cold leads. They have a higher chance of closing and come with a shorter sales cycle. Win-win.

Still, not all warm leads are created equal, so it's worth categorizing further.

Categorizing Warm Leads

Warm leads are all prospects that have shown some form of interest or intent (i.e., they aren’t cold leads).

But should every warm lead get the same treatment from sales?

The answer is no, by the way.

Someone who sees your ad on LinkedIn and hands over their email to download a “State of the market” report has not demonstrated the same level of intent as a prospect who has read five pieces of content and checked out your pricing page twice.

Thus, they should receive different treatment from sales and marketing, and go into different sequences.

MQLs and SQLs

Some brands use a simple MQL/SQL (marketing/sales qualified lead) division to action this, others implement lead scoring, and others still use a combination of AI and lead routing to create something close to personalized outreach sequences.

All are valid and not something we’re going to dive into detail here. 

The point is, though, that you bear in mind that the warm leads you generate with the five following strategies won’t all necessarily be of the same “warmness” and that your consequent sales tactics should vary accordingly.

Side note: Some sales teams go beyond warm and categorize some leads as “hot leads.” This can be helpful, but like warm leads, there is no industry-wide agreement on what a “hot lead” is. 

Again, that’s up to you to determine what the different lead types are.

Our Foolproof 3-Step Strategy For Generating More Warm Leads

Below is the exact strategy that Warmly used to generate warm leads and book sales demos.

In fact, as of writing, you can’t even book a demo with our sales team this month. This warm lead generation strategy has been so effective that our reps are full!

So, take notes!

1. Build A Media Brand

Creating and capturing warm leads is all about positioning your organization (and the key people within it) as trusted experts who provide advice, help, and education to the market.

The best way to conceptualize this is as if you’re building a media company.

Yes, you’re developing, marketing, and selling a product. 

But adjacent to that is your media brand, which acts as the fuel for your sales team by attracting a wider audience of not-in-market buyers and nurturing them down the funnel into warm leads.

Customer collaboration platform Aligned provides a great example of how this is done. 

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They’ve gone as far as giving their media brand a name (Streamligned), and positioning it as a streaming platform.

I mean, it literally looks like a Netflix or a Prime.

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Creating a media brand is the perfect response to the shift in the B2B SaaS market from “how” toward “who.”

As Phil Carpenter, CMO at ALICE Technologies, put it: 

"It's more important for your company to be known as a thought leader than to be known for its product's technology."

For something like B2B SaaS, I wholeheartedly believe that. 

I also believe that building a media brand and consistently publishing quality content is what will ensure your company is known as a thought leader.

It’s the approach we’re taking at Warmly, and it's already paying off.

For us, this has been especially important as we’re also engaged in category design (we’re building the category of signal-based sales orchestration).

So, how do you get started?

The following is a series of tips and best practices for creating and growing a media brand across seven different content types:

1. Blog content
2. Video content
3. Social media content
4. Podcasts
5. Lead magnets
6. Playbooks and courses
7. Case studies and testimonials 

Blog Content

Blog content is the backbone of most companies’ content strategies.

You publish many pieces on various topics related to challenges your audience faces, optimize them to show up in Google search, and distribute them across social media and email.

What’s critical here is that you don’t fall into the trap of mass-producing SEO content that serves only to capture search traffic, pushing up a vanity metric.

Yes, you can make SEO a viable channel, but value should be first and foremost.

Take, for example, our article on Drift competitors and alternatives. It achieves three important goals.

First, it ranks on Google for an important search term, “drift alternatives”:

Second, it provides deep value that helps readers understand the major differences between alternatives so they can choose the most appropriate one for their needs.

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This helps position Warmly as a thought leader and knowledge advisor in the vertical.

Finally, it creates an opportunity for us to explain why Warmly might be a reasonable solution and to further educate readers about the category we are designing.

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If you’re serious about making blog content a large part of your media offering, you’ll need to build a content factory to support high-volume production.

We’ve got a five-part series on how. Here’s the first installment: Building A Content Factory (Part 1 of 5). 

Video Content

Video is another important medium and one that can cover a variety of different content formats.

For us, video includes participating in webinars, as well as short walkthrough videos like this one from our Head of Revenue, Keegan.

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For HockeyStack, video content goes as far as humorous clips:

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As well as tactical series featuring industry leaders like Peep Laja:

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The great thing about video is that it can be heavily repurposed.

Long-form videos can be cut down into attention-grabbing clips that you distribute on social media or embed within blog posts to create a richer customer experience on the page.

Social Media Content

Social media is a whole-company thing, from the founders down to the sales team.

Take our CEO, Max Greenwald, who is constantly posting, commenting, and sharing on LinkedIn:

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Sometimes, that’s simply to distribute a recent piece of blog or video content. Other times, its to promote a job position we have available.

More often, though, it's an actionable and prescriptive piece of advice (the above post is not only a humble brag. It also includes a walk-through video on how our GTM engine works).

For sales leaders and reps, it's all about social selling.

Social selling is the practice of using social media platforms (LinkedIn, X, Instagram) to connect with prospects.

Our Head of Revenue and Operations, Keegan Otter, posts regularly on LinkedIn as a way of engaging with our target audience, spreading the word about Warmly, and creating new opportunities in the form of warm leads.

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It's important to note that the above post isn’t selling per se. Rather, it's adding value by providing prescriptive advice that our target audience can use in their day-to-day worklife.

That’s what you should be aiming for with social selling.

The most interested parties will get in touch with Keegan directly via InMail (warm lead = created) or navigate over to our website (where our previous strategy and our next one can play a part).

Learn more about how Keegan’s sales process works: 4 Powerful Omnichannel Sales & Marketing Examples.

Podcasts 

Podcasts are another fantastic form of content that your media brand can invest in.

The big win with podcasts is your ability to increase reach through brand partnerships. 

We’ll be diving into partnerships in detail in part two (it is that important), but the gist is that you can have others appear on your show while you feature on theirs: a win-win for reach.

Take a look at how many different podcast episodes Derek Osgood, CEO of GTM platform Ignition, has appeared on.

Lead Magnets

Lead magnets are the classic marketing tactic for generating warm leads.

Common examples of lead magnets include ebooks, guides, and webinars. 

Basically, they are a piece of online content that, in order to access, the prospect needs to hand over some contact information (usually an email, but sometimes phone numbers are asked for).

The problem with lead magnets is that while they do produce leads, it's not entirely clear that they produce warm leads.

Let’s say that I’m researching my content strategy as I prepare to build a content factory.

I download this ebook from Callbox to research what competitors are saying about predictive lead scoring and its importance in B2B sales.

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Does this signify that I’m at all interested in purchasing a solution like Callbox?

Clearly not.

Or consider a less extreme example. I am in the market for a solution like that, but I’m right at the start of my journey.

Often, lead magnets like this are considered the end of marketing efforts and the perfect time for sales professionals to reach out. I’m a “warm lead,” after all. But this is jumping the gun. There has been no buying intent demonstrated.

This doesn’t mean that you should do away with lead magnets altogether. Use them as one of your many marketing strategies, but don’t consider them a tactic for filling up the top of your sales funnel.

Instead, follow this playbook:

• Potential customers who download your lead magnet are synced to your CRM software and then enriched with firmographic data (something Warmly can help with)
• They are then entered into email drip campaigns with additional relevant and valuable content (with personalized content based on the data enrichment from the previous step)
• You measure interaction with your email marketing campaigns and direct traffic back to your site (where you can jump into strategy 3: conversational chat)

Templates are another form of lead magnet and one that tends to provide a lot more immediate and actionable value.

HockeyStack (again) has this one nailed:

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This is a fantastic way to generate new sales leads, as the templates are literally built within HockeyStack. 

Potential customers can jump into the template, take a look around at the product, and start embedding themselves into the product. Then, sales (or account management) can run upsell or cross-sell plays.

Playbooks and Courses 

Keeping in line with the “help, don’t sell” methodology, perhaps the ultimate form of media you can create to create and capture warm leads is a format that your audience can put into action right now:

Playbooks and courses.

For example, on the Warmly media page, we’ve created a series of short videos showing how GTM teams can get immediate value out of our solution:

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HockeyStack’s Academy page takes this to another level:

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Each of these modules contains a series of powerful, prescriptive, actionable episodes, some of which include using HockeyStack products (but, importantly, not all).

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Case Studies and Testimonials 

Finally, for customers right at the bottom of the marketing funnel, you’ll want to create some media celebrating your current customers in the form of case studies.

Case studies follow a common structure:

• Background
• Problem
• Evaluation
• Solution 
• Result 

Check out our case study with Basile Sensei, CRO at Arc, for an example of how this structure works.

It’s a good practice to keep these customer-focused. Yes, you are, to a degree, promoting your product here, and it is a bottom-of-funnel tactic.

But the article shouldn’t be a duplicate of your sales landing pages. It should frame the use cases and benefits of your solution in the context of a real-life customer: yours!

Check out how Aligned keeps their case study with Deel focused on the common problems their client faced

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P.S. Using hard data (“I have cut my sales cycle by 30%!”) in case studies is critical for creating an authoritative resource.

