Does Your IT Services Website Need More Premium Content?

Most IT services websites are starved for more targeted traffic, more qualified leads, and more revenue and ROI. In this post, we’ll examine how you can generate more high-quality leads from the right decision makers by using premium content.

Premium Content Defined

Given that premium content is the fuel behind successful lead generation at scale, what exactly is it?

Premium content is content that’s so valuable to a particular buyer persona that the reader is willing to “pay” for it with their contact information.

Also sometimes called “gated” content because it’s locked up behind a landing page, premium content is a big part of the secret sauce that transforms targeted website visitors into leads.

A good way to think about it: Let’s say you wrote a book on IT Services Best Practices for Healthcare IT. The book ends up being good enough to carry a $49 cover price on Amazon.com.

Your IT services company decides to exhibit at a regional future of healthcare conference attended by thousands of healthcare decision makers. You bring a palette of the books with you (since the book is self-published, your unit cost is in the $3 range) and trade autographed copies for business cards from qualified attendees.

After the conference, on a landing page on your IT services website, you do pretty much the same thing – except instead of getting a physical business card in return for a physical trade paperback book, leads exchange their business card-like information (six to eight form fields) for the PDF version of the book.

Comparing Premium Content to Non-Premium Content

Comparing premium content to non-premium content is kind of like comparing a fancy lobster dinner to a can of tuna fish in the grocery store. They’re both food. They both come from the ocean.

But one has much higher perceived value, both in terms of the raw ingredients and the dining experience.  So it commands a price that is 10, 20, maybe even 30 times higher.

Premium Content Examples

If you’re a frequent visitor to the SP Home Run website, you are probably familiar with some of these examples of premium content:

• White paper on Top 10 IT Marketing Strategies for Consistently Attracting New Business Clients to Your Small IT Business (premium content used in the early stage of the sales cycle)
• Downloadable IT Channel Inbound Marketing Planning Guide (premium content used in the early stage of the sales cycle)
• Webinar on 11 Ways Computer Consulting Businesses Attract the Right Website Visitors (premium content used in the middle of the sales cycle)
• Free Inbound Marketing Assessment for qualified IT companies (bottom of the sales funnel offer for the end of the sales cycle)

Non-Premium Content Examples

But your non-premium content has to be great too. It’s just a different kind of great.

Non-premium content is content that’s so remarkable to a particular buyer persona that the person finishes reading with a burning desire to find out “what else” you have to read, often your premium content behind landing pages that generates leads.

Some popular examples of non-premium content include:

• Blog posts
• Podcast episodes
• YouTube channel
• Twitter profile
• Facebook business page
• LinkedIn Profile

Non-premium content is used for, among other things, to attract website visitors to premium content.

So even non-premium content still has to be awesome and remarkable!

At the end of the day, your IT services website does most certainly need both premium content, that generates leads, and non-premium content, that attract strangers to your premium content.

How does your firm address these challenges? Let us know in the Comments below.

And to learn how to use premium and non-premium content to fill up the top of your sales funnel with more highly-qualified leads, be sure to watch the "Inbound Revenue Acceleration Webinar for Managed Services & IT Consulting."