Content Upgrades vs Landing Pages: How Repsly Doubled Lead Capture Using Dynamic Content Upgrades

But, you probably already know this. To most marketers, this strategy is old news.

Nowadays, many companies, even local freelancers, are pretty good at creating content for their audience.

Even you might not be too shabby at this content marketing thing.

But by now, you’ve probably figured out that creating good content alone is not enough to predictably grow your business.

To make it worthwhile, not only does your content have to generate traffic, it also has to convert.

While your content can attract more visitors and build your brand, it will ultimately need to start driving people to move through your conversion funnel until they become customers. Especially, if you want to scale using content as a primary marketing channel.

Repsly, a Boston-based SaaS company who encountered this challenge, recently ran one small experiment that had a big impact on their content’s conversion rate into leads.

How big? Their experiment resulted in a 100% increase in leads generated from their blog, with one small change that takes minutes to implement.

Curious to see how they did it?

Let’s take a closer look…

Repsly empowers teams to sell more in the field by providing a mobile CRM that makes customer history and account details just taps away, making it easier for sales reps to win deals on the field. Beyond being great for individual reps, their CRM also makes it easy to report on performance by organizing all of a sales team’s activity from the field.

As an education-focused brand that currently powers over 10,000 sales reps in 90 countries and growing, Repsly’s team creates lots of content in the form of videos and blog posts that help their existing customers succeed, while attracting new visitors and leads.

With their Hubspot-hosted blog being one of their primary channels for lead generation, Repsly’s marketing team would use embedded image CTAs in their content to guide readers to landing pages that promoted their content offers.

Once on the landing page, their visitors would have to fill out a lead gen form to receive their premium content.

This a standard setup you’ll see lots of companies use.

However, Repsly’s team knew this setup wasn’t good enough. It threw readers off the educational content they were reading, and created a poor user experience.

And when looking at their funnel’s performance, their conversions reflected it.

“…while the click-through-rate on our blog was relatively high, the eventual visitor-to-lead conversion rate was low because of the extra steps we were making people take by sending them to a separate landing page.” – Frank Brogie, Content Marketing Manager at Repsly

On a mission to increase their lead capture rate, while improving the experience for their readers, Repsly discovered ConvertFlow, and used it to power their website’s CTAs.

Now, by simply using embedded CTAs that show the right lead generation form and offer to visitors reading their content, instead of linking to a landing page, Repsly was able to double their lead capture rate.

This means that they’re generating twice as many leads for their sales reps, with a lot less work.

Instead of spending lots of time on creating landing pages for their lead gen offers, now they can display the right offer in their content to the right visitors, and seamlessly collect leads without driving visitors off the page.

Sounds pretty simple, and easy to implement, right?

If your current content conversion setup doesn’t look like this yet, please keep reading.

Before you run off and ditch all of your landing pages for embedded CTAs in your content, let’s take a step back and look at the bigger strategy used by Repsly that is really responsible for a 2x increase in leads generated from their content.

Content Funnels: Designing conversion paths for readers

Unlike some marketers who focus on capturing emails at all costs without much of a strategy, one of the drivers of Repsly’s great results is that they’re designing and optimizing conversion paths for their blog’s visitors.

This way, they can make it as easy as possible for the right readers to become qualified leads.

For their team, this means aligning their lead gen content strategy with the reasons their customers would buy their product. Then, they’re creating premium gated content that’s injected into well-written blog posts with topics that would attract prospective customers.

You can think of this strategy as using mini content funnels that generate qualified leads for Repsly, and route sales qualified leads to sales reps, giving them insight into what challenge they are facing, what attracted them to their company, as well as data on how to map their solution’s benefits and features to the customer’s problems.

Note: Try drawing up a mind map when it comes to visualizing how the funnel will look for your own business 😎

Avoiding dead-end conversion paths

If you look at their blog, you’ll notice that not every post promotes premium gated content (aka content upgrades).

