This article has been split into five key steps: create, publish, personalize, analyze, and optimize. Each step delivers additional benefits and value, but how far you go and which steps you focus on will depend on your objectives and internal processes. Consider this a starting point to get inspired and see what’s possible!
Who is this article for: Are you responsible for owning the content that feeds your lead generation strategy to drive more pipeline? This article is for you.
Lead generation without Turtl
Lead generation with Turtl
Create
1. Plan and develop content
No matter what you create, your colors, logos, fonts, and styles are locked within your Brand Theme on Turtl. Regardless of who created it, you can be certain every piece of content looks and feels consistent.
You can accelerate your creative process by leveraging our PDF Importer or choosing a ready-made template. Bringing content to life with interactive elements is a great (and proven!) way to engage your readers for longer. Drag and drop live charts, videos, audio, and real-time polls to encourage reader participation and gather intel in the process.
To ensure your Doc is optimized for engagement, you can use the content score tool to get pointers before publishing.
Value delivered: Replace dry, static content with interactive content for better engagement
2. Place lead capture forms on key pages
Rather than asking readers to fill in a form on your website, place lead capture forms directly in your Turtl content. With flexible options, you can choose whether to use an optional ("soft") or compulsory ("hard") gate and where this will appear in your content; at the beginning, mid-way through, or on the back page. How you gate your content will depend on your goals, audience, marketing channels, and even the value of your content.
For example, you may choose to include a newsletter sign-up form on the back page of a thought leadership piece. Or, you could use a hard gate halfway through a well-researched report. This gives your readers a taste of what the content is about prior to being asked to complete a form. If your reader is invested in finding out more, this increases your chances of conversion.
You can use Turtl’s out-of-the-box lead capture forms or embed third-party forms from CRM/MAP providers such as Hubspot and Marketo. Any leads captured on third-party forms embedded in a Turtl Doc will appear directly in your form provider’s platform. With an integration, a lead's information can be resolved in Turtl’s analytics dashboards to support reader-level engagement analysis (more on this later on).
Value delivered: Optimize lead capture potential
Publish
Distribute your Turtl content
Once you’ve created your content, it’s time to publish and share it to start gathering performance and reader data. Turtl automatically generates ready-made sharing assets for email, social media, and website channels to make things easy.
You can make edits at any time to your Turtl Doc. When you’re ready to re-publish, any amendments appear instantly on the same URL; no republishing and no redistribution efforts are necessary.
Every Turtl Doc has access controls so you can decide who sees your content. If you want your content to reach far and wide, you'll need to make sure your Doc is set to “public on the web”.
If you’re sharing content across multiple channels, we recommend using UTM tags so you can keep track of where traffic is coming from within your Analytics dashboards. This way, you can be confident in the best channels to focus your efforts.
Expert tip: If you’re distributing content to existing contacts in your CRM which is integrated with Turtl, you can add an additional bit of text to your Doc URL to associate any engagement activity with a particular Known Reader in Turtl’s analytics dashboards (we call this extra bit of the URL a "Lead Capture URL"). This gives you the option to pass reader engagement data back to a contact’s profile to support other processes (more on this later).
Value delivered:
Leverage optimized sharing assets for each channel
"Instant updates" through re-publishing mean an end to out-of-date content
Personalize
1. Allow anonymous readers to personalize their reading experience
An optional step to boost engagement and increase relevance is to set up your Doc for "Reader Form" personalization. This allows anonymous readers who land on your Doc to self-personalize content based on their preferences.
If you were sharing a product brochure for cars, for example, a prospect could select the type of vehicle they are interested in, the brand, the price they are willing to pay, their location, etc. After submitting the form, they’re presented with a brochure for cars that fit their criteria and with the contact details of the nearest car dealer. The benefit for you? You’ll have detailed insight into their preferences to tailor follow-up and outreach.
Value delivered: Improve relevance of content to deliver up to 85% more engagement [Read the research here]
2. Capture leads on personalized content
This feature is available if you have purchased the Personalization module and are on a Professional or Unlimited plan.
To streamline lead capture when using personalized content, we can place a "hidden" lead capture form behind the personalization form. This enables you to capture leads at the point the Doc is personalized. Alternatively, you can surface a lead capture form later on in the Doc to capture their details.
Note: To learn more about hidden lead capture forms and which providers support this, speak to our support team.