2. Create Brand Partnerships 

As you get your media operation up and running, you should simultaneously be investing in brand partnerships.

Here, we’re not talking about just influencers (though that could be a reasonable tactic in certain industries).

We’re talking about finding like-minded leaders and marketers at companies that occupy a similar space to you but aren’t direct competitors.

They need to be like-minded in that they, too, are building a media brand and focusing on creating warm leads through demand-generation activities. This aligns incentives.

They need to be in a similar industry but not competitors, as this will mean that you’re communicating with the same potential customers but not fighting over the same share of wallet.

For example, one of the brands that Warmly partners with to create educational content is Sendspark. 

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They’re a personalized video recording tool and one that we actually use as part of our omnichannel sales program.

We have similar customers (broadly speaking, GTM teams), but our tools do very different things, so they aren’t competing.

Intel, Intros, and Influence 

Reveal is one of our favorite tools for fruitful partnerships.

With Reveal, you can bring partner data across into your CRM to identify new opportunities and ask for referrals from partners to generate warm leads.

For instance, I can see that Salesflow has over 1,800 customers that aren’t already in my CRM.

Now, maybe not all of them are going to fit our ICP, but we at least know that they are in the market for GTM tools since they’ve bought Salesflow.

I can then review this data, identify which accounts fit our ICP and that I’d like to target, and then reach out to my contact at Salesflow for a warm intro.

Because those customers already know and trust Salesflow, that “warmness” is extended to us when the introduction is made.

Referral Programs

Referral programs as a tactic for generating warm leads is one that’s often neglected in small businesses and startup sales, and typically only adopted by larger retailers.

This presents an excellent opportunity for startups to scale using a tried and tested growth method, one which very few competitors will likely be taking advantage of.

Email marketing platform Woodpecker provides a good example of how to do this well.

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By simply referring a potential customer to Woodpecker and getting them onto a trial plan, clients (and even non-clients) can earn recurring commissions on those that convert to paid plans.

This is a quality warm lead generation strategy for Woodpecker, who doesn’t have to do anything except pay out commissions.

You’ll want to follow suit when designing your own referral program. That is, don’t pay for leads; pay for customers that close.

This will mean a zero cost to you until the point where you actually close a customer and start seeing revenue.

3. Engage With Prospective Buyers

The final stage in our three-part playbook is capturing the warm leads that you've generated.

That’s where you (as the CEO, revenue leader, sales rep, marketing manager, etc.) engage with potential buyers across the various channels in which you’ve been publishing content.

That covers everything from replying to comments on social media posts to capturing high-intent buyers who are browsing your website and initiating a sales conversation.

Social Media Engagement

The first stop is to jump onto whatever social media platforms you’re using to distribute content.

A good rule of thumb here is that more engagement is better. Here are some of the most important activities to nail:

• React or respond to every comment in your own posts
• Share or repost content from others in your company, and from those in your partnership network
• Ask questions to learn more (a great way to discover customer pain points you weren’t aware of)
• Browse relevant groups and comment on posts where your expertise allows you to provide helpful advice

This kind of social media engagement is also an effective way to understand how customers determine what is quality content. Measure engagement across your different posts, comments, and interactions. Then, double down on what appears to be working best.

Deanonymize Website Traffic

One of the most important components in building a warm lead-generating machine is identifying who all of the people on your site actually are.

Warmly, our signal-based revenue orchestration platform is built to do just that.

With Warmly enabled on your website, you’ll be able to uncover 15% of contacts that visit your site and 60% of companies (without you doing anything). And if you’re sending outbound emails with Warmly, you’ll be able to identify even more.

For the visitors identified, Warmly will tell you which pages they’re visiting, how long they’re spending, and how often they’re coming back.

This is crucial data for building outreach sequences, especially for companies with multiple products.

For instance, Warmly has use cases for both sales and marketing teams.

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When we identify a website visitor, the email outreach campaign we put them into will depend entirely on the content they’re engaging with.

Discover how Arc realized 200% ROI in just 6 months with Warmly’s site traffic de-anonymization

Conversational Chat

Chatbots have become a standard piece of equipment for marketing teams.

But most brands don’t go much beyond a plug-and-play chat solution that is entirely reactive and largely serves to take some of the load off of support.

But AI sales chatbots can accelerate pipeline generation and play a huge part in the generation of warm leads.

Take Warmly’s AI chat system.

Using the traffic de-anonymization we discussed in point one, Warmly knows exactly who is on your site and what content they’ve been engaging with.

Our AI chatbot can then create personalized messaging based on this browsing behavior and hold a full conversation right up until a meeting has been booked.

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But it doesn’t all have to be AI.

If a given prospect is showing a high level of purchase intent, Warmly can automatically notify the relevant sales rep via Slack to jump onto the chat and take over the conversation (without the customer realizing that a switch took place).

Learn how Kandji booked 2 qualified meetings in just 8 minutes of using Warmly’s AI chat.

Third-Party Intent and Job Change Data

The best engagement happens when you can deliver personalized content to a qualified lead.

For this, you need data.

Website deanonymization tells you who the visitor is, and when coupled with third-party firmographic data, can give you important data such as contact details.

To really lift conversion rates, though, you need to capture intent.

Warmly partners with best-in-class data suppliers (like Bombora) to deliver timely information about a target account’s buying intent.

We can tell when a given prospect is poised to buy, so your sales reps can jump in with personalized communications based on that specific person’s engagement history.

Job change data is another powerful signal that Warmly can provide, and is an effective way to generate warm leads.

Whenever your champion or contact at a given account jumps to a new company, this is identified as an opportunity. 

You’ve built trust and positive brand affiliation with that champion, and they’ve already demonstrated intent by buying previously.

With timely job change data on hand, you’ll be the first to reach out to congratulate them, then segway into a sales conversation.

What’s Next? Converting Warm Leads Into Buyers

As we’ve discussed in detail here, the concept of “warm leads” is a contentious one in sales circles.

While we can quite clearly describe what a cold lead is—and, therefore, what a warm lead isn’t—defining what a warm lead is ends up being something that comes down to the individual sales team.

Our take is that warm leads are a function of two things:

1. Buyer stage for your product or service (are they ready to buy or close to?)
2. Level of trust and affiliation with your brand (do they know who you are and trust your advice.)

However you choose to define them, Warmly can help you capture more of them:

• AI prospecting to help book meetings for you on repeat
• Best-in-class third-party buying intent data
• Website de-anonymization and intent signals to discover who is on your site and what content they’re engaging with
• Job change alerts to capitalize on hot opportunities 
• AI chat to engage web visitors and convert them to leads routed directly to your CRM and sales engagement sequences

Discover how Namecoach created 26 new warm leads in their first 6 months using Warmly.Sales teams run on leads.Without fresh leads, reps have nothing on which to run playbooks, nobody to send email outreach sequences to, and nothing in the pipeline with which to report back to their sales lead.Leads are our fuel. But most sales teams are running on Regular.

A quick note to readers: This article is actually part five in a five-part series on building your own content factory, with expert advice from Nate Matherson, the Co-founder and CEO of Positional. 

Read part 4/5 on how to get free backlinks.

Head here to jump back to the start.

A lot of marketers make a huge mistake when it comes to investing in content:

They don’t track the ROI (return on investment) from their efforts.

Or, perhaps more accurately, they don’t use the right content marketing metrics to understand how their content is performing or what they can do to improve results.

Hint: Measuring content marketing ROI is about more than just looking at monthly organic traffic.

If you’re looking to avoid making that same mistake, then you’ve landed in the right place. In this guide, we’re going to dive deep into measuring ROI from content marketing.

Specifically, we’re going to be talking about ROI in the context of SEO content (blogs, primarily). 

That’s because this article is the final step in the process of building a content factory, a five-part series we’ve published on that topic, featuring expert advice from Nate Matherson, the Co-founder and CEO of Positional.  

Haven’t been following along? Head here to jump back to the start.

How to Measure Content Marketing ROI: 9 Metrics 

First, let’s dive into some of the content metrics most commonly used by SEO experts and weigh up which of them are valuable to us and which we should just throw away.

1. Organic Traffic

Organic traffic is what the whole SEO game is about.

It’s the number of people reaching your website (measured on a monthly basis) through organic search.

Side note: Organic search means that someone has Googled something and found your site, rather than learning about you through a paid advertisement.

2. Search Impressions

Search impressions is a metric that refers to the number of times your content has shown up in search results (but doesn’t necessarily mean that it has been clicked).

For example, in the above Google search for, our blog post on Drift alternatives is winning search impressions because it shows up in position number two.

If someone clicks on our post to read it, then this will also count toward organic traffic. 

3. Keyword Rankings 

Rankings speak to the position each page holds in a given Google search.

In the above example, the page is ranking at position two for the target search term.

We can look at keyword rankings on a per-page basis, examine the average keyword ranking across all pages, or create filters to understand, for instance, the number of keywords for which we hold a top ten position.

4. Referring Domains

The referring domains content marketing metric tells us how many external websites are linking back to ours.

We can review this across the entire website or dig into each page’s referring domains.

