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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Image Source

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.

‎‎In 2023 and beyond, revenue growth will not come from investing in a single channel.

Outbound sales email campaigns can be effective, but only when combined with powerful intent data and complemented with outreach across other channels (like LinkedIn).

Going all in on SEO content can be a great way to deliver a ton of traffic to your site, but you’ll need downloadable content assets, email nurture campaigns, and on-site engagement (like chatbots) to convert those visitors.

We're saying here that you shouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket. You’ve got to be across the entire field to win the game.

But it’s not just about being across all channels. 

It's about making sure that your activities and messaging across each channel contribute to a cohesive experience on the customer end.

Of course, there are many ways you can achieve that end, so it's always a good idea to take a leaf or two out of the pros' books.

In this guide, we’re going to dive into 4 real-life examples of omnichannel sales and marketing playbooks, giving you a tangible map for building your own omnichannel approach.

What Do We Mean When We Say “Omnichannel?”

Before we dive into our omnichannel examples, let's quickly make sure we’re on the same page.

At the etymological level, omnichannel literally means “all channels” (a channel, in this case, being a method of reaching prospects, e.g., email, display ads, social media).

But that doesn’t really mean that you have to use every channel imaginable. 

You can neglect display advertising, for example, and still run a solid omnichannel motion across email, social, outbound calling, and conversational chat.

The important thing is not which channels you choose to use (or not use). 

What matters with omnichannel is cohesivity across channels.

A potential customer should be able to read an article you published on your blog, see a post from you on LinkedIn, and see an email from you in their inbox, and all of those activities are interconnected.

They share messaging (though the actual words and approach may differ by channel) that is relevant to that person’s role, goals, and stage in the buying cycle.

Ideally, this is highly personalized based on the contact and intent data you have at hand.

Check out our walkthrough of Warmly’s own omnichannel sales playbook (just below) to see what we mean.

A Quick Note On Omnichannel Retailing

Omnichannel is a term that can also be used in the context of retail sales, where customers have multiple ways to purchase a given product. 

Omnichannel retail means that customers can choose to head to a mall for the store experience or buy online through ecommerce stores.

Take Dollar Shave Club. 

You can buy their products:

• At a brick and mortar store like grocery retailers and drug stores
• At mass retailers like Target and Walmart
• On their online store 
• Via subscription

Below, we dive into a selection of B2C and B2B omnichannel marketing and sales strategies. We will not be using the term omnichannel in the context of omnichannel retail examples.

1. Warmly’s Hyper-Personalized Intent-Based Omnichannel Sales Motion 

Keegan Otter, our Head of Revenue and Operations, has built Warmly’s sales motion to be as personalized, contextual, and customer-relevant as possible.

That means that our targeting has to be super narrow. 

Rather than trying to capture the whole total addressable market and asking reps to engage anyone who matches our ICP (ideal customer profile), our sales targeting is all about intent.

Intent could be demonstrated when someone is looking at our competitors or solutions that we work with and integrate tightly with, or, of course, if they are directly looking at our own site.

But it can also be signal-based, like a recent job change or if there is evidence that the organization is growing.

The point is that only prospects with demonstrable intent get dropped into sequences, meaning we’re not wasting any resources on customers who aren’t in the market. 

Prospecting: Keeping The Sales Funnel Full

Our outbound team adds about 25-30 new prospects into outreach sequences per day.

But only half of these are identified and added manually by SDRs. The other half is added automatically using Warmly’s AI prospector.

Here’s how that works:

1. We use our 6sense and Bombora to reveal accounts that are in-market to buy. We combine this account list with the accounts we reveal on our site exhibiting high engagement levels via Warmly.
2. We then use Seamless.ai to find the right buyers and stakeholders for each of these accounts
3. Our sales team then personalizes outreach to VIP contacts and adds them to relevant sequences via email through our Outreach integration or LinkedIn via our Salesflow integration.

The important thing about that last step—adding other people from the same company to sequences as well as the person who demonstrated intent—is that each sequence is role-relevant. We aren’t just adding everyone to the same email campaign.

For example, the messaging a VP sees from our reps speaks to Warmly’s benefits at the executive level, which differs from the sequence that, say, an SDR team leader would see. 

Below is a message that a revenue leader would see.

Vs. a message a stakeholder might see.

This helps keep communication contextualized and prospect-relevant, improving engagement. 

Email: Personalized Outreach with Dynamic Video

Once a prospect is in an email sequence, what they receive is also highly personalized. And we’re not talking about just using the prospect’s name in the email subject line.

We’re sending dynamic videos embedded within emails that act as a pattern-breaker. They stop the scroll, standing out against a sea of boring and unimaginative B2B emails.

That’s because they look like they’re personally created by the sales rep as a screengrab.

In reality, that video is pre-recorded, and the inclusion of their website as a dynamic video background is automated using Sendspark 😉

LinkedIn: Going Behind The Scenes 

At the same time that prospects start receiving those personalized outbound emails, they’re also added to outbound LinkedIn InMail campaigns using Salesflow.

It's important to note that this is not just a duplicate of the email content; it's designed to be complementary.

The messaging is similar, but the style is different (LinkedIn tends to be a little less formal than email—think texting style), and we even include a few GIFs as another sort of pattern-breaker.

The idea here is that we want to surround sound our prospects. 

They’re receiving emails, InMails, and outbound calls from our reps, and the messaging is consistent across the board (though tailored to the channel).

One unique piece we added to our LinkedIn sequences is a short tour of the Warmly platform via Tourial.

We’re not trying to hide anything behind a paywall or forced demo. We want prospects to see the goods upfront, letting them see and imagine exactly how Warmly would work in the context of their day-to-day, thereby promoting psychological ownership.

Conversational Chat: AI-Led Website Engagement 

With outreach firing from all angles, prospects inevitably end up on our site—a marketing channel in and of itself.

Then, they’re met by Warmly’s AI chatbot (think of it as a smart, more dynamic Drift alternative).

Fed by account, prospect, and intent data, our AI chatbot looks to engage with website visitors using dynamic, conversational language.

(Image Source)

Once we get a few bites and the prospect is engaging with the AI chatbot, the relevant rep is notified via our Slack integration and can take over the conversation from there (contextually, of course), with the end goal of booking a personalized demo.

During demos we use Fathom to record all our calls so we can review the transcripts and provide feedback (though we really should be using tools like Gong.io or Nayak.ai to give deeper insight into deal health)

The results for our latest quarter (Q3 2023)?

• Close rates above 32%
• SDRs are seeing 110%+ quota attainment
• 30%+ increase in meetings booked month-over-month

2. Supermetrics’ Contextual Retargeting Campaigns 

Supermetrics, a data analytics platform, makes heavy use of retargeting to deliver omnichannel experiences to prospective customers.

Retargeting (also known as remarketing) is a strategy where you push communications to people who’ve previously been browsing your website, but didn’t convert.

Typically, this communication is a paid advertisement using marketing automation tools, though you can also take advantage of other marketing channels, such as email, to create a truly omnichannel customer experience.

Here’s how Supermetrics does it.

