The brand gave Janice one marketing objective – use content to drive leads to the sales teams. The audience’s intent was informational. 2 reasons audiences want content When audiences consume content online, they have only two purposes: Informational intent – Audience members consume content as part of their research or their interests. It is content that convinces, not content that converts – yet. Understanding transactional intent Content with transactional intent works best when the audience has been convinced and is ready to convert. Content types for transactional intent include: Partner success stories Promoted events Product demonstrations Classic advertorial such as product brochures Product reviews and competitor comparisons When it comes to measuring the effectiveness of content with transactional intent, you could use lead-generation forms, event registrations, e-commerce buy-now objectives, etc. Converting a potential lead into a customer If the ratio is 89% informational intent to 10% transactional intent, how can you change the audience’s intent from informational to transactional? She can only do two things: Give Steve valuable informational-intent content that helps him build his business case for stakeholder buy-in Provide transactional-intent content to keep him convinced to buy her laptops until he gets the budget to buy The catch is that Janice doesn’t know what content is most relevant to Steve because she doesn’t know what he is thinking and doing. Are you building content around informational or transactional intent? Brands and marketing departments have not understood properly how their target audience uses digital nor have they aligned performance metrics to the normal engagement actions the audience completes online.
Janice leads digital at a well-known tech company in Silicon Valley. It sells hardware such as phones, laptops, and servers to largely premium B2C and B2B consumers.
The brand gave Janice one marketing objective – use content to drive leads to the sales teams.
She instructs her team to create a gated white paper. About 500 people completed the lead-gen form to receive the download.
The sales team hits the phone. Out of 500 leads, only four were genuine.
Those results should have been expected because most people who downloaded the content were never really leads. They didn’t want a call from the sales team. They wanted valuable content. They “bought” the content with their phone number.
The audience’s intent was informational. Unfortunately, the marketing team viewed the white paper’s purpose as transactional. The misalignment of intent led to disastrous results.
2 reasons audiences want content
When audiences consume content online, they have only two purposes:
- Informational intent – Audience members consume content as part of their research or their interests.
- Transactional intent – Audience members act with the purpose of completing a transaction.
This graphic suggests how the two types of intent work when placed within the sales funnel.
Understanding informational intent
Content that caters to audiences with informational intent is designed to help, educate, inform, teach, and entertain. Informational content works better when you create it through the lens of audience, not the brand. It is content that convinces, not content that converts – yet. You should not attach conversion expectations to its performance.
On LinkedIn, about 89% of our members use our platform as a research tool before they make a purchasing decision. I believe this is reflective of all social media platforms, which means about 89% of all content a marketer produces for digital should be aimed at satisfying the audience’s informational intent.
This content is what really drives the best customer experiences with your brand on social media and should be designed to assist audience members in increasing their understanding of a topic, your brand, or an industry.
Types of content that work best for informational intent include:
- Internally sourced industry research and reports
- Entertaining or emotionally driven content
- Paradigm-shifting content (makes the audience think differently about subject or topic)
- Thought leadership – opinions; mentorship; demonstrated expertise from brand, employee or influencer
- “Clickbait” – how to, listicles, trivia, trends
- Corporate communication (content establishes brand values and corporate social responsibility as well as PR and communications-related materials)
- Event coverage
The format for informational-intent content should depend on what you know about how your audience prefers to consume content and the distribution channel. It could be a blog post, a video, a webinar, a white paper, an infographic, or a display ad.
As mentioned, this type of content should not be expected to convert into leads. It is meant to help audience members become more informed so they make a more informed purchasing decision when they are ready to convert.
The business objectives to attach to informational-intent content should be focused higher on the funnel such as:
- Increasing brand awareness
- Owning a topic or dominating a conversation
- Establishing your brand as a thought leader
- Building a community of content subscribers
- Improving the brand’s sentiment within a community
The calls to action here include sign-ups, subscribes, video plays and completes, and any metrics that help you articulate a growth in engagement, followers, awareness, and sentiment.
Understanding transactional intent
Content with transactional intent works best when the audience has been convinced and is ready to convert. The content is more advertorial. It is all about how great you are and should showcase product and services at its core. It is content that reinforces that what you are selling is the solution the audience is looking for.
You want to do your best to encourage the audience to take a transactional-related action after consuming the content. All that said, it is important to understand that only about 10% of your addressable audience is at this low stage in the sales funnel. This follows the Pareto principle – a small segment of your audience drives most of your results.
Content types for transactional intent include:
- Partner success stories
- Promoted events
- Product demonstrations
- Classic advertorial such as product brochures
- Product reviews and competitor comparisons
When it comes to measuring the effectiveness of content with transactional intent, you could use lead-generation forms, event registrations, e-commerce buy-now objectives, etc. Use this content to calculate a return on investment (ROI) because it is directly tasked with creating customer opportunities.
Converting a potential lead into a customer
If the ratio is 89% informational intent to 10% transactional…
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