Jump here to learn how to improve this key metric: Building A Content Factory (Part 4/5): How To Get Free Backlinks.

5. Domain Authority

Domain Authority is not an official metric used by search engines. Rather, it's a compound measurement created by the SEO tool Moz.

Best to let them explain it then:

“Domain Authority (DA) is a search engine ranking score developed by Moz that predicts how likely a website is to rank in search engine result pages (SERPs). Domain Authority scores range from one to 100, with higher scores corresponding to a greater likelihood of ranking.”

(Quote Source)

While DA isn’t officially supported by search engines, many content strategists find it valuable as an SEO metric. 

6. Click-Through Rate

Click-through rate (CTR) is the percentage of impressions that turn into clicks.

For example, if for every 100 people who get served a given page of yours in their SERP (search engine results page), 20 click on the link, then you have a CTR of 20%.

7. Page Load Speed

Page load speed measures how long a page takes to load once clicked into, reported in seconds.

Faster is better. A slow load speed hurts user experience and causes people to leave.

8. Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who enter a given web page and then leave without taking any action (such as clicking or scrolling).

Lower is better. A high bounce rate tells you that a given page isn’t as valuable as expected, doesn’t contain the information the user needs, or perhaps has a loading error (like a slow page speed).

9. Conversion Rate

Conversion rate is the percentage of users who take a specified action on the page in question.

This metric is only as good as you make it, as you’ll be the one defining what a conversion actually is in Google Analytics (or your website analytics tool of choice).

Say, for example, that you set “click” as a conversion goal for a given blog post. This means that any click, whether it be to a conversion asset or to another landing page, is counted as a conversion.

If that’s your goal with blogging, that’s perfect. But if your goal is only to direct them to the conversion asset, then your conversion rate metric will be misleading.

What Content Marketing Metrics Actually Matter? 

The content marketing world is full of vanity metrics (metrics that sound good on paper but don’t actually relate to the pursuit of core business goals).

More than that, there are a ton of metrics that can be vanity metrics if not used correctly.

Bounce rate is a good example. Simply increasing it for the sake of increasing might not be a good idea. 

Lower bounce rates can be a signal that your content is serving search intent quickly. People are getting the information they came for and then moving on with their day. 

Side note: This isn’t always the case, and further investigation is always warranted when a page has a higher-than-desirable bounce rate.

So, what content marketing metrics really matter?

As you begin building your content engine—and, with it, your reporting and measurement strategy—we recommend you focus on three core measurements:

1. Monthly Search Impressions 
2. Monthly Search Traffic
3. Keyword Rankings

P.S. These metrics should be tracked alongside the best practice of confirming each new page you publish is correctly indexed by search engines and rectifying this should that not be the case.

Monthly Search Impressions 

Nate recommends tracking search impressions as a core content marketing metric, as this is typically a leading indicator of search traffic.

The idea is pretty sound:

If your pages are getting impressions, it means that people are seeing your content and getting an opportunity to click through.

This should lead to traffic. And if it doesn’t, it means you’ve got some work to do on CTRs (more on that later).

Monthly Search Traffic 

This is the big metric for understanding whether your content strategy is paying off. 

Search traffic is the number of people who are coming to your website organically, which will primarily be through the blog posts and landing pages your content operations team has been hard at work creating.

Nate recommends tracking monthly search traffic in GSC (Google Search Console) and aiming for a month-on-month increase of 10-20% for a full year.

If you’re doing as well as that (or better), you can consider your content factory a success.

Goal-Specific Metrics 

Many SEO and content teams stop at search traffic.

Sure, this is a solid measurement of whether your SEO strategy is working, as it means you’re ranking for target keywords and converting impressions into clicks.

But what happens then?

Most organizations want to know that the money they’re spending on content production turns into revenue.

Larger companies can justify this expense with the basic heuristic:

More traffic = More conversions = More revenue.

This is largely true, assuming that your site itself is doing a good job from a conversion standpoint.

But startups and smaller organizations often need to be more revenue-oriented than that. They need to know how their content investment relates to new revenue creation.

If you’re in that bucket, then you’ll need to take your content measurement one step further and use a goal-specific metric.

Revenue as a metric is a little too far away from SEO content to be realistic, especially when there are so many other steps in the sales cycle between reading a blog post and closing a deal.

More realistic options here include:

• Conversion rate (assuming you set the conversion goal in GA to a conversion asset like a downloadable guide or demo signup for every page)
• Leads generated
• Free plan signups

Optimizing Content To Improve ROI 

Measuring content marketing ROI isn’t just about knowing what fruits your previous content efforts have delivered.

It’s also an opportunity to optimize existing content pieces to improve search rankings, user experience, and conversions.

When optimizing the content you’ve already published, there are three important areas to pay attention to.

Title Tags and Meta Descriptions 

Say you’ve got a page that’s ranking in the top ten, but it's low in there (e.g., position seven or eight).

You can take this as a good signal that the content is valuable and considered highly relevant for the search term, and you’re likely getting search impressions for that page.

To lift the page into the top three or five, you’ll want to focus on clicks. 

Take our guide to 2023 marketing conferences. It’s sitting at position nine for the search term “marketing conventions 2023.”

When it comes to Google search, there are basically two levers to pull from a CTR standpoint:

1. Title tag
2. Meta description

Let’s start with the title tag: An Essential Guide to the Best Marketing Conferences …

The first problem is that our title is getting cut off. It’s too long. For this reason, it doesn’t include “2023,” which is clearly an important part of the search term.

Compare that to top-ranking results:

We could also look at adding some action-based words (attend seems to be popular, perhaps a synonym to differentiate) to boost motivation.

Next, we’ll turn our attention to the meta description.

Ours looks like it has been auto-generated by Google. Sometimes, they rewrite your meta if they don’t like what you gave them. If you didn’t specify a meta description, they’ll just auto-generate it.

This is an opportunity for us to give readers a sneak peek into what’s inside and double down on motivation. What makes our page unique?

Bizzabo’s article does a good job of this.

It’s important to bear in mind that this is a process of experimentation.

Set up your change, then come back in two weeks or a month and see what changes have occurred.

On-Page Analytics 

Next, we’ll turn our attention to the on-page analytics provided by Positional for the same article.

Our bounce rate is quite high (around 40-50% is a good spot to aim for), which could be a signal that our article isn’t providing as much value as a user would expect. 

Time on page is also super low (it says zero seconds, but what this really means is less than one second).

What’s strange about this is that we have a really high scroll depth. 0.88 means the average reader scrolls through 88% of the page.

So, the typical user clicks on the page, scrolls through basically the whole thing, and then leaves immediately. 

That might be because the piece is particularly short at a total of just over 400 words (compared to an average ~2800w across the top five).

Positional also gives us some useful insights about where on the page people are most commonly leaving.

For this article, more than half saw the write-up on the first event, MozCon, and then decided that this page wasn’t what they were looking for.

Diving into the page itself, it appears that we’ve got some work to do on increasing the usefulness of the piece and improving user experience.

User Experience 

User experience (UX) encompasses everything that happens on the page and how this relates to the experience of the person using it.

Metrics like bounce rate and page load speed relate to user experience (slow pages aren’t great for UX), as well as broader facets like visual comprehension (how easy it is to digest the information on the page).

Looking at the article discussed above, we can see that it's lacking from a visual standpoint:

There are no images or other visual tools to break up the wall of text, such as lists or tables.

Let’s compare that to the piece by Meltwater, which owns the top spot for this search term.

Screenshots, lists, short sentences, and design boxes are all features used by Meltwater to improve visual comprehension and enhance the user experience.

So, to improve the performance of this page overall, we should:

• Add more content about each event
• Include more events to up our usefulness and overall wordcount
• Find images and screenshots to improve the visual experience
• Use visual comprehension tools like lists and tables to make the content easier to digest 

Tracking Improvements In Content Marketing ROI 

As you start diving into the above performance metrics and begin optimizing content on a per-piece basis, you’ll want to pay close attention to position changes that arise as a result.

All SEO tools (Semrush, Ahrefs, Moz) have some form of keyword tracking solution built in.

Positional offers a helpful keyword-tracking dashboard where you can easily access all of your core metrics:

By filtering the bottom table by “Change,” we can dive into changes in positions for the keywords we’re tracking.

For example, if we apply the changes mentioned in the above section to our “Best Marketing Conferences of 2023” article, we can monitor how those optimizations impact how we rank for that target keyword.

Driving ROI From Content Marketing Efforts With Warmly 

Since many marketing teams stop at measuring traffic as the key success metric for content production, they often fail to link that investment back to the sales funnel (the part of your business that actually generates revenue).

Before we sign off, we want to show you how to make this connection and turn your content factory into a revenue-generating tool using Warmly.

What Is Warmly?

Warmly is an account-based orchestration platform designed to help sales and marketing teams convert website visitors into high-value leads.

Read more: Warmly: The Account Based Orchestration Platform.

Warmly isn’t an SEO or content tool, strictly speaking. But Warmly can help you deliver greater ROI from content efforts by turning traffic into leads.