Beginning With The Website Channel Experience

It's easy to forget that your website is a marketing channel and one that’s critical to the broad user experience.

For Supermetrics, the website is where their omnichannel strategy kicks off. Take their LinkedIn Ads landing page.

(Image Source)

This page is the perfect blend of product-based messaging that speaks to their target audience’s pains and needs, educational content recommendations, and conversion opportunities.

(Image Source)

The page is packed with helpful content like the above video clip or links to relevant blog posts (contextual in that they are purely LinkedIn-related), as well as conversion opportunities like this set of CTAs:

(Image Source)

The page does a solid job of maximizing customer engagement by providing elements that speak to prospects at all stages of the buyer journey.

Then, once you leave the page, Supermetrics kicks off their B2B omnichannel marketing strategy.

Retargeting Ads Across Multiple Channels

Supermetrics uses a combination of customer data and browsing behavior on its site to create retargeting ads that serve the goal of omnichannel personalization.

This ad (served on Facebook) speaks precisely to the goal of prospective customers who have already been checking out their LinkedIn Ads product: improving campaign performance.

This same ad, by the way, is served across other social media platforms (Instagram and LinkedIn) to create a cohesive omnichannel experience and maximize the opportunity to capture attention.

Into The Content Marketing Funnel

When one of Supermetric’s multiple marketing channels captures a click, customers are led back to the website, but this time to a detailed blog page that provides deep support on how to optimize your LinkedIn channel strategy and improve campaign performance.

(Image Source)

On the page, there are a few different ways that Supermetrics can convert. 

Their most promising (and the option they are clearly directing users to) is a free trial CTA, though there is also an option for prospects to book a demo with a sales rep.

(Image Source)

Improvements Supermetrics Could Make To Their Omnichannel Marketing Approach 

Supermetrics creates a seamless experience that neatly guides potential customers down the funnel while providing plenty of opportunity for buyers to “choose their own adventure.”

There are, though, a couple of ways that this omnichannel marketing example could be even better:

1. Their blog posts should look include a non-product CTA that has them sign up to receive email communications. That would add to the multiple marketing channels they’re already using and allow them to create a personalized experience using contextual email marketing methods.
2. A live chat function on their website (driven by AI, like Warmly’s AI chat solution) would help improve the overall customer experience by providing an opportunity for instance engagement. This would also be a solid conversion opportunity for Supermetrics’ sales team.
3. A little ad personalization (using something like Segment) would go a long way to delivering a more immersive experience.

3. TestGorilla’s Omnichannel Advertising Assault 

TestGorilla, a pre-employment testing platform, has an interesting approach to the omnichannel customer journey.

They take one take (advertising) and apply it across multiple channels, using behavioral data to create personalized offers throughout the buyer journey.

The First Hit Through Google

TestGorilla goes big on PPC (pay per click), which is another term for Google Ads.

Basically, they run paid advertisements against key search phrases that show intent for the product.

For example, if you search “hire developer test” in Google, you’ll see this PPC ad:

That’s step one. 

Once you click through and check out the landing page it directs you to, TestGorilla’s website identifies you as the site visitor and stores your details for the next step.

Next Up: Email Advertising

A fairly underused channel in the B2B world is email advertising.

Yes, we use email a lot, but it tends to be the kind of cold email outreach we discussed as part of Warmly’s omnichannel marketing strategy.

Here, we’re talking about ads that pop up under the Promotions tab in Gmail, like this retargeting ad from TestGorilla.

Third Strike, You’re out

Like us, TestGorilla clearly believes in the idea of surround-sounding prospects with relevant content, which is why the third arm of their omnichannel customer engagement strategy attacks social media, this time with a Facebook Ad.

(Image Source)

Where TestGorilla Could Improve Omnichannel Customer Experiences

There are a few small changes that TestGorilla could make to inject a whole lot more personalization into customer experiences, which would help to capture more attention and likely deliver better conversion rates:

1. Use platforms like Warmly or 6sense to dive into customer insights and gain a 360-degree view of buyer behavior on their website
2. Personalize the website and ads based on buyer behavior (for example, the email ad should be related to developer testing specifically rather than the idea more broadly)
3. Align their ad strategy with the customer journey map (“hire developer test” is a bottom-of-funnel search term, so it should be supplemented with BOFU ad content rather than TOFU educational blogs)

4. Divatress SMS and Email One-Two Punch 

Divatress, an online wig store, provides a great example of how unique customer insights, plus the combination of a capable ecommerce platform and a solid customer communications tool, can deliver a powerful omnichannel strategy.

Divatress’ is built on Shopify, and they’ve plugged in Omnisend to manage an omnichannel campaign across email, SMS, and push notifications. 

Getting Customer Onboard With SMS

SMS is largely an underutilized platform, which means its much easier to cut through the noise.

So, Divatress puts a focus on capturing customer phone numbers with a website pop-up box containing a special offer.

(Image Source)

Note that the pop-up asks for both an email and a phone number, enabling a multichannel approach.

From there, the team can access an untapped channel to promote upcoming sales:

(Image Source)

Recovering (Almost) Lost Revenue

In particular, they’ve designed a powerful abandoned cart recovery series, using several channels to generate a 29% conversion rate and drive over a quarter of the site’s total revenue.

Here’s what that simple campaign looks like:

• One hour after the cart is abandoned, an automated email is sent
• 10 hours later (if there is no activity), a second email is sent
• 24 hours post-abandonment, a one-two punch is sent: an email and either an SMS or a web push notification, depending on what the customer is subscribed to

That web notification, in particular, is seriously effective. 98% of those who click on it end up buying.

How Divatress Could Go Above And Beyond

This is a solid playbook and, clearly, one that is working for Divatress.

Their website chatbot, however, is taking a very reactive approach.

(Image Source)

Divatress could improve on-site conversion rates by taking a more proactive approach, using an AI-driven chat solution to initiate the conversation rather than waiting for a question from the customer.

Steal These Omnichannel Marketing Examples 

Each of the omnichannel marketing strategies we’ve covered above, from TestGorilla’s ad-based approach to our own combination of AI-driven social media and email outreach, can easily be replicated in your own organization.

All you need is the right combination of processes and technology. We’ve given you the playbooks, so now you just need the latter. 

Warmly, our AI-powered account-based orchestration platform can help you deliver omnichannel experiences to target high-intent prospects at key accounts.

Dive in here: Warmly: The Account Based Orchestration Platform.

‍Warmly, the signal-based sales orchestration platform, went from zero to 100+ paying customers in 2023. More importantly, we went from founder-led sales to a repeatable sales process.

We recently raised an $11 million Series A led by Felicis, helping us continue the momentum into 2024.

Introduction to Warmly's Success Story

It wasn’t all up and to the right even if it might look that way from the outside (founders getting awarded Forbes 30 under 30, participating in both Y Combinator and Techstars).

Warmly was founded in 2019 (yes, you heard that right) and our initial product was a virtual name tag for Zoom. While the original product won accolades (like this PLG123 video) and was a Zoom Apps launch partner, ultimately we struggled to sell it. We had a second major product pivot as well before focusing on the current iteration during the second half of 2022.

