The Right Content for The Best Results
According to VentureBeat, content marketing is up 300% but remarkably, only a fraction of the vast amount of content businesses have in play (5%) actually drives results. What’s more, it’s almost impossible to know which specific content is the most effective and has the largest positive impact at various stages of the customer’s buying journey.
Merging B2C & B2B Customer Experience
Storytelling and experience customization are now commonplace in B2C interactions, and customers have come to expect a high level of consistency and sophistication in their interactions with their favorite brands. Increasingly, B2B customers are expecting the same types of experiences and customers have come to expect a high level of consistency and sophistication in their interactions with their favorite brands. In many ways B2C and B2B is merging into B2P (Business to People). One important way B2B marketers can meet this expectation is by enabling self-service and repurposing successful, existing content to create personalized content experiences that accelerate the path to purchase.
It’s vitally important to understand, not only where and when buyers are interacting with your content, but also the quality of those interactions. With this knowledge, you can optimize your campaigns and streamline customers’ content journeys, making it easier for your customers to buy.
Connecting the Dots
Let’s start by setting strategic goals and tracking the right metrics. There are 7 critical metrics for effective content marketing to understand customer intent and automate personalized content experiences:
Traffic Quality - Campaigns fall flat if they don’t reach the right audiences. You need traffic quality data that shows you whether your campaigns are hitting the correct targets. It should reveal the crucial information about visitor’s content interaction behavior that identifies your ideal customers.
Engaged Intent, Engagement - Drill down into how your content is performing at the individual audience member level. Filter your audience by domain, location and/or interest to better understand how anonymous and known visitors are engaging with your content. Separate the casual browsers from the serious buyers based on how much time they’re spending with your content after they click, and how quickly they consume it. Determine whether your content is serving an informational goal or a transactional goal. Savvy marketers know it’s what happens after the click or download that matters most.
Purchase Pathways, Identify and Fast-track Your Best Prospects - Put your prospects on the right pathway. Understanding the optimal pathway through your content takes the guesswork out of delivering the right sequence of content to engage and convert your audiences. Filter your audience by domain, location and/or interest to better understand how anonymous and known visitors are engaging with your content. You can easily measure the intensity of engagement on an individual and domain-wide basis. Serious buyers consume content in bursts. Accelerate the ones bingeing content through the funnel faster.
Lead Quality, Lead Scoring With Engagement Data - The first step in improving lead scoring is to define what “quality” means for your marketing team. Most lead scoring assumes that a click alone qualifies as engagement, but without knowing whether someone actually read your content, you can’t score leads accurately. Track not only metrics, such as how much time a prospect spends with content, and also what type of content they are interacting with, and how much of it. A simple shift in focus to what matters most to your marketing team can greatly improve marketing outcomes.
Content Performance - Top performing marketers know that less is truly more. Instead of overwhelming prospects with a barrage of information they don’t need or want, focus on providing the relevant information that will make it easier for them to buy. In this way, you can reduce a tsunami of content to a gentle, refreshing smart stream.
Sales, Sales Readiness - To help your sales team get ready to close the deal, provide a big picture view of how prospects have interacted with your content. For example, information about how long they spent with specific content pieces and what types of content they engage with the most can be easily captured in your lead scoring model and then used in your CRM system. A definitive indicator of sales readiness will enable you to improve lead scoring and reduce the number of “false positives” sent to sales.
Purchase Ease, ROI Connect The Dots Between Content and Results - HubSpot recently reported that nearly half of marketers surveyed (43%) said that proving results is a top challenge. On the other hand, Hubspot also reported that marketers who calculate the ROI of their campaigns are 1.6 times more likely to receive more budget. Tracking results in order to showcase effectiveness is essential to gaining executive buy-in. It only makes sense to track ROI, especially when you can get a bird’s-eye view of your content performance, including who is engaging and who is ready to move on to sales.
Once you have focused on these key points and tracked the right metrics, you’ll be in a much better position to execute at the next level.
If you want to take your content campaigns to the next level, speak with one of our Client Success Advisors
Empower your business to move beyond the short-term focus of closing the single transaction to a more holistic approach that wins lifetime customers.