De-Anonymizing Site Traffic

You’ve been working hard on driving traffic to your website, publishing 20 articles a month, and optimizing individual pieces to rank higher.

But who are those people who land on your website through a blog post?

That’s the first thing Warmly helps with. 

We de-anonymize site traffic and tell you 15% of contacts that visit your site and 60% of companies (without you doing anything). If you are sending outbound emails through Warmly with tracking links, we can drive these numbers even further.

Fuelling Content Planning

By de-anonymizing site traffic, Warmly helps you figure out who’s visiting your site and understand whether the people landing on it actually fit your ICP.

It helps you figure out what content is being consumed by your ICP (so you know where to invest more into), but also what new content you’re not writing but should be writing.

Converting Traffic Into Revenue

After identifying who that person is on your site and what company they work for, Warmly syncs all the visitors to your site back to your CRM with data on what pages they visited, how long they spent there, and so on. 

Then, Warmly can help you tailor specific outreach sequences to identified contacts based on the pages they’ve been interacting and engaging with.

Plus, with a quick Slack message (by way of a native integration), reps can be automatically notified when a target prospect is on your site, so they can initiate a conversation via live chat.

Scaling Your Content Factory: Where To Next?

In this five-part series on building a content factory, we’ve covered a lot of ground.

In part one, we explore Nate Matheson’s experience in building high-performing content teams and how content production played a huge role in creating marketing success at his previous organizations.

In our second installation, we dove deep into how to create a plan for website content production and followed that up with an extended guide to building out content operations in part three.

Our previous post (part four) looked at the importance of backlink building and how internal links also play an important part.

And in today’s lesson, we taught you how to measure the results of all of that hard work, and provided a few tips for optimizing existing content.

So, where to next?

Two places, simultaneously:

1. Back to the top: Content strategy and planning are things you should engage in every 2-3 months so that you’re constantly re-integrating your learnings.
2. Check out Warmly: Dead set on making sure your content not only drives traffic but converts visitors into revenue? Then, you’ll want to be using Warmly to de-anonymize visitors and add prospects to automated outreach cadences.

Discover how Warmly can transform your content strategy and turn traffic into revenue.

A quick note to readers: This article is the fourth installment in a five-part series on building your own content production factory, with expert advice from Nate Matherson, the Co-founder and CEO of Positional. 

Read part 3/5 on Developing Content Operations.

Head here to jump back to the start.

So you’ve been plugging away for months producing SEO-focused blog content, and nothing much seems to be happening.

Sure, you’ve got a few articles on page one, and the overall trend is upward. But you feel like you’re not moving as fast as you should be.

You’re doing all the right things: creating high-quality content that provides actionable advice, is easily scannable, and optimized for search.

So why are some of your articles not making it onto Google’s radar?

It may be that you need to secure more backlinks—links to your website from other trustworthy and authoritative domains that Google sees as a good sign that your content is valuable and worth paying attention to.

Good content will generate backlinks naturally and organically, but this happens over time.

To boost your chances, it's a good idea to invest some time (and maybe some money) in generating backlinks early on.

In this guide, we’ll be detailing seven different strategies that show you exactly how to get free backlinks.

But first, let’s get a little debate out of the way (or head here to skip right ahead to the backlink strategies).

Should You Bother Investing In Backlink Building?

SEO (search engine optimization) is one of those fields where nobody seems to agree much on what the best approach is.

Should you publish more content? Focus on high-volume keywords that are harder to rank for? Or low-difficulty keywords that you can win more easily? Should you use an optimization tool?

Ask five different “SEO experts” those questions, and you’ll get five different answers. (The best answer is yes to all of them, by the way).

But more contentious than any of the above is whether or not backlinks are even important.

Some content strategists are all in on backlinks. There are even agencies and consultants dedicated specifically to the task of securing backlinks on behalf of companies like yours.

Others are vehemently against them, preferring to invest in other activities like internal linking.

Backlinks vs. Internal Links

Nate Matheson’s position on this whole debate is that generating backlinks is valuable but that you should be less concerned about backlinks to specific pages and more about your site in general (backlinks being the tide that rises all boats).

More than that, Nate believes that internal links (links between different pages and blogs on your website) are generally more important than backlinks.

Plus, if you’ve developed plenty of strong internal links across the content you’ve published, when you do get some backlinks, the “link juice” will be spread across the various connected content pieces (that rising tide again).

So, to ignore backlinks entirely is probably a bad move. 

Yes, there are plenty of other higher-value tasks to invest time in—like improving your internal linking structure or simply producing more content.

But, assuming you’ve got the most important boxes ticked off already, finding ways to increase the number of backlinks to your site is an activity that will improve your content marketing ROI overall.

Before starting with backlink building, make sure you’ve clarified your SEO strategy. For example, you may use a comprehensive web scraping toolkit to gather research on your competitors, including which keywords they’re targeting and their backlink profiles, or conduct research with SERP tools. This information can help you approach your link-building activities with more precision.

7 Different Strategies For Finding Backlink Opportunities 

1. Go Heavy On Guest Posting 

The most common approach to building backlinks is to write and publish guest posts.

Guest posts are blogs that you write (or, rather, your content writers do) but publish on an external website.

It’s made clear on that website that the post is from you, and the article itself includes one or more links back over to your site.

Check out this example from Eventbrite.

(Image Source)

At the top of the blog post, there is a note that the article is a guest post from Mike Bronfin. It then includes a backlink to a desired page on Instagram’s website.

A quick note here:

Don’t skimp out on guest posts. Many content teams view guest posts as a pure link-building tactic, so they just write a short 1000w post and leave it at that.

Yes, that gets you the link, but it doesn't provide a lot of value for the reader and subsequently means the article is unlikely to rank.

No, you don’t have to be creating an “ultimate guide” for every guest post you write.

But you should be approaching the guest post just as you do with your other blog posts: write the most valuable piece you can and optimize it for search engines. 

If it shows up in search results, it will receive more traffic, which means more potential eyes on your site through referral traffic (if they click the backlinks you added). 

2. Leverage Bookface (for YC Startups) 

If you’re a Y Combinator startup, then Bookface is a solid place to find a number of like-minded founders who are trying to grow their marketing efforts and would be open to a bit of guest blogging.

Look for similar companies but not competitors. 

For example, we (Warmly) are in the broad sales and marketing space. 

We could write guest posts and secure high-quality links from companies offering CRMs, marketing automation solutions, or even social media platforms.

We wouldn’t, however, want to write something for another company with an account-based orchestration solution.

Link exchanges are a great option here. You publish a guest post on their site, and they write one for you.

It’s a win-win for you because you not only secure a couple more inbound links, but its also an excellent way to expand your site’s own content offering (and outbound links to other relevant websites are a good thing, too).

3. Try Out A Few Media Outlets 

Media outlets are another great way to publish content and receive high-quality links.

This is similar to the guest blogging play, but the big benefit here is that most quality media outlets get a lot more readers than the typical startup blog.

This means more eyes on a given page, making media outlets a dual play: link-building and brand awareness.

4. Play The Numbers Game With Resource Pages 

Resources pages are another smart place where you can secure high-quality backlinks.

For instance, when Nate was designing the link-building strategy for a previous company, he secured backlinks from the likes of the University of Iowa.

This one is more of a numbers game. 

Build yourself a long list of relevant resource pages, then run an automated email outreach campaign.

You’re not going to get responses from all of them, but you will hear from some, and that will be enough to supplement your backlink-building strategy (without putting more strain on your content operations team).

5. Consider Investing In Broken Link Building

Broken link building is the process of identifying pages that have broken links within them and then asking the domain owner to replace that link with one to your website.

Semrush has an excellent guide on broken link building, but the gist of the process is this:

• Jump on Google and use Google search operators (like “useful links” AND [topic], [topic] intitle:“useful resources”, [topic] inurl:resources) to find resource pages
• Use an extension like Check My Links to find broken links
• Find the owner of the domain by performing a WHOIS search
• Pitch the website owner with a relevant link to include instead

6. Go Head To Head With Your Competitors 

Many SEO tools allow you to check out the link profiles of your competitors’ sites, allowing you to rapidly build a list of relevant domains from which you may attempt to obtain external links.

For instance, this Backlink Gap report from Semrush shows us what domains RollWorks (one of our competitors) is receiving and provides advice on which websites we should target in our outreach.

You can also use these SEO tools to monitor backlinks and track your own backlink profile.

7. Don’t Forget Your Direct Network 

Finally, consider who in your direct network might be a good fit for a link exchange or guest post partnership.

Your investors are an easy option. Most of them will want to share their success in investing in your company, and a small write-up on a recent funding round could secure a couple of high-quality backlinks to your site.

Once you’ve reached out to everyone you know might be a good fit, post your social media platform of choice that you’re looking for backlink-building opportunities.

5 Tips For Capturing More Backlinks 

Before you jump into running the link-building techniques discussed above, take note of these five quick tips for improving your chances of obtaining quality links.

1. Pay (Not Too Much) Attention To Domain Authority 

Most proponents of link-building techniques recommend focusing solely on authoritative sites. That is, those that have a high Domain Authority.