Because we already had another product in-market, we built the sales orchestration platform in stealth for six months before sharing it publicly. This new product gets customers warm leads by de-anonymizing website traffic and then automatically following up with visitors via chat, video, email, or LinkedIn. This helps customers generate 10x more outbound leads than a traditional SDR while seeing 3x higher close rates because these are warm leads rather than cold ones. 

Keep reading for our color commentary on how we built a repeatable go-to-market motion in 12 months and what we learned along the way.

Q1 2023: Founder-led sales 

• 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Customers: 0 → 10
• ⚡️ GTM strategy: Design partners and founder friends
• 📈 Key experiment: Messaging
• ❓ Key questions: 
• (1) Can we sell Warmly at any price point?
• (2) Can I stand up a basic funnel?
• (3) Can I find the 10 most common objections and solve them?
• 🛠️ Key new tools: HubSpot (CRM), Mixmax (sales execution), ConnectTheDots (warm intros), DocuSign, spreadsheets

Entering Q1, “everything but sales were already in place,” and so I could spend the majority of his time scaling go-to-market.

Our main initial experiment was on Warmly’s messaging. I needed the words for a sales person to be able to talk about what we were doing. Since we had previously built a solution that was different from the problems that customers were trying to solve, I was particularly keen to avoid making that mistake again.

I began by looking at SEO rankings and researching what others in the space called themselves. One tactic is to go to every competitors’ website, write down all of the words on their homepages, and then build a word cloud around it. “Competitors spend five to six years figuring out how messaging works so why reinvent the wheel?”

‍

One of my early email outreach messages

There were a bunch of category and message variations in Warmly’s market (ex: account-based marketing, contact databases, intent data). I tested some of these messages with potential design partners, allowing him to find out what competitors got wrong and what we got right. I then tested a message focused on a live video caller Slackbot that would capture people before we leave the website. That failed to land – people instead wanted outreach to be done for them in an automated way and done across multiple channels rather than just video chat.

We landed on signal-based revenue orchestration, which captured what customers were trying to do and was meaningfully different from what competitors talked about. The simplified message was that Warmly helped you “get warm leads and talk to them live.” We could tell that it was working because prospects were nodding their head along and would say “here’s how I see that being used here”. (As an aside, I thought about AI sales orchestration, but found that people were sick of AI as a marketing message.)

I knew that Warmly's messaging wouldn't be completely solved in only a quarter. We were able to specifically tackle (a) what kinds of other tools did people have?, (b) what’s the category that we operate in?, (c) what phrases will get people to join a demo?, and (d) what phrases were other people using?

Another priority for Q1 was to set up a basic sales funnel.

Can I see that if I talk to roughly 10 people, one will close? If I talk to 20 people, will two close?

I had heard general benchmarks about having 5x coverage; that is, for every five qualified conversations, you close one deal. As a founder, I didn’t worry about hitting these exact benchmarks early on because he knew he was talking to “the most random people who weren’t in our ICP” and therefore would never buy. My bigger concern was the close rate among qualified prospects and finding out who was in Warmly’s ICP.

As a product with a $10-15k average annual contract value (ACV), I was looking to see that these deals could be closed in only a few meetings and with a 30-45 day sales cycle. Seeing positive signals, he was ready to scale the magic.

A snapshot of Warmly’s funnel stages for their outbound pipeline (we have separate pipelines for freemium, midmarket, and inbound)

Q2 2023: Sales leader-led sales, founder involved

• 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Customers: 10 → 30
• ⚡️ GTM strategy: Founder friends, startups, email sequencing
• 📈 Key experiment: LinkedIn sequencing
• ❓ Key questions: 
• (1) Can a strategic sales leader who is a non-founder roughly hit projected quota? 
• (2) Can I as the founder hit quota and also reasonable terms (no opt-outs, annuals only, discounts)? 
• (3) Can I build trust with this leader to sell my vision and build a team around them?
• 🛠️ Key new tools: Warmly/6sense (website de-anonymization), Outreach (sales execution), Seamless.ai (contact database, Warmly (AI website chatbot), Sendspark (video personalization), Warmly/Salesflow.io (auto-LinkedIn sequences), LinkedElf (LinkedIn connections)

After starting to prove out founder-led selling, I chose to recruit a sales leader and then hire sellers after that. This would've extended our go-to-market progress by a quarter if not for the fact that our early sales hires used to work at the same company as this new sales leader. If we had to recruit, ramp up, and train new sellers – particularly sellers who might not have been effective – it would’ve taken much longer. 

I emphasized that I wasn’t looking for a sales leader from a really big, later stage company. It was important to me that the sales leader be scrappy, hungry, entrepreneurial, and experienced – but not someone who’s done it twenty times. If I couldn’t find someone like that, I believed that the safer path for Warmly would’ve been:

• Founder-led sales first
• Then hire a BDR/SDR to scale the founder
• Bring on the first AE to report to me
• Once that’s successful, hire a second AE
• Then, hire a sales leader

My big experiment for the quarter was LinkedIn sequencing as a source of qualified pipeline. I had heard from other go-to-market leaders that email wasn’t working as well as it used to and that LinkedIn sequencing was still effective.

My co-founder Alan, Warmly’s SDR leader, and I adopted LinkedElf and Salesflow to max out our LinkedIn connections, adding 100 sales and marketing leader connections every week on auto-pilot. Then we wanted to do messaging on auto-pilot, too. We were able to send out 300 connection requests a week, seeing about half of them accept, and then one-eighth of them reply (half of which would be positive replies, the other half not so much…). Collectively, we were able to book about 10-15 meetings per week just from conversations on LinkedIn – and found a channel that we could continue to grow Warmly’s pool of leads.

‍

A refined version of Warmly’s messaging now that we have more customer validation

Q3 2023: Seller-led sales, founder involved

• 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Customers: 30 → 60
• ⚡️ GTM strategy: Omni-channel (Linkedin/email), inbound (warm calling on the website with Warmly), territories
• 📈 Key experiment: Conferences
• ❓ Key questions: 
• (1) Can an AE and ISR ramp and hit quota in the last month of the quarter? 
• (2) Can our sales leader enable the sellers to ramp and hit quota? 
• (3) Can we build a V1 sales process that can be understood and executed?
• 🛠️ Key new tools: Warmly (AI auto-emails), Warmly (AI auto-LinkedIn), HubSpot Quotes ,Tourial (pre-made demos), Spekit (sales process documentation), AccountAim (territory building)

At this point, our new sales leader and I needed to quickly build out the go-to-market team. First, we made a financial model to check whether the math would work out. If you’re not reconciling your quota against your financial model, you’re screwed. The financial model allowed our team to see things like:

• When is the next milestone we need to fit for fundraising?
• How do we get there without being cash-out?
• If Warmly had these milestones, how many reps do we need and when do we need to hire them?
• What would quota have to be in order for all of this to work out?

