How to Capture More Leads for Your Business Like HubSpot

A decade ago, when I was learning content marketing for the first time, I came across a HubSpot study that fundamentally changed the way I approached content marketing from there on out. So in this article, I’m going to be digging into exactly what that tactic is, how HubSpot applied it to their own business, and then leave you with a few questions that you can start answering to start applying this tactic for yourself.

Over the years, I’ve used this tactic to generate thousands of leads for all sorts of businesses. So I know it’ll work for you too. First thing we’re going to do is dig into the actual study and the key findings from the HubSpot study.

Key findings from HubSpot study

This HubSpot study was conducted in 2011 from studying 4,000 businesses. And what HubSpot found was that businesses that had 31 to 40 planning pages generated seven times more leads than businesses that only had one to five landing pages. So what you can tell here is that there’s this chart in which there are the new leads that are being generated in the Y axis, and then there are the number of landing pages on the X axis. And as you build out more landing pages, it leads to a correlation with respect to more leads for your business.

When I learned this, this changed the way that I approached a lot of things around content marketing, because what it meant was that I need to create more and more offers so that I could have something compelling for all the different niches or pockets of customers that were coming into my business’s website.

In fact, what HubSpot says is that businesses that had more than 40 landing pages, had a whopping 12 times more leads than those that only had one to five. So what this means is that in many cases, you’re thinking too small when it comes to the number of landing pages on your website.

A lot of times I know that there’s only a couple landing pages such as the general demo page, the trial page, and something else in terms of a general freebie, however, you could actually be crew generating a lot more business by creating other landing pages that might convert well for your business.

How HubSpot uses this tactic to convert prospects

As we navigate through HubSpot website, I’m going to go ahead and go into the resources section and then go into the eBooks guides and more section. The reason why I’m going to go here is because this is likely going to be a place where there’s going to be a ton of landing pages. And so right off the bat, what you’ll notice is that this directory of free business and marketing resources actually has 654 different assets within this directory. And so this is already a great start in terms of promise for finding some of these landing pages that HubSpot’s built.

But furthermore, when I’m probably going to look at is I’m going to look for things like eBooks, because eBooks are often downloadable that they don’t just leave public on a website. You often have to opt into those and to get those freebies. So in this case, when I filter down for eBooks, what you’ll notice is that HubSpot has 204 e-books. All of HubSpot’s e-books, all in one place and they all cover different topics like a beginner’s guide to social media workbook, Instagram for business, customer service metrics calculator. And so what I might do is I might just go ahead and open up a few tabs with these particular resources.

You’ll notice that this is a landing page. So you can see that we are on the landing page for HubSpot’s free download of a social media workbook. So here’s a beginner’s guide to social media. And I bet you, if I click this, it’s a lead page, right?

Why it works?

1. The first main reason is because it really builds on the reciprocity principle. The reciprocity principle sense really says that when somebody gives you something for free, then you feel a little indebted to that person. And so in this case, HubSpot’s giving us something for free and therefore we potentially are a little bit more interested in HubSpot than we would have been if we hadn’t gotten this freebie.

2. The second reason why this works though, is because it actually helps us enter HubSpot’s email marketing funnel. So from here, HubSpot would probably start marketing us in terms of some additional materials that might be useful to us based off the resource that we downloaded. The main thing that I want you to take away from this though, is that HubSpot has built landing pages for each of these resources. They specifically detailed within this page, some benefits from you downloading this resource. And so they are targeting this page in terms of some SEO things that people might be searching for around this particular asset.

So you can see here how they are answering some commonly asked questions. And they do this on all of their landing pages as well. So you can see this other example in which they’re doing, how to use Instagram for business. And so if I were to just to scroll through this page, you can see how they are answering some frequently asked questions around Instagram for business.

So they’re targeting these pages in terms of these landing pages, not only for the actual person that’s visiting the page, but also for Google to read exactly what this resource is about and potentially place it up there in terms of some of the organic search results here. So they take this model and they apply this over and over again.

HubSpot has largely built their business off of inbound leads and they come from all these different assets they’ve built over the years. So what you can see here is that they have 204 resources. And I want you to just think about that. If you had 204 resources for your business, would you probably get more leads than the competitor of yours that only has five or six resources?

The answer is obviously yes. And so if you were to apply this principle, the way that HubSpot has applied it, you can potentially significantly change the trajectory of your business because you’re creating all these different offers that speak to the different needs of all the different ideal customer profiles that you are trying to target.

Questions to ask yourself when approaching this sort of tactic

  1. What are three to five questions that people are often asking you about in your buying process?

So you’re probably going to have some sort of question that folks are always asking you that you feel like you’re answering time in and time out.

Those are the sorts of things that create great assets. So when you can tell from the HubSpot example is that a lot of people are probably asking them how they should use Instagram for their business. So they went ahead and made a resource for that. Similarly, if there is something that people are often asking you, you can probably make some sort of resource for those folks as well.

2. Aside from the product or service that you’re actually selling, what are other ways that you help people?

There are probably things that you help your customers with, that don’t necessarily fall into the direct product or service that you do. So whatever those things are could be great adjacent things that you could build a freebie or landing page for.

3. What do people still take notes on or create spreadsheets for within your niche?

The reason why I want you to think about this is because these are the sorts of resources that are really evergreen, that people are going to love if you build it into a freebie and create a landing page for. You’ll notice that back in the HubSpot example, you saw that there are things like calculators, you’ll see that there are also things like spreadsheets and templates. So you can see example templates here for mission statements and all sorts of things in terms of starter kits for businesses.

And so what you should take away from this is that if you can answer things that people are often building their own templates or examples for, then you can actually create a really valuable landing page for prospects to convert on your website.

4. What are some reports in your niche that people are often creating from scratch?

So whether that’s an Excel, in PowerPoint or something else. If you can create some sort of template for them, then that can be really valuable as a freebie and lead to a ton of new leads for your customers.

Just as pool from a personal example, a few years ago, I was working for a business in which every single year people would need to take some sort of certification and essentially, these certification test dates were set in stone. So what we did was we built a one-pager that would answer common questions around the certification, including things like when the certification dates were, what sort of percentage breakdowns of different concepts were on this particular exam and so on.

And so it was from creating this sort of resource that we would generate a lot of interest in our business because what people do is they would look for things like a downloadable around this particular thing. And then they would want to learn more about our business just because we provided them with a centralized place for that information.

If you liked this article, be sure to check out my YouTube channel to get new videos every single week. I’ll help take you from zero to self-starter as you grow your business, get more customers, and hone your business acumen. Also, feel free to share this with anybody that you think might benefit from learning how to use this tactic to capture more leads for their business.