Don’t know what Domain Authority is? That’s because it's made up. Here’s what Moz, the creator, says of DA:

“Domain Authority (DA) is a search engine ranking score developed by Moz that predicts how likely a website is to rank in search engine result pages (SERPs). Domain Authority scores range from one to 100, with higher scores corresponding to greater likelihood of ranking.”

(Quote Source)

Domain Authority is not something that Google or other search engines claim to use as part of their algorithms.

That said, while Google might not use DA (or Domain Rating or Authority Score, which are Ahrefs’ and Semrush’s respective versions), there does appear to be a correlation between DA and search engine rankings.

That is, sites with higher DAs or DRs tend to capture more search results compared to those with lower scores.

So, what does this have to do with link-building?

The general belief is that backlinks from higher DA/DR sites are more valuable from an SEO standpoint than those from lower sites.

As such, many content strategists set a guideline for a minimum score from which they want to build backlinks, ignoring all others.

While it may be true that higher = better, this is probably not the best approach.

Yes, you should pay attention to DA/DR and seek out sites with higher scores. But don’t throw away good opportunities just because of a low Domain Authority. 

Instead, prioritize relevance… 

2. Prioritize Highly-Relevant Referring Domains 

When designing your link-building strategy, a good practice is to prioritize websites that cover topics that are as relevant to your brand, industry, and product as possible.

While large publications might provide more reach and brand awareness, what you really want is to get in front of people who might also have a need for your product.

That way, you’re working towards your SEO goals while simultaneously building new revenue opportunities. 

3. Don’t Forget About Link Reclamation  

Link reclamation is the other side of broken link building.

It is when you identify that a backlink you previously had no longer exists or is broken, and so you reach out to the site owner and ask them to replace it.

Majestic is a good tool for managing this, or you can keep a spreadsheet and manually check links every few months.

4. Be Clear About What’s In It For Them 

As you begin your backlink outreach process, it's important to understand how to best motivate the site owner to play ball.

Unless they have “Backlink Manager” in their title, you can safely say that your request is already interrupting their workday. 

So, keep your message succinct, but also be sure to answer their WIIFM (what's in it for me?)

For example, could you take a little of the load of their website content plan by tackling a blog post in their content calendar free of charge?

5. Don’t Bother With A Free Backlink Generator

It can be tempting to consider the use of free tools to generate backlinks. There are plenty of them out here, but you’d generally do well to avoid them.

That’s because many of them practice black hat tactics (SEO slang for practices that go against search engine guidelines as a way of cheating the system).

White hat tactics (those supported by search engine guidelines) like those discussed above are generally going to deliver better results in the long term and not put your site at risk of being flagged and losing all of your hard work.

Backlinks Are One Tool In The SEO Arsenal 

Let’s make one thing clear:

Backlinks are not the be-all and end-all of SEO tactics.

If you aren’t engaging in backlink generation, that doesn’t mean that you can’t see great results for your content engine.

However, sites with more high-quality backlinks tend to do better than those that don’t, so if you are serious about seeing a strong return on investment from SEO content production, backlinks should be one arrow in your quiver.

Speaking of ROI, that’s precisely the topic of the final installment of our five-part series: Building A Content Factory (Part 5/5): Content Marketing ROI.

A quick note to readers: This article is actually part three in a five-part series on building your own content factory, with expert advice from Nate Matherson, the Co-founder and CEO of Positional. 

Read Part 2/5 on website content planning.

Head here to jump back to the start.

Ready to get serious about high-volume SEO content production?

Then, you’re going to need to build out your content operations.

Content operations (ContentOps) is the most critical component of building a content factory. It's what drives the actual writing and publishing of content. 

Without that, your content strategy is not much more than a one-pager of goals.

In this article, we’re going to walk you through a series of highly actionable steps that you can follow to build out effective content operations.

Since this article is part of a series, we won’t be covering the necessary work that goes into building a content strategy and calendar. The assumption here is that you have all of that ready to go. 

And if you don’t, you might want to jump back a step and check part two in our five-part series. Building A Content Factory (Part 2/5): Website Content Planning.

What Is Content Operations? 

Content operations is the engine your organization relies on to produce and publish content. The term refers to the combination of people, technology, and processes used to achieve content publishing goals.

ContentOps teams can be responsible for creating all forms of content, from short-form social media posts to animated videos. 

In many contexts, though, content operations refers more specifically to the product of SEO-focused blog content (since that often makes up the majority of an organization’s content output). As we move forward, we’ll be using the term in this context.

Content operations has very clearly defined start and end points. 

1. ContentOps begins when a brief is created and passed onto the writer. This means that strategy and content planning must be completed in advance. 
2. ContentOps ends once the article is published. This means that activities like content updates and reporting on content marketing ROI sit outside of content operations.

Why Invest In ContentOps? 

The main reason that businesses choose to invest in content operations is that there really is no other way to produce and publish high-quality content on such a large scale.

If you’re posting a couple of articles a month, then you can probably manage the whole thing yourself.

But if you’re really serious about SEO as a marketing channel, you’ll need to be doing something in the range of 8-20 pieces monthly.

You need to bring on additional people (writers, editors, VAs) at that scale. 

And when you have all of those people and moving parts, you need a content tech stack to manage the whole thing effectively and efficiently.

Once you’ve got that set up, you’ll realize that you need a series of SOP (standard operating procedure) documents to maintain compliance with expectations and to help your people operate your tech stack correctly.

At that point, you’ve already got three pillars of ContentOps. So you might as well approach the whole operation more intentionally and build a formal content operations team from the beginning, skipping all the trial and error.

To summarize, the main benefits of building content operations to support your strategy are:

• Increased efficiency
• Ability to access greater scale
• Enhanced collaboration
• Greater compliance with expectations 

Building The Three Core Components of Content Operations

Content operations is made up of three key components:

1. People (e.g., the writers who create your content and the virtual assistants who publish it to your website)
2. Tech stack (e.g., the project management solution you use to run the whole process or the optimization solution you use to target specific keywords)
3. Processes (e.g., your guidelines for using your optimization tool or your tone of voice one-pager)

1. People 

People are what make content operations work.

We’d be remiss not to mention that artificial intelligence is taking some of the work off of content peoples’ plates, and we’ll definitely be covering the huge role that technology plays in the content production process.

However, as of writing, a good ContentOps affair is still a people-heavy situation. 

Writers 

Your content writers are the backbone of the whole operation.

Without content creators on your team, none of the following stages can occur. So, it's a wise move to invest most of your hiring time in this role in order to create an effective content operations team.

How Many Writers?

The first step is to figure out how many writers you’re going to need.

Nate’s experience dictates that most SaaS writers can deliver one article a week. However, some can easily produce three or more. 

So, if your goal is to produce one to three articles a week, then you should be able to get by with one, two, or three writers.

Our advice is to overhire here for a few reasons:

• Many writers say that they can produce a certain volume but often struggle to meet the goals they set or face quality issues
• People fall sick, and freelancers leave
• You might have to say goodbye to some writers who aren’t keeping up with internal requirements
• You may want to produce a couple of extra pieces one month, and it is good to have extra manpower there

A good rule of thumb is to only work to 80% of your capacity. For example, if your three writers can handle ten articles in total, you probably only want to load them up with eight, giving you room for error.

So, here’s a quick formula for figuring out how many writers you’re likely to need based on an average per-writer volume of one a week (four a month):

([Your monthly publishing goal] / 4) / 0.8 

So, if our goal is to publish 20 articles a month:

(20/4) / 0.8 = 6.25 (so, 6 writers should be sufficient).

Where To Find Writers

As far as the actual recruiting and hiring of content writers, though, Positional has a great article on where to find them. Here are the top three options: 

• Create ads on job boards like Upwork, Problogger, and BloggingPro
• Scope out competitor blog posts and publications in your industry, and reach out to the writers of articles you like
• Post on social media platforms like LinkedIn and ask for referrals from your network

Writer Hiring Process

Hiring writers is a process. You don’t just put out an ad, find the first person who responds, and suddenly have a content team.

If you use the platforms mentioned above, you’ll likely receive hundreds of writing applicants. Then you’ll need to cull through them, decide which ones you might like to work with, and move on to the next stage.

It’s kind of like a sales funnel, narrowing at each stage.

Here’s the broad process:

1. The writer fills in a short application form
2. You review applicants and filter out the ones you want to trial
3. The writer completes a short writing trial for you to assess if they’re a good fit
4. You review the trials, provide feedback, and move forward with those writers you’re happy with
5. The writer gets their first official brief, and the official writing relationship begins

A good practice is to use a project management solution like Airtable, Asana, or monday.com to manage this from start to finish, including the application form.

For instance, here’s what the application form looks like for content writing agency lowercase.

(Image Source)

All applications are then plugged directly into the hiring board built on monday.com, which has several stages that represent the steps discussed above (each with an automated email send programmed for application communications).

Editors 

Once you’ve got your writers up and running, you’ll want to plug in an editor or two.

Your editor’s primary job is to uphold standards, holding writers accountable to your guidelines across style and positioning, as well as engaging in a bit of grammar correction and copyediting when it's called for.