While in the past mature SaaS companies might’ve aimed for a 5x quota to on-target earnings (OTE) ratio, I didn’t believe that was realistic given the current buying environment and given that our sellers would need to source some of their own leads. We instead aimed for a 3x quota:OTE ratio and a 50/50 split between base and OTE commission, which would fit Warmly’s financial model and allow us to attract the right caliber seller. (As an aside, I encourage others to pay a higher salary-to-commission ratio in the early days so you don’t lose talent while you’re figuring out what’s working and what’s not working.)

Here’s what the team structure ultimately looked like:

• Sales leader (KPI = overall revenue that was sales-sourced / sales-closed)
• Account executives, i.e. AEs (KPI = closed-won revenue)
• Inbound sales reps, i.e. ISRs (KPI = closed-won revenue for very small deals and qualified opportunities among inbound demo requests)
• At Warmly, the ISR role creates a path for SDRs to get promoted; ISRs can advance to AEs if they consistently hit quota
• SDRs (KPI = sales qualified opportunities)
• We do international SDR hiring, which helps keep costs down, and has a 1:1 ratio between AEs and SDRs
• Sales assistants, aka SAs 
• The SA helps with sales admin work, joins demo calls, drafts replies for AEs, pulls lead lists, and writes internal and external follow-up notes
• We got our sales assistants via Virtualis

In Q3, we bet on attending conferences to diversify pipeline generation beyond LinkedIn, greenlighting five conferences for the quarter. For each conference, our sales leader Keegan Otter would attend with one sales rep. We decided not to buy a booth for any of them; rather, we simply went, were friendly, and tried to meet as many attendees as we could.

Three of the five events turned out to be successes; two were not, including Dreamforce which was both extremely large and lacked buyers in our ICP. Overall, the conferences generated more money in closed won sales than it cost for us to attend. But there were drawbacks. For example, I found that there were tons of meetings booked from conferences, but also a spike in demo no-shows. And it was draining for the team to be on the road for five events over the course of only six weeks.

Reflecting on the quarter, I believe that most companies find three to four channels that work for them. It’s important to try all the channels early on, then get laser focused and double down on the ones that work. Conferences were a ‘tweener’ – we needed to keep iterating.

Q4 2023: Seller-led and sales leader run

• 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Customers: 60 → 100+
• ⚡️ GTM strategy: No change from Q3 (repeatability!), just optimization
• 📈 Key experiments: LinkedIn social to drive inbound, PLG
• ❓ Key questions: 
• (1) Can I as the founder step away from closing altogether? 
• (2) Can the sellers hit quota each month across the quarter?
•  (3) Can we find repeatability in our core metrics (meetings held, SQOs, closed/won) and rates?
• 🛠️ Key new tools: Letterdrop (LinkedIn social), Alysio (gamified daily sales metrics), Warmly (cross-tool signal-based revenue orchestration)

By Q4, Warmly’s go-to-market started to look more and more repeatable. My focus turned to optimization. 

We bet on product-led growth (PLG), which Warmly had gotten good at during a previous pivot and hadn’t yet applied to the current product. Unlike the Zoom name tag product, the sales orchestration platform involves extra friction for self-service adoption – users have to install a script on their website.

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Warmly’s pricing page includes a free account for smaller customers

We got creative with the free offering, designing it to be an on-ramp to Warmly’s core product rather than a replacement. Free users would get access to up to 500 free warm leads each month along with intent signals and alerts about those leads. If users then want automation to act on those leads, that’s when they'd have to pay for it. There have now been over 1,000 installs of our PLG offering and we're still early in optimizing free-to-paid conversion. 

Two key learnings that made PLG different this time around:

1. PLG became an acquisition strategy for a more valuable product. Before the pivot, we built a great product but people weren’t willing to pay for it. This time we validated that we could sell it before investing in PLG.
2. PLG helps segment Warmly’s prospects. We thought if we had both ‘book a demo’ and ‘try for free’ on the website, everyone would click ‘try for free’. It turns out that companies with less than 50 people naturally sign up for free while companies with more than 50 request a demo. That’s what we wanted.

Reflecting on the last 12 months – and what comes next

First tip: your CRM setup is critical (we chose HubSpot). At first I was very anti having a bunch of form-fills and I understand why reps hate updating a CRM, but the better you can do this in the early stage, the better. I would recommend five fields to always fill out:

1. How did we hear about us?
2. How was the meeting booked? (Get really specific – Warmly has 20 sub-channels – because that will tell you what channel to double down on.)
3. If you closed-won or closed-lost to a competitor, which one?
4. Who was the associated AE?
5. Who was the associated SDR? (An associated SDR might be the same person as the AE if your AE’s are full-cycle.)

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The beauty of CRM reporting when you have good data (the actual numbers have been anonymized)

Second: clean deals are better. The sooner you can get away from month-to-month, opt-out, weird deal terms, do it. It becomes a big headache for CSMs and for managing how you pay out reps.

Third: pay out your sales leader on a percentage of overall revenue that was sales-sourced and sales-closed (i.e. everything except for deals that are founder-sourced and closed). I don’t give commission out on deals that I find and close on my own as a founder. But any deal where an AE is involved or an SDR is involved, the sales leader gets a commission on overall revenue to align incentives.

Fourth, and finally: you and your sales leader should stay accountable for closing deals on your own. I still try to self-source and close three deals a month and my sales leader does, too. You have to be so close to the process and find issues with it before taking a step back.

Google and Yahoo announced that they aim to reduce the amount of spam emails received by their users and improve email security.

Any bulk email sender will be subject to strict new requirements to avoid experiencing email deliverability issues.

Google will begin enforcing the new requirements on February 1st, 2024, while Yahoo will enforce theirs in Q1 of 2024.

These restrictions will change the way many organizations think about outbound prospecting.

How is "bulk sender" defined

A bulk sender is defined by Google and Yahoo as an organization sending 5,000 or more messages a day to any gmail or yahoo email address.

The daily threshold pertains to all emails originating from your entire organization, regardless of the platform or method used to send them.

This includes email marketing platforms like Hubspot or Mailchimp, sales sequencing tools like Outreach or SalesLoft, or emails from your application like password reset emails, newsletters, or product announcements.

What does this mean for bulk email senders?

You want to be careful to make sure your organization is not being flagged as spam. Once marked as spam it takes time for your email domain to normalize and your messages landing in the inbox again.

When do people mark your emails as spam?

• When you aren't emailing the right person
• You're sending irrelevant emails
• You aren't kind in your communication
• The email you sent was clearly AI-generated
• You added the prospect to a multi-step automated email cadence (which auto-followed up five times with no response)

What are the risks of not following these requirements?

Starting February 1st, 2024, if a bulk-sending organization has an abuse complaint rate of 0.3% or higher, Google and Yahoo will automatically block all messages coming from that organization.

That's only 15 emails getting flagged before the hammer is dropped.

Globally, Gmail is the number one free-email service, usually making up between 40-60% of subscribers on a B2C sender's list worldwide, and a top three B2B mailbox provider. Yahoo is also among the top three for global representation on a B2C sender's list.

By not adhering to their new email guidelines you can expect your engagement metrics to begin dropping as your emails land in spam folders more and more.

Because Gmail and Yahoo's reputation-ranking system for senders is also based on subscriber engagement and your engagement has plummeted, it will create a snowball effect.

