As an IT managed services provider specializing in small and medium-sized businesses, Iconic IT had a not-too-usual marketing challenge: getting a stream of qualified leads that’s large enough to supply five different sales offices nationwide.
The answer to that challenge, of course, had a lot to do with social posts and advertising, as well as involvement in local business organizations in those markets. But the strategy
underpinning it all was Iconic IT’s pillar posts, designed using Hubspot’s pillar post strategy. If you’re trying to drum up leads for your company, you’re really missing out if you’re not making the most of this strategy.
Pillar Posts—Hybrid for the Win
What is a pillar post? Pillar posts are a fabulous tool that HubSpot gives you, allowing you to connect CTA assets and blog posts against a central theme. We’ve started with pillar posts in major areas of interest for our clients—namely Cybersecurity, and the Modern Workplace Journey toward cloud migration. We took a hybrid approach with
it, as the pillar posts are designed to boost our blog traffic, and vice versa.
The posts were part of a major site redesign after we merged five individual IT services
companies together. We’ve had the pillar posts up since July 2020 now, and the results we’ve seen from it have been transformative. The key was building the pillars out fully with a deep well of quality downloadable assets, as well as video and blog content. The company created custom downloadable deliverables for every pillar, including high-end webinars, information-dense checklists, and comprehensive subject kits offering a combination of special reports, best- practice tip sheets, and more.
Connecting the Content Dots
So how did we pull it all together? By giving customers different deliverables for each part of their journey. Each deliverable has its own landing page and was connected back to the pillar. Even now, we continuously produce blogs against the pillar content, using links that point back to those landing pages. And on every blog post, there’s a nice piece of CTA art and a link to our pillar post offerings.
Keywords that Click with Users
At any one time, they have as many as twenty different blogs, landing pages and deliverables all linking back to each pillar. Does that sound like a lot? It is. But the key to making them work is keywords. Each pillar has least twenty connected keywords against it, with blogs and landing pages well seeded on each keyword topic. Building out keyword-specific content pointing directly back to the pillar has helped us create a virtuous circle of links right back to our door. Once customers type in an email address to get one of the gated deliverables, they go into an email drip campaign that assigns them scores as they go down the funnel. Once they’ve hit 75 points, the lead becomes “qualified” and is sent to the company’s sales division, and a local salesperson is assigned to set up a meeting. So far, the company averages several hundred “marketing qualified leads” per year.
What Pillars Have Done for Us
So far, the pillar post strategy has been responsible for several important outcomes, including:
- Increasing rank on our blogs—blogs tied to pillar posts do far better than those that are not.
- Improving rank on Google—because each page ranks well
- Keeping site visitors engaged longer—for an average of 3.5 minutes per page, and they go on to visit more pages on the site
- Driving CTA clicks—by offering customers a deep well of information, they’re far more likely to hand over an email, and see Iconic IT as a thought leader worthy of their inbox.
- Directing visitors down the funnel—The pillar provides more ways the customer can interact, bringing order to the funnel in a way one-off blog posts cannot.
- Keeping clients engaged over a long sales cycle—pillars offer “sticky” content that keep customers engaged over what can often be a long sales cycle.
We’ve used every opportunity we can to strategically link off to the pillars, including putting pillar post CTAs on our home page. We love our pillars. But they’re just like any other marketing strategy. It’s all in how much you build them out, track the inbounds, and respond to your leads. Do that, and you could have an inbound strategy that could work for you for years to come.