Generating leads in today’s crowded landscape is one of the biggest challenges B2B companies face. With prospects consuming over 11 hours of content daily, getting them to pay attention to you — much less take action— is getting harder than ever. Creating content that will convert therefore requires ingenuity, data, and, of course, a compelling offer. And that’s the approach we took with Toffler Associates. By creating an immersive user experience via an interactive infographic to promote Toffler Associates’ latest research (Disruption 2030), we were able to increase buyer engagement, conversion rates, and revenue by leveraging HubSpot’s suite of tools.
Toffler Associates, founded in 1996 by world-renowned futurists and authors Alvin and Heidi Toffler, is a future-focused strategic advisory firm. For the past 20 years, the Virginia-based company has endeavored to help global leaders transform their organizations and build future value by dissecting their future operating environment. By engaging with senior thought leaders from diverse backgrounds, Toffler Associates is able to produce research and reports that tackle some of the hardest questions of today to help organizations build a better tomorrow.
When Toffler Associates engaged with the Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) to explore the future threats and technological disruptions over the next decade, they wanted to share the findings of the report with other executive leaders and use the report to generate new leads. To do this, the value of the asset had to be easily understood by their buyer personas outside of government agencies and evocative enough to encourage a conversion through a seamless and integrated marketing approach.
Toffler Associates knew that the promotional campaign had to be as forward-thinking as their brand, but expressing that cohesively and tangibly was a bit of a puzzle. Not knowing the best approach to promoting their asset, they collaborated with their strategic partner, Marsden Marketing, to breathe new life into marketing the asset.
Companies often resort to random acts of marketing when they want to generate leads fast, which often leads to wasted resources (time and money). Practicing the first commandment of Marsden Marketing, the team began by doing the headwork before the footwork. A brainstorming session was conducted to identify the best avenues for promoting the report, what formats were going to be used, the look and feel of each component, and the email nurture programs to put in place to yield optimal results.
It was quickly decided that an infographic would be the best way to engage prospects across digital channels and to show the value of the research. But it couldn’t be your typical stagnant infographic. Leveraging Marsden's agency partnership with Ceros, an experiential content creation platform, the team set out to distill the data of the report to create a visually impactful and interactive user experience.
With Toffler Associates' buyer personas on hand and an interactive infographic to serve as the foundation of the campaign, the team proceeded to map out the promotional plan from awareness to delight — including a highly optimized landing page, social promotion on LinkedIn and Twitter, and email drip campaigns to further nurture prospects into qualified sales leads. Using Ceros not only served to elevate the impact of the infographic but its seamless integration with Hubspot armed the team with real-time data to track its performance.
As the lynchpin that held the promotional campaign together, it was important for the infographic to convey the complexity of the findings in an easily digestible way. To achieve this balance, it was decided to break the infographic into five sections. The infographic starts with a statement detailing the purpose of the report and why the intended audience should care, followed by the drivers, shocks, and technology waves impacting the future landscape. At the end, a list of recommendations and a compelling CTA is used to encourage buyers to download the offer.
As you scroll down the infographic, strategically placed animations come to life, adding visual interest and validation for the actions taken on the page. Bold typography, imagery, and icons provide a visual hierarchy while serving as a roadmap for how the information should be consumed. This allowed the team to convey the findings and concepts of the report in a format that the audience would easily understand while emphasizing key information that would pique their interest.
Toffler Associates' goal for this interactive infographic was to generate leads in the commercial space. By making the findings of the report easy to understand in a visually appealing and innovative way, Toffler Associates positioned itself as an industry thought leader while encouraging executives to seek guidance in future-proofing their organizations.
Since the launch of the campaign, 44% of web visitors to the interactive infographic page have clicked on the CTA, with 70.5% of those converting and downloading the full report. The gated form outperformed every other asset over the past 12 months.
Equally impressive, the email drip campaign is delivering a 76 percent open rate and 68 percent click-through-rate. The campaign has also set a record by generating a deal within the first month of being launched and closing said deal in less than 30 days.
By providing visitors with an enriched and multi-layered visual experience, Toffler Associates has increased engagement with their target personas while expanded their reach as an industry thought leader.