You'll begin to see open rates plummet, conversions plummet, and eventually, be unable to reliably deliver email from your domain.

Mailbox providers hold all the cards. It's how it's always been.

Why is Google and Yahoo doing this?

Google noted that their AI-powered defenses stop more than 99.9% of spam, phishing and malware from reaching inboxes and block nearly 15 billion unwanted emails daily.

"But now, nearly 20 years after Gmail launched, the threats we face are more complex and pressing than ever." -Google

The short answer is they want inboxes safer and more spam-free.

One thing is certain, email prospecting has already become saturated and buyers are getting numbed to anything that doesn't stand out. Now with ChatGPT, it's become even more difficult to distinguish a personalized email from one that AI generated.

Because of contact database tools like ZoomInfo and Apollo and email prospecting platforms like Outreach and Salesloft, any sales team can add thousands of prospects to email sequences with a few clicks.

Buyers are getting 20-30 "do you want to buy?" emails daily that they unsubscribe from or mark as spam.

It's a massive drain for everyone involved.

Successful sales teams are going to be those that can stand out from the crowd and create an incredible customer relationship.

How should sales teams be thinking about this?

I don't see these updates as anything but a good thing for sellers and customers. Totally agree that those who might be affected could be worried, but it's also an opportunity to improve processes and build better relationships with prospects.

If you're doing outbound the right way, you've got nothing to worry about. "Right" meaning adding value, thoughtful, contextual, human, relevant, and so on.

Sales leaders may need to reduce the autonomy they give to reps and have greater control over the outbound rules.

Reps will need to be more intentional with their outreach rather than carpet-bombing their ICP market with bulk email sequences.

Hopefully, in the future, when emails land in buyers' inboxes they'll be relevant and targeted towards actual need, which creates a better overall buyer experience.

Imagine seeing 1-2 emails daily from a seller helping you solve a problem you have today.

That would completely change the lens through which buyers view salespeople.

The Future of Outbound Outreach

Building effective outbound sales will come down to two things:

• Is the company you're targeting in-market (ready to buy)?
• Does the company have a favorable outlook on your brand?

As we've talked about in How the B2B SaaS Funnel Has Changed, nowadays, buyers do the majority of their research before even talking to a salesperson.

Building a strong brand in your buyers' mind around the problem you solve will play an important role when it comes time for the buyer to evaluate solutions.

Especially in B2B SaaS there are so many solutions out there it becomes difficult to parse through the noise.

Things like G2 reviews, awards, household brand case studies, and thought leader product endorsements matter.

If you know when prospects are in-market for your product AND they have developed a strong liking to your brand, then you don't need AI-generated copy and mass emails. You just need to find these people and say "what's up."

Easy right?

How Warmly Helps Sales Teams Thrive

Warmly is "warm leads" platform that helps you discover companies in-market for your product AND companies and people who have engaged with your brand. The platform synthesizes metadata across your sales and marketing techstack to arrive at an "Account Intent Signal Score."

When the score reaches a threshold, we help you autonomously outreach to the buyers at these companies who would find your product most relevant. And we take an omnichannel approach across email, LinkedIn, and website chat to reach them.

You can still use your favorite sequencing tools like Outreach, Apollo, SalesLoft or HubSpot. But now you're sending emails more responsibly and, with "fewer bullets in the chamber," more strategically to prospects that have the highest likelihood of converting.

Introducing a "warm outreach" process reduces the risk of over-sending mass emails AND being marked as spam for your entire email domain.

This announcement from Google and Yahoo, coming in the year's final quarter, offers an opportunity to put an outreach plan in place that sets your sales team up for success in the years to come.

Sales reps need a platform to help them outreach effectively without burning through your domain.

You can try Warmly for free here.

Qualified is somewhat of an industry standard when it comes to account-based marketing and chatbot-led lead gen.

They offer solid conversational chat, decent B2B buyer intent data, and fantastic customer service.

But here’s the thing:

Qualified is built for enterprise, not SMBs.

At a minimum, it will cost you $42k a year, plus the costs of running a sales team large enough to take the heavily human-led approach that Qualified promotes.

Plus, you pretty much have to be using Salesforce.

For large enterprises running a Salesforce + Marketo + 6sense tech stack, Qualified makes a lot of sense.

But for anyone not working in Salesforce (yes, other CRMs exist) or with a more modest budget, there are many other suitable options.

In this article, we’ll explore 8 more realistic Qualified competitors & alternatives.

1. Drift - Best For Enterprise
2. Intercom - Best For Customer Support
3. HubSpot Chat - Best For Basic Chat
4. 6sense - Best For Conversational Email
5. ZoomInfo Chat - Best For An All-In-One Platform
6. Demandbase - Best For ABM Execution
7. Clearbit - Best For Developer-Focused GTM Teams
8. Warmly - Best For Account-Based Orchestration
9. Why Consider An Alternative To Qualified?

8 Qualified Competitors & Alternatives

1. Drift - Best For Enterprise

Drift is kind of the industry standard when it comes to automated chatbots.

It sits at the other end of the human-automation spectrum to Qualified, designed for high-volume lead funneling.

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Why Consider Drift As An Alternative To Qualified?

Drift is basically built for large enterprises with millions of visitors to their sites each month, something which would require a huge salesforce to cover with Qualified’s motion.

They’ve also started leaning into AI-powered chatbots, though there are other more advanced tools in this space.

One key feature that Drift has over Qualified is video. A sales rep can send an embedded video in an email (like a Vidyard). This kicks off a cool little playbook:

• Prospect clicks the video
• Directed to a landing page to watch the video
• Drift notifies the rep that the prospect is watching the video right now
• Sales rep can reach out to start a live conversation with the rep while they’re engaged

Where Drift Falls Short

Drift kind of missed the boat on a deep integration with a CRM.

They’ve caught on now (they have native integrations with Salesforce, HubSpot, and a couple of others), but they decided earlier to be an independent platform that you do everything out of.

This means you didn’t have the tie-in to CRM deals and opportunities that Qualified offers.

So, it's not really a perfect alternative if you’re just looking for a non-Salesforce version of Qualified.

Drift Pricing

Drift is cheaper than Qualified, but still fairly expensive.

You’ll pay at least $30k annually for their standard plan and $90k upward for their more advanced packages.

So, Drift is still serving the same market as Qualified (and thus not ideal for SMBs).

2. Intercom - Best For Customer Support

Intercom is a household name in chat, though it comes at it from a support angle rather than a sales one.

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Why Consider Intercom As An Alternative To Qualified?

Intercom is an industry standard for customer support.

It’s a people-driven chat tool, but they have started integrating more automated, AI-driven flows to respond to market demands.

This is great news for small businesses that might not have the budget for a dedicated support team but still want to provide at least some level of customer service, as Intercom’s AI chat tool is more cost-effective (and claims to resolve 50% of support requests instantly).

Where Intercom Falls Short

Intercom isn’t focused on the sales use case.

It is a passive rather than proactive chat tool (Qualified, Drift, and Warmly all take a proactive approach), and so it doesn’t respond to buying intent signals, like these solutions do.