The best editors also act as coaches for your writers. They provide actionable development feedback to help them grow as writers and produce better content each month.

Beyond that, you may have editors be responsible for certain technical tasks, such as:

• Including more internal links to other existing blog pages 
• Using optimization tools like Clearscope or Positional to improve rankings and ROI from content efforts
• Adding titles and alt text to images 

Virtual Assistants 

Virtual assistants aren’t a must, but they can help you take a lot of repeatable work off of your plate. They’ll create a more streamlined content creation process and free you up to focus on higher-value tasks such as optimizing your content marketing strategy.

The biggest thing you’ll want your VAs to be handling is publishing.

Publishing is the act of taking the content your team members have labored over and getting it live on your website.

It sounds like a relatively simple task, but the truth is that many content management systems (CMS) make this harder than it should be.

When copying over content from Google Docs or Microsoft Word to your CMS, there is often a lot of additional formatting work that needs to happen. This is pretty tedious, so it is best outsourced to a virtual assistant.

A few other tasks you might also hand over to VAs include:

• Coordinating and communicating with the design team to fulfill image creation needs
• Following up on writer and editor due dates and keeping the content calendar on track  
• Compiling the data you require to generate content reports

Design 

Having a couple of graphic designers on board isn’t a bad idea, either.

For many topics, you can get away with screenshots or simply source images from other sites (make sure you provide source links).

In other cases, having a freelancer or two available to create different types of images, like a custom infographic or graph based on first-party data that you’re presenting, is a fantastic way to improve the visual experience of your content.

Additional Roles

Depending on the scale of your operation and how much content you’re looking to produce, you might consider adding a layer of management above the whole thing (e.g., Content Operations Manager).

This isn’t necessary but it would be valuable for someone like a Head of Marketing or startup founder to take content production almost entirely off of their plate.

Additionally, you might hire a content strategist to perform some of this work but still retain ownership of the ContentOps team yourself.

Content strategists can perform tasks like keyword research, preparing content briefs, and answering queries about search intent or topic direction that might pop up from the writing team.

2. Tech stack 

Your tech stack is what helps you really streamline content operations.

It’s where all of your people live, collaborate, and communicate and where you track production across the content lifecycle.

This can be as complex or as simple as you like.

For example, you might opt to purchase a robust content operations platform designed specifically for your use case or use a free task management solution or Kanban board.

Project Management 

Your project management tool is the heart of your ContentOps tech stack.

It guides the entire content production process, allowing you to see exactly where every piece is in the process.

It's where you’ll access all of your brief, draft, and SOP documents (though they’ll be stored elsewhere), and it's where you writers, editors, and VAs will all communicate with each other.

The project management software landscape is saturated, and finding the right solution is a bit of a Goldilocks situation.

ClickUp seems to be the most robust solution for managing ContentOps and is where most content agencies end up gravitating toward for its flexibility. It's probably overkill for smaller operations, though.

On the other end of the scale, Trello is a great solution for Kanban-style content production management. The biggest benefit is that Trello’s free version is super usable, so it's a good, cost-effective way to get started.

It does, of course, offer much less flexibility in how you set it up. 

Common middle grounds are Asana, monday.com, and Airtable. All of these solutions are quite affordable, and you can generally add external parties (e.g., writers) as guests to save you from paying for more users. 

Whichever platform you choose, a good practice is to set yourself up with a stage-based workflow using the following stages:

1. Brief Creation
2. First Draft
3. Editor Review
4. Second Draft
5. Final Approval
6. Design
7. Publishing

Once a person has finished their respective task for that stage, they move the card forward to the next one. For example, once the writer completes their first draft, they drag the card over to Editor Review.

Here are a few additional tips for getting the most out of your project management solution:

• Add all of your content documents and SOPs to the card so team members can access everything in one place
• Choose a project management solution that integrates with the other components in your ContentOps tech stack as much as possible to streamline workflows and eliminate double work
• Create automation recipes in your project management tool so that when a card is moved to the next stage, it is automatically assigned to the relevant person, and a notification is sent
• Use automation to send due date reminders to help keep timelines on track
• Create checklists in each card to help writers double-check that they’ve met all of your requirements

Brief Creation

Your writing team will require a brief for every article they’re asked to produce.

At the most basic level, you can just provide them with the keyword you’re targeting and let them take it from there.

A better approach, though, is to provide a few notes about:

• What topics and subtopics you’d like to cover
• How the topic relates back to your products
• Expert insights or advice to include

The reason this exists under the “tech stack” umbrella is that there are a number of helpful tools out there that can help you build a brief content outline. SEOwind, Narrato, and Surfer are all good options to investigate.

It's worth noting, though, that what these tools do is essentially scrape the top-ranking results for your search term and generate a loose outline that ensures you cover all the key points.

This is valuable, but it's not enough to just regurgitate what’s in the SERPs. 

A better practice is to have your content strategists and/or writers research and analyze competing pages and determine what should and shouldn’t be covered in your own article, with a specific focus on adding value to the content they produce.

If you’re not using one of the brief creation tools we discussed above, you’ll also want to build a brief template document to help you streamline this stage (Google Docs is the go-to here).

Content Creation 

With good content management and a well-organized structure in place, you should be able to use a free solution like Google Docs (which is pretty much the standard in the content production world) for all of your drafting and editing needs.

Alternatively, there are a few tools out there that are designed specifically for content creation that might help you streamline processes, such as GatherContent and Narrato. 

Optimization 

Optimization tools allow you to plug in a blog post you’ve written and determine the likelihood that you’ll rank for the target keyword. 

This is based primarily on the inclusive of long tail keyword variations and semantically relevant terms, but most solutions consider factors such as content length and use of headers and images.

We’re using Positional to optimize this article, targeting the search term “content operations.”

On the right-hand side, we can see that adding one more image, as well as injecting a few of the NLP (natural language processing) terms into our content, will help our overall score.

Having done that, we’ve upped our score to 777, improving our chances of ranking for our desired keyword.

Having your content creators or editors run each article through an optimization solution like this not only improves overall content performance by upping the likelihood of ranking for your target search term but also that you’ll show up for additional related terms.

Options to include in your consideration set include Positional, Clearscope, and Frase.

Publishing 

Most content teams will handle publishing manually, meaning a VA will go into your website or CMS and copy over the content from Google Docs.

If you’re using a formal content operations solution for the creation stage, then you might be able to tee up an integration to publish directly from that software.

Otherwise, there are a few handy tools out there that can help solve the formatting issues that come with uploading (specifically when working in WordPress). Wordable, for instance, is a great option.

At Warmly, we use Letterdrop, as it enables us to publish to multiple channels at once and automate parts of the content distribution process.

Knowledge Base 

Separate from the content operations tech stack itself, but equally as vital, is your knowledge base.

This is the software solution where all of your SOP documents (to be covered very shortly) live and where your team goes to make sure they’re nailing expectations, such as your desired tone of voice.

This can live in Google Drive as well, though many ContentOps teams prefer to use dedicated workplace wiki solutions like Notion or Slite.

Both are valid approaches. Google Docs is free, but Notion and Slite offer more flexibility in terms of formatting.

3. Processes 

Finally, you’ll need to build out the content processes you want your team to follow.

The best move here is to create a content governance hub (using the knowledge base discussed in the previous step) so everyone on your Content Ops team has access to all required SOP documents when they need them.

Company/Product/Industry One-Pager

The first document you’ll create is a broad overview of how your company and product fit within your wider industry and differ from competitors.

This should be a one-pager. You don’t need to go into a ton of detail. 

You just want to provide enough information to get the writer up to speed on how the topics they’re writing about relate to your product and how they’ll be used by your target audience to solve the typical challenges they face.

On that note, this is a good place to link out to any ICP (ideal customer profile) or customer persona documents you have.

Tone of Voice & Content Preferences 

Your second SOP is your style guide. 

It describes the tone of voice you want your content to take on based on your company’s broader branding and style and what you think will resonate with your target reader.

Some companies opt for a very conversational tone. Other brands prefer to be succinct and direct. Still, others lean into a humorous or antagonist style.

There are no wrong answers here, but you do need to communicate your preferences so that your writers can meet your expectations and so your editors can ensure those guidelines are upheld.

The style guide also details any specific preferences you have, such as:

• Whether or not you want to include a table of contents at the start of the article
• Preferences related to the use of internal and external links 
• Spelling preferences (e.g. UK vs. US)
• Guidelines for the use of images 

Depending on the scale of your ContentOps outfit, you might consider creating multiple style guides for the various content types you’ll be creating. 

For instance, your brand might want to be more conversational on LinkedIn posts but stay succinct and concise in your blog content.

Guidelines For Using Your ContentOps Tech Stack 

Finally, it's a wise investment to create guidelines on how to use the various software solutions you’ve integrated into a ContentOps tech stack.

This will help ensure your team members follow best practices and help you get the most out of your investment in these tools. 

For example, you might build SOP docs that detail how to optimize an article using your chosen optimization tool.

P.S. If you end up using Positional, Nate recommends aiming for a score of at least 60-70.