Value delivered: Capture leads in the process of personalization
Analyze
1. See overall content performance at a glance
You can start analyzing content performance as soon as you get your first Read (this declares your Doc "Active"). Use the Doc Dashboard to dig into the performance of a specific piece of content.
You can review the sign-up rate, bounce rate, sources, page performance, interactions, and more as a starting point. Use this information to make tweaks and improvements to your Doc. Each time you republish we’ll timestamp the analytics so you can compare performance before and after tweaks.
Value delivered:
Know how content is performing beyond clicks and opens
Make changes to content and re-publish instantly on the same URL
2. See how individual leads are engaging with content
Note: Known Readers Dashboard + CRM Integration available on Professional and Unlimited plans.
If you’ve captured Known Readers on your content (via a native lead capture form, third-party lead capture form, or other method) you can see detailed engagement data for those specific readers. Reader information (name and email) captured using a third-party form will be anonymized until you set up a CRM integration.
If you’ve enabled readers to self-personalize content, you’ll be able to see an overview of engagement data for those personalized Docs within the Personalization section of your Doc Dashboard. You can click on each Personalization to see more detailed engagement data.
Using the insights gathered at a reader level can provide a strong indication of intent and interest, so you can more easily spot your warmest leads.
Value delivered:
Identify high-intent readers ripe for follow-up
Focus sales activity in the right place
3. Pass reader engagement data to other systems
Note: Custom Behavioral Events are available on Professional and Unlimited plans.
You can pass reader engagement data from Turtl into other platforms such as a CRM or analytics platform so it’s centralized in one place. For example, within a CRM, you might want to enrich a contact’s profile with detailed information about their Turtl Doc engagement to build a better picture of intent.
You can manually export performance data from Turtl at any time or you can automatically sync data to certain platforms such as Hubspot, Marketo, and Google. For some platforms, we can enhance the data that’s sent to include "custom behavioral events" specific to Turtl. For example, when a reader responds to a poll or reads for a certain period of time.
Value delivered: Start to centralize engagement data
Optimize
Note: Benchmark Dashboard available on Professional and Unlimited plans.
1. Compare performance vs benchmarks
Once you’ve gathered enough data on your content, consider how it compares to benchmarks.
You might have internal benchmarks for things like bounce rate or conversion rate you want to compare against or you can also use Turtl’s Benchmark Dashboard to understand how a Doc is performing against the rest of your Docs, your industry, or globally (meaning every Turtl created).
If lead generation is your focus, you may want to look closely at the benchmarks for conversion rate. Consider picking out three areas for improvement from the data and either update your existing content or take these recommendations forward for future pieces.
Value delivered: Understand how you compare to the wider Turtl community
2. Use performance trends and patterns to optimize content and channels
Once you’ve built up a bank of lead generation content, you can review performance trends and patterns at a higher level using our Engagement Radar (currently in pilot). The Engagement Radar analyzes all your content and makes recommendations on what’s working best to drive engagement, including content topics, word count, design decisions, and distribution channels.
You can make the information within the Engagement Radar more useful by adding Labels to your content. This allows you to slice and dice performance trends and patterns in different ways e.g. by campaign name or content type.
Speak to our support team or your CSM to get involved in the Engagement Radar pilot.
Value delivered: Create the right content that’s optimized for lead generation, based on data
3. Use engagement data to inform existing nurture programs
If you’re passing reader engagement data back into other systems, such as your CRM, you can feed that data into lead generation processes. Defaulting to the data ensures sales and marketing teams are focusing effort and resources in the right place.
The opportunities are endless but here are some common ways the data can be used:
Tailor follow-up conversations: If your sales team works primarily from your CRM, you can allow them to see what Turtl Docs a contact has consumed or engaged with prior to reaching out. By zeroing in on hot topics, challenges, or interests, your team increases the relevance of conversations.
Feed into lead scoring initiatives: You may want to score a contact in your database higher if they’ve deeply engaged with your content. Using your engagement data to support lead scoring helps your salespeople to identify high-intent contacts to follow up with.
Group leads who fit certain criteria: Rather than providing your sales team with a list of contacts who’ve simply downloaded a guide, create a more tailored list of leads who’ve taken a certain action e.g. spent more than 5 minutes reading.
Trigger nurture content: You may want to trigger an email with additional content or relevant information to contacts who have read particular Turtl Docs or taken a specific action e.g. clicked a link.
Value delivered:
Streamline lead generation process and focus energy on the right prospects
Lead generation content delivers more ROI
Where next
For more information on lead generation and examples of how our customers are seeing success, head over to our website.