Intercom Pricing

Intercom’s Starter plan begins at $888 per year. This includes their AI chatbot, but with limited functionality. You’ll have to upgrade to the Pro plan (custom pricing) to create custom answers.

3. HubSpot Chat - Best For Basic Chat

HubSpot Chat is a good out-of-the-box chat tool that requires minimal setup.

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Why Consider HubSpot Chat As An Alternative To Qualified?

Okay, we gotta be real here.

HubSpot Chat isn’t super sophisticated. Out of all the Qualified alternatives, it's the weakest tool as an outbound chat for sales teams.

The big win, however, is that it's free. So, it can work as a starting point for small organizations with no budget.

Where HubSpot Chat Falls Short

The list is pretty long here, but to keep things as simple as possible, HubSpot Chat lacks intent data, company reveal capabilities, sales orchestration, and reporting. However, this might change with their recent acquisition of Clearbit.

Alternatives like Warmly and Drift provide these functions, but HubSpot Chat isn’t designed as an ABM tool so much as a human-led live chat solution.

HubSpot Chat Pricing

HubSpot Chat is one of many free tools from HubSpot.

Being a freemium tool, though, functionality is limited. You’ll need to subscribe to a paid plan to go deeper (in which case, you’re probably better off going with one of the other alternatives listed here.

4. 6sense - Best For Enterprise Account-Based Marketing

6sense is one of the most well-known platforms in the account-based marketing space and is also core Qualified partner.

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Why Consider 6sense As An Alternative To Qualified?

6sense is a hugely comprehensive platform.

In 2023, it was named a leader in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Account-Based Marketing Platforms for the third year running, joined only by Demandbase.

Specifically, Gartner called out 6sense’s customer satisfaction, sales alerts and insights, and marketing strategy.

For those with an enterprise plan, 6sense also offers AI-driven recommended actions, helping sales reps focus on the highest-value activities.

Another cool feature is their conversational email.

It basically sends and responds to emails on your behalf using natural language. Obviously, this is a little scary, especially for enterprises, so it's generally reserved for low-stakes emails, but it's a cool way to clear a lot of tedious work off your plate.

Where 6sense Falls Short

For SMBs, the biggest challenge with 6sense, like many other competitors, is its pricing model.

Sure, it's great that you can pick and choose different modules and features to customize your plan (and pricing), but certain tiers need to be bought before others can activate.

For instance, to get the conversational email function we discussed above, you’ve got to buy the ABM platform, Predictive Analytics, and Orchestration tiers.

To get to a point where you have full end-to-end orchestration of a workflow, you’re spending ~120k.

Additionally, much of this is experimental and only works on Salesforce.

A few other drawbacks, as mentioned by Gartner, include:

• Lack of attribution modeling
• UX complaints
• Some reports regarding ICP traffic (like ICP traffic converted to a meeting) are missing

6sense Pricing

6sense customizes pricing to your company’s specific needs. However, it's not cheap. You’re looking at about the same price range as Qualified or Drift.

5. ZoomInfo - Best For An All-In-One Platform

ZoomInfo is a suite of GTM software platforms. They have tools for marketing, operations, sales, and hiring, as well as a decent chatbot with solid “if/then” workflows.

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Why Consider ZoomInfo As An Alternative To Qualified?

ZoomInfo is well-known as a best-in-class solution for contact and company data.

That’s really the core of their product offering. Everything else is built up around that.

For example, their SalesOS platform has prospect insights and buying intent signals, conversation intelligence (think Gong), data enrichment, and engagement tools like chat workflows and email automation.

They also have their own demand-side platform, so you can sync your audience so you can advertise to them.

The big benefit, then, is that when you want to add another GTM-related offering to your contract, you don’t need to stitch together another vendor. You just buy from the same supplier, reaping the benefit of native integrations.

Where ZoomInfo Falls Short

ZoomInfo does a lot of things well.

Where they fall short, though, is that in trying to do a lot of things well, they’ve started to lose ground on being the expert at any one thing.

ZoomInfo built its name on having the best contact data out there. But contact data has been commoditized and, in general, is an ongoing depreciating asset.

Realizing this, ZoomInfo has taken a “acquire and cross-sell” approach to expand revenue and keep growing ACV. They bought Insent.Ai for their chatbot tool, Comparably to expand their Talent asset, and Clickagy to improve intent signaling.

Diversifying into other offerings means less focus on their core competency, and so other vendors (like Apollo.io and Seamless.ai) have been gaining ground on contact data.

Their chat is also less powerful than alternatives like Qualified and lacks full CRM integrations. Again, this is a consequence of tackling too many surface areas at once, and acquiring tools rather than building them natively.

ZoomInfo Pricing

ZoomInfo is one of those “you gotta talk to us first” companies. We don’t have any pricing available, but we’ve heard that they’re also a pretty expensive solution, depending on the modules you opt to include.

6. Demandbase - Best For ABM Execution

Demandbase is another solid ABM tool and the only other platform named as a leader in Gartner’s 2023 Magic Quadrant.

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Why Consider Demandbase As An Alternative To Qualified?

Demandbase is, for all intents and purposes, a #2 version of 6sense.

It's been around for a bit longer (so it kind of has a legacy interface) and was a proponent of ABM for years before other brands jumped on the idea.

It does most of the same stuff as 6sense, with slightly better segmentation and reporting, though Gartner scores it slightly lower on both its Completeness of Vision and Ability to Execute scales. 

They also have a cool Buying Group AI feature in beta, which purports to “define, track, and engage members of a buying team within an account, outcome-driven ad campaigns to achieve marketing objectives, and prescriptive sales dashboards with recommendations for sellers.”

This is something many vendors have hand-waved at, but never quite nailed.

Where Demandbase Falls Short

Demandbase, like ZoomInfo and 6sense, has an “a la carte” model, and there’s plenty to choose from.

Unfortunately, “a la carte” generally translates to “expensive,” so this is another out-of-range tool for SMBs.

Demandbase Pricing

Demandbase creates pricing on a company-by-company basis, which is pretty much the standard for software solutions in this category.

7. Clearbit - Best For Developer-Focused GTM Teams

Clearbit is somewhat of a different beast from the rest, but still worthy of mentioning as a Qualified competitor thanks to its visitor identification and prospecting functionality.

More importantly, Clearbit was recently acquired by HubSpot, which has the potential to be a huge partnership in this space.

This acquisition combines CRM, data, and workflows, creating a solution that can break down data siloes and integrate seamlessly across systems. It will be one of the first to bring forth the new era of signal-based revenue orchestration.

As Whitney Sorson, CTO of Hubspot, puts it:

"Picture having complete data on over 20 million companies right inside HubSpot. All with over 100 rich data points about the companies and their decision-makers. Then, imagine being able to easily find high-fit prospects natively within your CRM. Finally, imagine that once those companies and contacts are in HubSpot, being alerted when those companies are showing buying intent."

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Why Consider Clearbit As An Alternative To Qualified?

Clearbit is great at deanonymizing site traffic, enriching it with best-in-class B2B data, and then syncing that back to your CRM.