You should also consider writing a brief document on how to reach the right people on the right team via your various communication channels. This is especially important as the team grows and roles become more complex.

Driving Results Out Of Content Operations 

If you’re set on publishing SEO content at high volumes, a well-built ContentOps team is going to be a linchpin for you.

But it's not just the team that matters. 

It's the combination of your people, your teach stack, and well-designed and documented content processes that help you produce and publish better-quality content that delivers SEO results.

If you’ve followed the best practices discussed above, including optimizing your article using a solution like Positional, you should have a good shot at owning some page-one search results.

To really boost your chances, though, you’ll want to get all of your links in order.

This, conveniently, is the topic of the next article in this series: Building A Content Factory (Part 4/5): How To Get Free Backlinks.

Read Part I in this 5 part Series here.

It's often said that your website is your most important marketing channel.

That can be true, but only if you’re actually using your site as a marketing channel and investing in website content creation and search engine optimization (SEO).

If you’re not, it's kind of like saying, “TikTok is our most important channel,” and then never producing a single video.

The key to turning your website into a powerful channel for lead acquisition and customer engagement is building a series of web pages that attract relevant traffic.

The first step in that process is website content planning—the process of researching and prioritizing keywords to go after, then building a content calendar that acts as your source of truth for content production.

In this article, we’re going to guide you through the three broad steps involved in website content planning:

1. Defining your content strategy
2. Performing keyword research
3. Building the content calendar 

We’ll also provide detailed steps as we progress so you can follow along.

A quick note: This article is part of a five-part series, Building A Content Factory, featuring expert advice from Nate Matherson, the Co-founder and CEO of Positional.

If you haven’t read part one and you’d like to get a bit of background on the whole thing, head here: Building A Content Factory: Part 1 of 5.

1. Define Your Content Strategy 

Before you start researching and prioritizing keywords to target, it's a best practice to establish clarity on your overall content strategy.

There are billions of keywords you could go after.

But what you need to know is which search phrases you should go after. 

Your content strategy acts as your north star for choosing which keywords are relevant and which aren’t and for determining which are more important or urgent to target.

There are three core inputs to this strategic process:

• Your industry and product: Who you’re competing with and what their website content assets look like, how your product and brand are different, and what sector of the market you’re going after.
• Your target audience: What interests your typical buyer, what information they are likely to be searching for, and where they often are in the buying journey (e.g., problem-aware vs. solution-aware)
• Your marketing and business goals: The metrics you’ve set to measure marketing success (e.g., new customer acquisition, new leads generated, trial to paid conversion rate)

Consider Warmly.

We exist within the broad account-based marketing and sales space, where there are a lot of established companies competing for the same eyeballs. 

But most of them are targeting enterprises, and we’re built for SMB B2B companies who are looking to scale personalized sales outreach processes and account-based marketing programs. 

Our product is unique in the market (read about that here if you’re interested), which means our customers are somewhere between problem-aware and solution-aware since they know about the industry-standard solutions but may not be aware of our unique take.

Finally, our primary marketing and business objectives are breaking away from the "red ocean" (competition) and making our way into the blue ocean, our own category, where we establish ourselves as the leader.

All of this informs how we choose and prioritize keywords to target as we develop a website content plan. We would be unlikely to target “account-based marketing platforms for enterprise,” for example.

PS. Write this all down in a Google Doc so you can share it with other team members, such as a content creator or social media manager.

Divide Efforts Between Funnel Stages 

A quick note here about funnel stages and a piece of advice from our SEO expert, Nate Matheson.

The funnel stage model (TOFU, MOFU, BOFU), is widely used in the world of content planning to divide and prioritize keywords and inform how the content itself is written.

(Image Source)

The problem is that many organizations (particularly startups) tend to ignore top and even middle-of-funnel pieces and focus solely on BOFU.

That’s because BOFU topics and customers are closer to conversion. So, it does make sense from the perspective of prioritizing spend on the topics that are most likely to deliver results in the form of customers.

But our goal in website content planning and creation is broader than that.

We need to not only have individual pages rank for their target keywords but more broadly raise the domain authority of our website, which works best when we produce content across the entire funnel.

When we create TOFU and MOFU content as well, this acts as a signal to search engines that our site is a trustworthy and relevant resource on the entire topic space, which has positive impacts on ranking potential across the whole site.

Nate’s recommendation here is to split your efforts broadly across the funnel, with ⅓ of the content you produce targeting each funnel stage.

2. Perform Keyword Research 

This is where you jump into the official research and planning stage, starting with keyword research.

Keyword research is the process of identifying which key search phrases you’re going to try to rank for using website content (specifically blog content in the context of this series).

Technically speaking, there are a number of routes you can take here, e.g.

• Speaking to customers about their search behaviors
• Looking at social media posts that perform well and seeking to replicate them with blog content
• Performing a content audit of competitor websites (we’ll look at how to do this soon)

In general, though, most content strategists will use this process to gather initial content ideas and then use dedicated website content planning tools (e.g., Semrush and Ahrefs) to perform the official keyword research.

Here’s how to do it in Semrush. 

The steps might look slightly different in your content planning tool of choice, but the process should be largely the same.

Keyword Research in Semrush

Open Semrush and head to the Keyword Magic Tool.

Add a broad topic idea (your industry or product category is a decent place to start).

Semrush then provides a series of related keywords that you might choose to target, most of which can be spun out into different blog posts (for example, “account-based selling system” is going to be different from “account-based selling strategy”).

Select the keywords you want to include in your content marketing plan and add them to your keyword list.

Volume and Keyword Difficulty

There are two additional pieces of data you want to consider here:

• Volume. This is the monthly number of searches for this keyword. A higher number is better, as it means greater potential for organic search traffic from this topic.
• KD% (keyword difficulty). This is an indication of how hard the topic is to rank for. Lower is better.

That said, you don’t need to pay too much attention to those details at this stage in your website content plan.

While a high-volume/low-difficulty keyword is the holy grail you’re seeking, these don’t tend to be all that common. There is most commonly a trade-off between the two (because high-volume keywords have more traffic potential, so they are more competitive.

Nate recommends against being scared off of high-difficulty keywords anyway. 

While some content marketing strategists set a hard bar at 60, 70, or 80, Nate believes that even as high as 90% is still worth going after, so long as you have a well-rounded strategy that:

• Includes a mix of keyword difficulties
• Publishes content consistently at scale
• Focuses on activities that build site authority overall (like building backlinks and creating top-of-funnel content)

Rinse and Repeat

Repeat this process for each of the keyword or topic ideas you have (refer back to your content marketing strategy from step one for inspiration) until you have a list of several hundred potential keywords.

This will be a fairly long and iterative process, but you don’t have to finish it all in one go.

Nate recommends running this process every two to three months. 

Not only does this split the workload up, but it also allows you to learn from what’s working and integrate this new knowledge into future keyword research.

Competitor Site Research 

Looking into competitors’ websites and seeing which pages are doing well can also be a good strategy for identifying keywords to target.

You should be able to do that in the content planning tool you used for the last step.

Here’s how it works in Positional.

Add your website URL and the competitor you want to compare against.

The app then suggests a list of keywords that the competitor is ranking for that would also be relevant for us to target.

In this case, “mql vs sql” looks like a good opportunity. The search volume is decent, and the competition is low, and we have a shot at knocking Rollworks off of page one.

Keyword Clustering 

Keyword clustering is the process of looking at a series of search terms and determining whether any of them share SERPs (search engine results pages).

Where this is the case, we can target several keywords with the same piece of content rather than wasting time and resources on multiple pieces that are actually going after the same SERP.

We’ll use Positional to cluster our keywords.

For instance, Positional has identified that the search terms “b2b leads” and “b2b lead generation” are essentially the same thing, and they share search results.

You can also do this manually by just Googling the two search terms.

If the results are different, then you need to target each keyword with a separate piece of content. If they are the same, you can combine them into one.

However, this does drag out the content planning process, especially at the scale we’re talking about, so you’d be wise to use something like Positional or Semrush to automate this.

3. Build The Content Calendar 

Step three is to take that prioritized list of keywords and convert it into a content calendar using a project management tool or Excel spreadsheet.

Determining An Appropriate Content Velocity  

Here’s where you need to lock in your content or publishing velocity (which is marketing speak for “how many articles are you going to publish each month”?)

Nate’s advice is that 1-2 pieces a week is a good place, 2-3 if you’re really serious. 

At the high end, 3-5 pieces weekly can help you run super fast, but this is likely overkill for most brands.

What you need to bear in mind here is that SEO is a long-term game. 

It’s a channel that compounds over time and takes a lot of upfront work, with the results being realized further down the track.

You also need to be publishing for a while before you start consistently showing up in search results and seeing any ROI out of content marketing efforts.

You’ll have to publish at least 20-30 pieces before Google starts really paying attention, and it won’t be until the 6-12 month period that you really see promising results.

But while faster might equal better, if you’re launching your first online content creation process, you’ll have some early learnings and hiccups to battle through before you can realistically achieve that scale.

