Successful marketing today isn’t just about creating useful content that informs buyers, it must be even easier to find in all the right places and deliver both utility and experience.
As an agency that primarily creates content to help B2B companies create awareness, improve engagement and drive leads/sales, our customer empathy model focuses on optimizing the relationship that prospective customers have with information during the buyer journey.
Additionally, here are three high level considerations including industry research and benchmarking, private brand data and competitive data to help optimize your content marketing performance.
Industry Data for Benchmarking – One of the starting points for the use of data for improved customer engagement with content is to benchmark.
Private Data for Opportunities and Performance Optimization – While industry level research and reports represent the macro view, analytics from a brand’s own website, marketing programs, search and social media could be considered the micro view.
A few examples of brand data sources: Google Analytics and other web analytics data are probably the most frequently used sources of insight for content performance optimization.
Google search console data where you can find numerous opportunities to optimize content for better search performance.
Competitive Research Data – An important opportunity to use data for more informed and optimized content marketing is competitive research.
Looking at other companies in your industry can provide a useful point of comparison when your company is implementing something new or if you’re a challenger brand working to move into a leadership position in the marketplace.
For social media – Monitoring when competitors get spiked social activity to learn from – also to see what not to do.
In 1984, a person saw an average 2,000 ads/day. By 2014, they saw around 5,000. (Media Dynamics)
There’s some irony to the fact that it’s due to data and information overload that consumers face on a daily basis (63gb of media per day in the US according to USC/ICT) that data has become even more important for marketers.
Successful marketing today isn’t just about creating useful content that informs buyers, it must be even easier to find in all the right places and deliver both utility and experience. Without data insights about customer preferences, it’s very difficult to deliver on that.
“Understanding how to use data to drive to the right client conversations has become the most powerful weapon in a marketer’s toolkit. Using different types of data – intent data, behavioral data, purchase data – is key to driving engagement and building a demand funnel. We use data for early stage engagement to inform our content marketing editorial calendar and campaign strategy and also to build buyer journeys by successfully converting inquires into sales conversations.” Tami Cannizzaro – Vice President, Head of North America Marketing and Global Digital Demand Centers, CA Technologies
As for tailoring data, there are a number of factors that guide how much or little, how sophisticated or basic an approach needs to be. As an agency that primarily creates content to help B2B companies create awareness, improve engagement and drive leads/sales, our customer empathy model focuses on optimizing the relationship that prospective customers have with information during the buyer journey.
In particular, there are three key opportunities for data informed customer empathy and you can go as light or as deep as necessary. Those opportunities for optimization include:
Discovery – where do buyers discover resource and solution information – search, social, ads, publications, influeners and influences
Consumption – what are buyers preferences for content topics and types as well as devices. what experience do they expect?
Action – what are the intellectual and emotional triggers that will motivate them to take the next step in the journey
When brands have customer segments and even personas sorted out, you can get as specific and sophisticated as you like. If not, then it’s often more practical to phase in your approach and get deeper as you learn and complete your understanding of buyers as they discover, engage and take action with your content.
There are many ways to get started with data-informed content, including these 5 tips from Anne Leuman. Additionally, here are three high level considerations including industry research and benchmarking, private brand data and competitive data to help optimize your content marketing performance.
Industry Data for Benchmarking – One of the starting points for the use of data for improved customer engagement with content is to benchmark. Industry centric research can be useful to provide that kind of data to highlight trends and a baseline against which to guage campaign or marketing program performance. Here are a few examples:
Industry stats to recommend tactics. For example, to justify content marketing, a company might rely on industry research:
– Content marketing generates over three times as many leads as outbound marketing and costs 62% less.
– After reading recommendations on a blog, 61% of U.S. online consumers made a purchase.
Performance metrics can also be directional benchmarks, but be careful to treating them as universal truths – open rate, conversion rate, cost per lead
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