Hey everyone,
I’ve often heard people in the industry say “payment managers or senior executives don’t read blogs”.
Maybe you secretly believe this as well – if you don’t read a lot of blogs online, then surely neither do your prospects, right?
I always find these statements interesting because we have literally seen (as you will see in screenshots below) people with these job titles read content, convert and close into customers.
The blog is a lot more influential than you think. The problem is it’s getting harder and harder to track how many people are actually consuming your content. In fact, we calculated that only about 26% of all your blog readers can be tracked.
Yes, people read your blog. The issue is that most of them (the other 74%) are reading it within LLMs, which are hard to track.
Let’s start with some examples that showcase how even within those 26%, there are real enterprise buyers reading content and converting:
1. Services based company in the FS sector regularly brings in $1M+ value deals from blog content
The screenshot below (taken within HubSpot) shows a Director of Operational Excellence from a $3B company reading a blog and then converting.
Interestingly, our client had been trying to reach this company for months with targeted outreach and it hadn’t been working. Instead, they came inbound through the content we published.
So yes, billion dollar companies read blog content!
2. Company in the payments space where 20% of leads are enterprise
For this payments company, 20% of all leads that read blog content are marked as enterprise.
For this client, we use WhatConverts, which allows us to see the pages a reader visits before and after submitting a form.
You can see an example below. This is a company in Southeast Asia with over 13 million users submitting a “book a call” form. You can also see that it wasn’t in the same session (which is the most common situation). They read the blog on a Saturday, and then converted the following Friday.
Our client also saw one of the biggest airlines with $40B in revenue operations across 80 countries read a few blogs and then submit a form.
Yes, companies making 11 figures in revenue still read blogs!
3. Identity verification company captures Fortune 500 companies with content
With HubSpot, what we often see is people reading lots of pages, including blog content, before converting. We can’t show the full screenshot here but the person viewed 28+ pages and converted a few weeks after reading.
This is a person with the title of Research Lead who works at a global business firm serving more than half of Fortune 500, has $2B in revenue and hire 40,000 people:
How to track enterprise leads
Being able to tell a story is key to communicating about marketing to leadership. Showing screenshots and examples like these helps leadership understand the role of content and how people will often have multiple touchpoints before converting.
But without the right tracking in place, this is very hard.
There are a few ways to do it, but the way that is most effective is tracking the pages that people visit before and after booking a call / demo, even if we’re only really tracking ⅓ of all the leads reading our content.
If someone’s read your content before or after submitting a demo, you can then showcase this to leadership as proof that your blog was a key part of the journey that led to that opportunity.
If you have HubSpot, it’s about setting up the right reports that allow you to track this. You can see reports like:
- Articles that bring in the highest number of leads
- Articles that bring in the most amount of revenue
We’ve written a guide on how to set it all up here: How to Track the Quality of the Leads Your Content Brings in [With 6 HubSpot Reports]
If you don’t have HubSpot, then you’ll need a third-party tool that tracks pages. Our favourite one is WhatConverts, and there are others like Formulayt and RulerAnalytics.
Since you’re still missing around ⅔ of people who are reading your content but cannot be tracked in HubSpot or a third party tool, you also want to be tracking:
- Organic leads: Many leads are coming through organic search overall (in fact, one of the most common journey is finding your brand in LLMs, typing your brand name into Google and then converting on your homepage). You won’t always be able to tie these back to a specific article, but it gives you a broader view of how content and SEO are contributing to your pipeline.
- LLM leads: Your content feeds LLM responses but hardly anyone clicks through the links to the original source which makes actually getting the credit for the lead difficult. We’ve found the best way to track LLM leads is simply to ask “How did you hear about us?” on your forms, so prospects can tell you if they discovered you through ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity or another LLM.
Tracking direct and offline leads would be ideal as well, but if you’re doing other types of marketing as well it can be really hard to be certain whether content influenced those.
With those three above (tracking people who land on content pages, organic and LLM leads), you can get a relatively accurate picture of the influence of content.
Of course, it comes down to creating the right content
If you don’t create the right type of content, no amount of tracking will show enterprise leads coming on.
So where do you start?
The best place to start is to get a deep understanding of the topics, the questions and the pain points that someone working for an enterprise company is speaking to someone on your team who is constantly talking to prospects and customers at that level.
You’ll come away with a list of topics, questions and ideas for content that they would actually resonate with.
We’ve written about this a lot already, so the best way to learn more about how to get started is to read this article: What is BOFU (Bottom of the Funnel) Content and Why Is it Important?
So yes, blog content still works! We’ve written a more in-depth article on this topic where you can see more examples and a break down of how to create the right type of content here: Do blogs really bring in enterprise customers? And if so, how?
Mint Studios Recommended Reads
- Your Biggest AI Search Risk Is Conflicting Information About Your Brand
We've noticed amongst certain clients that have different brand names or conflicting information, that LLM visibility suffers. This article shares an interesting tactic to overcome this. - Do visitors from AI convert better? New research from 29 million visits. Interesting research from Andy Crestodina!
- Gaetano DiNardi: The AI Hype Machine: Two highly experienced content / SEO marketers share their findings on what works now in digital marketing. Highly recommend!
Thanks for reading,
Araminta & the Mint team 🎉
We help financial services and fintech companies turn content into measurable pipeline. Learn more about what we do.