A wiser approach would be to:

1. Start in the 1-3 a week range (which translates to 4-12 a month).
2. Get your content factory running smoothly 
3. Validate your assumptions about what SEO and content can bring to your business
4. Then ramp up into the 3-5 range.

Choosing The Appropriate Solution 

Your content calendar can totally exist in a Google Sheets or Excel spreadsheet like this:

(Image Source)

But if you’re serious about building a great content plan and maximizing efficiency, we’d recommend investing in a project management platform.

Something like Asana, ClickUp, or even Trello would be suitable.

Compared to spreadsheets, these solutions allow for:

• Better collaboration (things like assigning tasks and tagging other team members)
• Integrations with other tools and stages in your process (like the content promotion solution you would use to share the blog post on social media platforms
• Greater visibility over timelines, milestones, and due dates 

Note how much more user-friendly, organized, and collaborative this content calendar is, for example:

(Image Source)

You can still use Google Docs for all the drafting and editing tasks and then just drop links to the relevant docs in the project card.

Scheduling Content Production 

From there, it's just a matter of deciding which topics will be produced on which dates.

A good practice here is to spread the funnel stage load evenly. 

For example, if you’re producing three articles weekly, you might do one TOFU, one MOFU, and one BOFU piece weekly.

The same goes for the monthly traffic/ranking difficulty paradigm, though you might want to skew that a little so you start off tackling some of the easier topics first.

This will help you secure some page-one positions on Google early on, building your site authority before tackling topics with higher keyword difficulties.

Just don’t fall into the trap of only targeting easy topics.

Putting The Plan Into Action 

Consistently creating and publishing quality content is a great way to get in front of your target market.

The best practices discussed above will help you create a solid plan for producing new content pieces on a regular basis. But you’re still missing a part:

A well-oiled content creation process.

That’s the topic of discussion in the next installment of our five-part series: Developing Content Operations.

‎A quick note to readers: This article is actually part one in a five-part series on building your own content factory, with expert advice from Nate Matherson, the Co-founder and CEO of Positional. 

‎‎Content, specifically blog content, has become a staple of the SaaS startup go-to-market strategy.

And for good reason.

If you can build up domain authority and rank for a number of high-value, high-intent keywords, you’ll be constantly driving organic traffic (that is, visitors you aren't paying for) to your site each month.

From there, it's a simple formula:

More traffic = more leads = more customers = more revenue.

But that point is a little bit down the track. To get there, you’ve got to invest heavily in content production, which brings with it a number of moving parts.

You’ve got to orchestrate research and planning, brief creation, content writing and editing, and publishing. 

To nail that process, you’ve got to build a content factory.

In this five-part series, we’re going to show you exactly how to build your own content factory. 

We’ll cover everything from high-level keyword strategy and planning down to the details of optimizing each specific piece you publish and reporting on your content marketing ROI.

Note: In this article, we’re going to be laying the foundations and discussing what a content factory even is, what it involves, and why you should build one. If you’re already set on creating your own content engine and just want to know how, jump forward to part two here: Building A Content Factory (Part 2/5): Website Content Planning.

What Exactly Is A Content Factory? 

A content factory is the entire infrastructure built around producing and publishing content on your website.

Specifically, we’re speaking about SEO-focused blog content here, but the term could be applied to the production of other kinds of content (social media posts, ebooks, etc.) as well.

We use the factory analogy here because your content production system shares a lot of parallels with a physical product line. 

Each person in the factory has a dedicated role and works at a particular stage. They are (or become) experts in that task, and perform it better than anyone else could.

The content creation process must proceed in a waterfall-like fashion (one task is dependent on the completion of another), and it must do so at scale, just like a real factory.

What Goes On In A Content Factory? 

There are three main components that make up a well-oiled content machine:

• Processes (what your people do at each stage)
• People (who perform the specific roles)
• Tech stack (like your factory machinery)

In this article series on building your own content factory, we’ll be covering each in detail.

But for you to quickly grasp how the whole thing works, here’s a high-level breakdown:

1. Content strategy and planning
2. People: Content manager
3. Tech stack: Keyword research tools (Positional), project management solution
4. What it involves: Determining what search terms to target, performing keyword and competitor research, building a content calendar
5. Writing
6. People: Content writer
7. Tech stack: Google Docs, Grammarly, content optimization tool, or my favorite, Letterdrop
8. What it involves: Research, drafting, proofreading, and self-editing the article
9. Editing
10. People: Content editor
11. Tech stack: Google Docs, Grammarly
12. What it involves: Reviewing the drafted piece against guidelines and briefs, making copy edits, providing feedback and suggestions to the writer
13. Publishing
14. People: Virtual assistant 
15. Tech stack: Your CMS (we use Webflow), Letterdrop
16. What it involves: Coordinating with designers, uploading the content to your CMS, ensuring everything is formatted correctly, content syndication.

From there, it's rinse and repeat.

You create a blog brief targeting a specific keyword and pass it to the writer. They draft it, and forward it on to the editor. The editor polishes the pieces and sends them over to publishing, who bring the article live.

Then it's back to the top.

The beauty of this content creation process is that it's highly repeatable and super scalable. 

Once you’ve built the processes and tech stack, it's just a matter of bringing on more writers, editors, and VAs to increase your publishing velocity.

Why Build A Content Factory? 

Building a content factory isn’t the only way to produce content at scale and drive SEO results.

But for most companies, it's the best way, and there are five key reasons why.

1. Scale

When it comes to SEO content, scale matters.

You’ll need to produce at least 20-30 pieces of content just to get Google to start paying attention to you. You’ll then need to publish 100+ pages over the course of your first year to start seeing results.

That boils down to around 2-3 articles a week, which is almost never going to be achievable by a single marketing person.

Yes, it's realistic for a writer to produce 2-3 articles a week. But many companies looking to invest in SEO have a marketing team of one. That person is responsible for marketing across all channels, not just SEO.

And even if you do have a dedicated content marketer, the actual writing of a blog post is just one of many moving parts.

Building a content factory allows you to bring on role experts to cover each of those tasks, and enables you to scale up production simply by hiring more people into the right roles.

2. Specialization 

Every person who works in your content factory plays a specialized role.

Content writing is different from editing, which is different again from strategic thinking and planning. Each of these undertakings is not only a different task; it's a different skill set.

Even the best T-shaped marketer is unlikely to be a master of all of them.

By separating these into distinct roles and having your team members focus on only responsibility, you can access skill and role specialization.

This leads to higher quality work (as nobody is doing something they aren’t that good at) that gets delivered faster.

3. Efficiency 

Efficiency and specialization go hand in hand.

If someone develops a given skill because they focus only on that (say, publishing approved content), they’ll generally also become faster at it.

If they’re great at their job, they’ll develop little efficiency hacks along the way, too.

The opposite is true when you have a one-person content marketing team working on everything: your workload is stretched thin, and you’re constantly switching between tasks, preventing you from working as efficiently as you could.

4. Consistency 

An important component of building your content factory is developing systems and processes for your team to follow, something we’ll dive into in more depth in Part 3: Developing Content Operations.

You’re going to create SOP (standard operating procedure) documentation covering the likes of:

• Your company's tone of voice and style
• Messaging and positioning guidelines 
• How to optimize a piece for search

Clearly documenting your content expectations from the get-go helps create consistency across the pieces you publish, as do the quality checks you put in place (e.g., where editors are responsible for holding writers accountable to your style guide).

5. Control 

Finally, building an in-house content factory gives you more control over content creation than does the common alternative of hiring a content creation agency.

Yes, there are several benefits to hiring an agency:

• Quicker to get off the ground
• Only one relationship to manage 
• Can be more cost-effective 

Plus, hiring an agency gives you access to experience and expertise (for instance, they might have some great hacks for generating free backlinks).

But by keeping the operation in-house, you can develop a team of strategists, writers, and editors who are not only role experts but experts in your product and industry.

Building your own content factory also allows you to retain control of hiring and firing decisions (so you can build your ideal team) and makes you more agile as far as strategic changes are concerned.

How To Get Started Building A Content Factory 

In the next four articles in this five-part series, we’ll be diving into the specifics of building a content factory and providing step-by-step details on how to do it.

Here’s how we’re going to break it down:

• Part 2/5: Defining a content strategy, performing keyword research, and building a content calendar.
• Part 3/5: Building a team, creating a content writing tech stack, and writing up the necessary SOP documents.
• Part 4/5: Generating backlinks (for free) and the importance of internal linking.
• Part 5/5: Measuring the impact of your efforts and optimizing for even better results.

Throughout this series, we’ll be drawing on the extensive SEO expertise of Nate Matherson, the Co-founder and CEO of Positional.

Positional is an AI-powered toolset for content and SEO teams, and one which we use here at Warmly as part of our own content machine.

Nate has years of experience building successful SEO content factories, and in particular, spent seven years scaling content at LendEDU, an online marketplace for financial products, where he and his team:

• Scaled up to producing 70 articles a month
• Published 2500 articles in total
• Achieved a traffic volume of over 500,000 readers per month

Ready to discover the inside secrets of building an SEO content engine? Head to part two here:

Building A Content Factory (Part 2/5): Website Content Planning.