They’ve got strong integrations with both Salesforce and HubSpot, with the latter likely to strengthen, given the recent acquisition.

They also have a powerful tool called Prospector.

This uses AI and their B2B database to find the buying committee for a given account and then sync that back to your CRM to line up orchestration in engagement tools like Outreach and SalesLoft.

Lastly, they offer a robust API for custom connections. So, if you’re a developer-focused GTM team and have people who can stitch together systems to create automation off of data, Clearbit is a winner.

Where Clearbit Falls Short

That last point works both in favor of Clearbit and against it.

If you’re running classic sales-led motions, Clearbit doesn’t come with any out-of-the-box playbooks to execute sales workflows. It’s designed more with the developer in mind.

That might change as the HubSpot acquisition plays out, though it's clear that any workflows will need to take place in their own sales tools.

For now, though, Clearbit is like the building blocks but doesn’t necessarily solve the problems end to end. You need to integrate it into your other tools to make sure the data is being used to fuel the rest of your GTM.

Clearbit Pricing

Clearbit’s plan structure looks pretty simple. You’ve got a free option (obviously limited), a paid option (no pricing information given), and an option to just buy API credits.

8. Warmly - Best For Account-Based Orchestration

Did we save the best for last? Obviously.

Let us introduce you to Warmly, our AI-powered platform for account-based orchestration, purpose-built for SMBs.

With Warmly, you can build an army of AI SDRs, finding that sweet spot between the human touch and AI-led engagement.

Also read: The Rise of Account-Based Orchestration in the Age of AI and Automation.

Why Consider Warmly As An Alternative To Qualified?

Compared to the other alternatives discussed here, Warmly takes a different approach.

We use generative AI to automate and personalize outreach on your rep's behalf.

That outreach is triggered by intent signals from tools in your tech stack (Slack, SalesLoft, Apollo, and so on), and enriched with best-in-class intent data from 6sense, Bombora, Clearbit, and PeopleDataLabs.

We call this account-based orchestration. It is a far more scalable, efficient, and cost-effective alternative to account-based marketing.

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The goal here is scalability and speed to lead.

35-50% of sales go to the company that responds first, but only 7% of companies respond within five minutes of a prospect filling in a form. Half don’t even respond for five days.

Achieving this speed is super difficult (and ridiculously expensive) to do with a human-centric approach. Warmly finds that perfect middle ground between human touch and AI automation.

Our AI platform runs your entire workflow—from intent being triggered to outreach being fired—until it's the right time for a rep to get involved.

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From the customer’s perspective, it looks like they were speaking with a human the whole time so that transition is seamless.

With this approach, you can build and scale up an AI SDR army on an SMB budget, creating full-cycle automated orchestration with human intervention at the right point based on real-time purchase intent data.

Learn more: Warmly: The Account Based Orchestration Platform.

Why Warmly Might Not Be A Good Fit For You

We, like all of the platforms discussed here, aren’t a perfect fit for everyone.

Warmly is designed specifically for the SMB and lower middle market.

So, we’re a great alternative for smaller organizations who find Qualified’s enterprise-facing feature set to be overkill or who simply don’t have the budget for that kind of sales motion.

However, it does mean that our integrations right now aren’t perfectly supporting the middle market or enterprise-level companies.

Warmly Pricing

Warmly offers 3 different plans:

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Our most basic paid plan comes in at $850 a month, or about ¼ of what you’d pay for Qualified.

We also offer a free plan, meaning you can start getting free warm leads without having to speak with a salesperson.

Get started for free here.

Why Consider An Alternative To Qualified?

Qualified is clearly a solid tool.

In fact, there are a few things it does exceptionally well:

• Reporting - You can see exactly who’s coming to the site, what percentage of traffic fits your ICP, which campaigns are driving conversions, which accounts are hot, and so on.
• Salesforce integration - Qualified is built by ex-Salesforce people, so they’ve got a pretty strong tie-in. The Qualified-Salesforce integration is about as deep as integrations get, so it's a great choice for larger teams who need everything fed into Salesforce as the source of truth.
• Amazing customer support - The team at Qualified is hungry to get you leads, and you’ll have a dedicated CSM to guide you through setup, including setting up Salesforce.

It's billed as “pipeline generation software,” which largely rests on their conversational marketing tools (i.e., website chat).

While there is an AI component to the software (you can build automated chatbots), where Qualified differentiates itself from competitors like Drift is in taking a distinctly human-led approach.

The idea is that customers are chatting with real people, which is where the drawbacks begin.

Only Works If You Can Scale Your Sales Team

Qualified’s ethos is human-first. That means that, as a customer, when someone reaches out through website chat, it's a human being on the other end.

This is great from a personalization standpoint, providing better buying experiences (assuming the skill is there on the other end). But it also means you need a dedicated person to “man the chat.”

This is made clear by Qualified’s reporting, which is built around things like chat leaderboards and analysis of traffic hours, so you can set up your team around peak times.

It's a great tool if you can organize humans appropriately, but it is largely out of reach for SMBs and even mid-market businesses that don’t have inbound reps on hand nor the budget to hire them.

Not Built For SMB Budgets

Speaking of budget, Qualified is expensive.

It's one of the most expensive chat-based ABM tools around. You’re looking at $42k a year for their Growth plan and $72k for the Premier plan, and those are just the “starting at” points.

Then, you’ve got things like implementation and integrations with your tech stack (you typically see Qualified paired with Salesforce and 6sense) to build.

All of this means lengthy setup times, and requires an established revenue organization to set up all the reports and workflows, plus organize all the reps.

Non-Salesforce Users Are Out Of Luck

Lastly, Qualified only works on Salesforce.

As mentioned, the Salesforce integration is strong. But they don’t integrate with any other CRMs.

So, it's basically a Salesforce-only platform.

An Army of AI SDRs at ¼ The Price of Qualified

It's tough to deny that Qualified is a solid platform.

If you’re deeply embedded in the Salesforce architecture and have the manpower to run a human-led motion, Qualified makes a lot of sense.

That’s a pretty niche situation, though.

For small and medium-sized businesses, lean sales teams, or any company working in any CRM that isn’t Salesforce, Qualified’s value prop becomes questionable, especially considering how expensive it is.

With Warmly, you can begin receiving hard ROI in 20 minutes with just two steps

1. Add a code snippet to the site
2. One-click authenticate your existing systems (Hubspot, Outreach, Apollo, Slack, LinkedIn, etc.)

You’ll immediately start improving conversion rates by revealing who is on your site, enriching that with best-in-class data, syncing that data back to your CRM, and routing hot accounts to the right rep.

Plus, with plans starting from just $850 a month (billed annually), you’ll reduce your Qualified bill by ~75%.

Discover how Kandji booked 2 qualified meetings just 8 minutes after going live with Warmly.

What is category design?

Category design is the process of creating a new category of products in the market.

The reward for being a category king is extraordinary.

According to Harvard Business Review, category kings capture 76% of the value within the category - as measured by market cap.

If you're not #1 in your customers' mind, try reframing and designing new category.

