Early this month, we’ve announced the Kapost Top 50 Content Marketing Brands—a list of brands whose content marketing efforts are generating big wins and real successes.

Number one on that list? Electronic signature provider DocuSign.

Today, we thought we’d offer a little more insight into why DocuSign topped our list and what their content marketing looks like.

Let’s start with the results, shall we?

In 2012, DocuSign shortened their sales cycle, doubled their pipeline, and reached 127% of their goal—all in the first half of the year.

So, the big question is: How did they do all that? What strategies helped them turn their content marketing into a powerful sales tool? And how can we all take a leaf from their book?

First, Let’s Talk Content

We can learn a few key lessons from simply looking at DocuSign’s content:

  1. Substantial long-form content is an important sales tool. Which is why DocuSign focuses their resource center on in-depth white papers and case studies that speak directly to their target industries and audiences.
  2. Engagement is an important component of content marketing. Another front-and-center content marketing strategy at DocuSign is weekly webinars. Smart, since webinars tend to attract highly qualified leads in the middle or end-stages of the sales funnel.
  3. Show is just as important as tell. DocuSign offers customer video testimonials as well as long-form, written case studies, which build a whole new level of trust as leads see the faces of and connect with the current satisfied customer base.

Okay, Now Let’s Talk Strategy

In case you missed Meagen Eisenberg’s DocuSign presentation at content bootcamp in San Francisco, here are a few of her behind-the-scenes tips based on DocuSign’s wildly successful content marketing:

  1. Map out your sales funnel in detail and optimize and personalize the middle.
  2. Get the right people involvedincluding the sales team and relevant thought leaders.
  3. Leverage the right technology to automate, communicate, syndicate, target, and personalize.
  4. Focus time and energy on getting your forms right, because “in order to deliver the right content in the middle of the funnel, you need the right information at the top of the funnel.”
  5. Ask and answer key strategic questions—How do you get content? How do you use content? How often do you refresh it?—before you start creating content and use those answers to direct all your content marketing efforts.
  6. Send nurture emails from a real person, which encourages response and connection.
  7. Use case studies and white papers to prove your expertise.
  8. Ask your leads why they didn’t convert after a free trail, which will help you understand what kind of conversations you can and should have with those leads moving forward.If a lead is concerned about price, for example, at DocuSign, we follow up and have a value conversation. If a lead is unable to find a feature they want, we point them in the direction of the appropriate feature or solution.

This is, of course, just the tip of DocuSign’s strategic iceberg.