Why? Because not every post would generate a lead that’s qualified for their product.

Some of their content like “Repsly Recipes: Apple Cider Kombucha Cocktail [Video]” is simply used to entertain and build a deeper relationship with their existing audience. While other content like “Repsly Announces 100 Buzziest Food & Beverage Brands” may be used to get industry attention.

Their content upgrades are only found on posts that attract the right type of lead, and align with their conversion funnel.

Lead generation with dynamic content upgrades: Creating a conversion experience readers enjoy

When readers discover your content, they want to access the information they were looking for, and read the content that drove them to your site. Just because someone landed on your site, it doesn’t mean they want to be forced off the content they’re reading and down your purchase funnel.

You see, your readers don’t mind being marketed to, they just don’t like it when you get in the way of what they were originally trying to achieve on your site.

However, if you engage your visitors with a CTA that helps them achieve their goal faster, by guiding them to the right content on your site, they’ll happily follow your lead.

Capturing leads & instantly delivering value with dynamic content upgrades

In the case of converting readers of your content into leads, dynamic content upgrades allow you to capture leads and instantly deliver the value they requested access to, without the reader ever having to leave the page or check their email.

Repsly uses dynamic content upgrades to create a conversion experience readers actually enjoy.

As you can see, when you visit one of Repsly’s blog posts that contains a content upgrade, you’ll have the opportunity to get premium content that’s relevant to the content of the post you’re reading.

With many of their content upgrades, they deliver their premium content through Wisita videos that load instantly after submitting the form.

To create these dynamic content upgrades, Repsly’s marketing team uses ConvertFlow’s embedded CTAs, and injects them into specific blog posts by targeting the URL of the page or keywords in the URL.

Note: If you use WordPress, you can directly target blog posts, as well as posts in categories by using ConvertFlow’s WordPress integration.

Creating dynamic content upgrades using embedded CTAs

With ConvertFlow, you can easily create embedded CTAs that can be used at the bottom of your blog posts or within your post’s content.

Using our visual builder, you can design them to match the look and feel of your site, without sacrificing tracking important conversion and click-through metrics.

Once you’ve designed your CTA, you can add automations to your form to make sure your leads are properly segmented and passed to the email marketing app.

With the lead capture step of your CTA done, you can now add a second step to instantly deliver your premium content after a lead submits the form on the first step.

You can then deliver your premium content by either linking out to it, embedding it or a video using the custom HTML element, or even deliver it as written content within the second step of the CTA.

Lastly, when you creating your dynamic content upgrade CTA, you can add confirmation actions to your form or buttons to redirect visitors to a URL, a step in the CTA, or even trigger a different CTA to display.

When you’re all done, you can easily launch your dynamic content upgrade on your site and display it in the right content to the right visitors.

Here’s a quick guide on how to launch a call-to-action using ConvertFlow.

This is the same workflow Repsly’s marketing team uses to inject dynamic content upgrades with embedded CTAs, instead of creating of landing pages and linking to them with image CTAs.

For Repsly, this conversion setup has led to a 2x increase in leads generated from their content, while reducing their workload for creating new lead generation campaigns.

“ConvertFlow helped us double our conversion rate while making it easy to identify our highest (and lowest) performing CTAs when it came to lead-generation, not just click-through.” – Frank Brogie, Content Marketing Manager at Repsly

If you’re currently driving visitors off of your content to your lead generation offers, run an experiment and try encapsulating your whole lead capture process into a dynamic content upgrade that doesn’t drive people of your page and disrupt their reading experience.

Not only will your readers enjoy it, but you might just see a boost in new leads for your business.

It’s a simple conversion tactic you can implement, that could lead to big results.

If you haven’t seen it already, check out Repsly’s story and see why they chose ConvertFlow over other tools to generate more leads for their business.

P.S. If you get great results with dynamic content upgrades, please let us know. We’d love to share your story too :)