Benefits of being king:

1. Market Leadership: As the king of a category, you set the standards and define the norms within the market, often resulting in a loyal customer base that sees your brand as the go-to authority.
2. Pricing Power: Dominance in a category typically grants the flexibility to command premium pricing due to the perceived uniqueness and value of your offering, with less pressure from competitive pricing.
3. Enhanced Visibility and Growth Potential: Being at the forefront of a category often attracts more media attention, strategic partnerships, and investment opportunities, fueling further growth and solidifying market position.

Creating a category doesn’t mean having the best product. It’s about being seen in a different light — standing alone rather than in a crowd.

Here's how Warmly is designing the category of Signal-Based Sales Orchestration.

When to pursue category design

Pursue it when your market has many competitors.

I would argue that for any venture backed startups there's no reason not to pursue this strategy because you are inherently trying to disrupt the status quo. There are always incumbents.

Those incumbent solutions already occupy a space in your buyer's mind.

How do you enter and not only compete but capture market share quickly?

Warmly ran into this problem when we first brought our product to market.

There were already so many tools that help you capture more leads. People were also biased in what they liked.

Prospects had trouble figuring out where to put us in their techstack because our category didn't exist yet.

They knew they needed a CRM like Salesforce or a sales engagement tool like Outreach. Some sophisticated buyers would already have intent tools like Clearbit or 6sense in place.

But the concept of orchestration wasn't something people actively looked for.

Some of our early evangelists would describe us to others as "If 6sense, Drift, and Clearbit had a baby... that's Warmly."

Prospects began to view us as a cost-saving because we consolidated three tools into one for cheaper. Not a bad start.

But sales deals would stall because buyers would compare us directly with established kings and queens of existing categories they were familiar with.

It was difficult to compete in someone else's story.

Instead, we wanted them to see that "you can keep using tools like 6sense and Drift, AND Warmly, and here's why 1+1+1=5..."

Step 1: Select the right problem

Market >>> everything else. As Marc Andreessen, Founder and General partner of a16z, puts it, "In a great market - a market with lots of real potential customers - the market pulls product out of the startup."

A great market is more important than a great team or product for building a big business.

We felt a lack of market with our prior nametags product.

The market wasn't there.

Luckily, our team got better over time.

Given the recessionary market environment of Q3 2022, every company was looking for more warm leads, including us.

Teams that predominantly fed off inbound leads now had to go outbound.

We found that the key sub-problem of finding more warm leads was:

• Identifying who was in-market for your product
• Getting in front of them in that buying window

Tools like 6sense, ZoomInfo, and Apollo have raised hundreds of millions to try and solve this problem. It's not solved yet. But the market was already validated.

Step 2: Frame the new, different future for the customer

Bring your customers into the future by showing them something new.

As Category Pirates explains it...

Unique points of view have a simple architecture.

• Frame a different problem/opportunity.
• Evangelize a different future.
• Show customers how your “solution” bridges the gap from the problem/opportunity to a different future.

Most importantly, the company evangelizing the POV is immediately viewed as the leader.

For us, there were already many awesome tools out there to help with intent data and buyer signals, but all of these siloed solutions still have to be orchestrated - usually by humans, which is expensive and time-consuming.

Incumbents created their products during the golden age of the sales development representative, where companies solved their lead generation problem, which required a lot of manual effort, by throwing more humans at it.

With advancements in AI, instead of coordinating humans who need to operate multiple tools to catch a buyer's attention, we leaned into the point of view of using automation and orchestration to do the repetitive work.

Let humans do what they do best, building relationships, and let automation take care of the rest.

Step 3: Crystalize a radically different brand

What's the number one thing you want your audience to think when they see your name?

We wanted our audience to shortcut their mind to "AI Sales" when they thought of Warmly. Conversely, when they think of AI sales, they think Warmly.

Next, what do you want your audience to "feel" when they see your name?

We wanted them to feel powerful, that they could access something mystic and extraordinary by having Warmly.

We studied Carl Jung's brand archetypes and how they could be applied to companies.

Jung theorized that humans use symbolism to understand complex topics. And these symbols can be timeless and understood as categories. In the case of brands, these categories exhibit personality traits that customers easily understand. Archetypes, he called them.

‎Image Source

We selected the "magician" brand archetype, the ethos of which you can see reflected in our website.

Source: Warmly.ai

We chose our category name to be signal-based sales orchestration because

• It encapsulates our unique point of view and the future that we saw.
• Nobody else occupied it from an SEO perspective.

Once we crystallized our brand, we reflected it in every facet of our marketing and product - website, language, social posts, blogs, sales calls, feature naming, branding.

As Seth Godin, world-renowned marketing author, explains, "Having a brand means you've made a promise to people. They have expectations. It's a shorthand of what they should expect the next time."

Step 4: Lightning strike!

Once you define your problem, unique point of view, category, and brand, you're next step is to let the world know who you are and what you stand for in a lightning strike.

A lightning strike is a category-defining event.

It defines a new problem or, like in our case, an old problem that can be solved in a new way.

It must be carefully crafted to trigger a moment in the minds of your prospects where they say, “Wow, this is new... I want that.”

We wanted to frame the problem, claim the solution, and own the narrative.

We decided to use our Series A funding announcement as our lightning strike to spread word of mouth.

Super important here is to tell your story in three bullet points. Because that's all people will remember.

Any more and it dulls the punch of what you're trying to say.

Our template looked something like this:

• "The world is changing..." (Problem reframe)
• "Because of X, Y" (Unique point of view)
• "Warmly closes that gap" (Bridge the gap to a different future)

It's difficult to unwind the narrative once it's been released in a lightning strike to the world. You get one shot.

It's worth spending the time to get your story right.

Image caption

‎Source: ‎https://techcrunch.com/2023/10/19/warmly-pivots-from-zoom-tool-to-directing-warm-leads-to-sales/

Step 5: Make your position as category king permanent

Once the category king dominates the category, it can use that position to expand the category to higher levels.

Create a flywheel to continue reinforcing your position as category king.

We instituted a constant beat of mobilizations and lightning strikes we call "operation rolling thunder."

• Our investors wrote thought leadership pieces about our space, expanding awareness around the category, and putting us at the center. For example, Why NFX Invested in Warmly: Harnessing AI to End the Cold Call by NFX or Investing in Warmly by Felicis Ventures.
• We launched on Product Hunt, Bookface (a launch within YC's community), Hacker News, and others
• We actively engaged with revenue operations, account-based marketing, and demand gen community groups across Slack, LinkedIn, and Reddit, extending the reach outside of our inner circle of influence
• Our evangelists and affiliate influencers educate our category within trusted CMO/CRO groups
• We sought out additional press and newsletter coverage to keep our market attuned to how Warmly was developing
• We built an ecosystem of affiliate influencers, integration partners, and agencies
• We use each new customer as an opportunity to turn drive more testimonials and positive G2 reviews.
• We leveraged Lavender's playbook, consistently generating high-value content like webinars or blog posts and distributing across other channels like YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter, Medium, newsletters, and emails

Each lightning strike gives the flywheel another shove. It amplifies the effects of each of the prior listed initiatives, furthering the gap between the category king and the rest.