C2C14 Demand Generation 2.0 Track: Measuring Content Effectiveness To Drive Demand

Kucera defined the “three Fs” of content success as:

• Fine – Beautiful, smart, highly creative content will find an audience;
• Fit – Content must have utility to be effective. “Beautiful content that doesn’t move the buyer to action (eventually) isn’t going to be seen as beautiful for long,” he noted; and
• Findable – Being there is 90% of success.

Best-in-class companies are much more likely to align content with a variety of personas, depending on their industry and their stage in the sales funnel, Kucera noted. Best-in-class companies leverage their sales teams to do nurturing where buyers are learning, essentially creating “mini-marketers.”

Content attribution is key, Kucera said, but only 42% of marketers can track attribution to a specific piece of content. “It takes eight to 10 marketing touches to close a deal. Last-touch attribution doesn’t tell you what content is effective.”

For many marketers, the question of content alignment often centers on asset types and whether a piece of marketing content is registration-gated or not, Kucera noted. This is a helpful place to start, but probably too often based on marketers’ perceptions of value, rather than those of their buyers.

Kucera explained that a better way to think about this alignment is to think in terms of information value, and the implicit “transaction” that occurs at the gate stages of the buyer’s decision journey.

70% Of B2B Content Isn’t Used To Close Deals

Two thirds of buyer interactions happen online. While content fuels these conversations, 70% of B2B content is never used to close deals.

Matt Papertsian, Research Director at SiriusDecisions, gave the C2C14 audience six strategies to increase content leverage, effectively scale content strategy and to track and measure its effectiveness:

1. Target and offer alignment;
2. Determine when to engage;
3. Discover what buyers are seeking;
4. Align conversations with buyer needs;
5. Scale the content process; and
6. Track and measure effectiveness.

“Buyer expectations for content, messaging and offers aligned to their specific needs have never been greater and thereby require a more integrated approach,” Papertsian noted.

Some other tips from Papertsian include:

• Use modular, smaller assets to test with your audience and better leverage content;
• Most companies are sitting on a wealth of data do guide the content process yet rarely fully leverage it to extract buyer intelligence to drive alignment; and
• Do a “deal forensics” to see what content, offered at what stages, helped close deals.

Defining A Content Marketing Measurement Framework

Jim Lenskold, President of The Lenskold Group, outlined some of the challenges of measuring content marketing:

• Content is still measured as lead generation;
• All content is measured on same outcomes;
• Single attribution measures miss critical multi-contact benefits;
• Measures are more tactical than strategic; and
• It is challenging to measure and optimize tactics, messaging, order and frequency.

Echoing Papertsian, Lenskold noted that you have to do a post-deal analysis of how effective your content was at driving demand. He asked: “When comparing wins and losses, do you see different types of content being used?”

Defining Lead Nurturing 2.0

Cari Baldwin, Partner and Founder of BlueBird Strategies, and Christine Elliott, Associate Director at Crowe Horwath, both outlined their vision for the role of content in the next generation of lead nurturing.  

Baldwin gave her audience at #C2C14 a crash course on how to enhance their lead nurturing capabilities — primarily by highlighting how traditional lead nurture campaigns (or Lead Nurturing 1.0) is an outdated version that does not meet the customer’s expectations or the company’s needs.

Having a good mix of inbound and outbound programs — while also staying customer-centric — keeps companies’ scoring capabilities accurate and informative, according to Baldwin. This style of nurturing (or Lead Nurturing 2.0), can make a large impact on businesses.

Baldwin added that “lead scoring helps you understand if the content is working, how your audience engages you, and gives you a detailed idea of the audience once you give them to the sales team.”

Baldwin also pointed to data as critical to the lead nurturing process. Being the “foundation” of a company’s lead nurturing abilities, marketers need to make sure that the data is clean for more accurate lead scoring and segmenting content to the right buyers at the right time of the buying cycle.

In the end, “moving away from the drip” can be achieved by aligning data, personas and content so they all effectively boost nurturing success, Baldwin explained. Chipping away at each “piece of the lead nurture pie” will eventually bring more life to the marketing team.

Elliott of Crowe Horwath covered how lead nurturing can be leveraged in the content creation/strategy process.

Her top Lead Nurturing 2.0 considerations:

• Review Phase 1 results with a critical eye;
• Make sure program/project management is as efficient as possible;
• Prioritize market issues and develop a story-based approach to create leverage;
• Understand what content is working and repurpose/atomize shamelessly;
• Guess and test, guess and test, guess and test;
• Become an evangelist for content strategy;
• Use the story-based approach to integrate across all marketing channels, making each effort exponentially more powerful;
• Constantly refine lead scoring/measurement strategy;

After uncovering a gap in the company’s content strategy, Elliott used MLR research on shifting buyer behavior to help convince the company that lead nurturing would help Crowe Horwath fill the content gap.

With lead nurture programs, marketers need to map existing content to buyer types and stages of the buying cycle, according to Elliott. Creating structure to the lead nurture program, while also forming a strategy when in the content ideation phase and having a project management plan, can help businesses easily execute a lead nurture program.

“Especially in this economy, your content has to be more efficient,” according to Elliott. Regular audits of lead nurturing programs — and current content — can help marketers understand what they have to work with and what next steps can be taken in order to boost efficiency.

It is also important to offer potential buyers the flexibility to look at the content they wished to view. Giving buyers the option to pick and choose what content they wish to view gives companies a deeper view of the potential buyer’s intentions.

Pushing The Mental “Buy” Button

David Lewis, Founder and CEO of DemandGen International, outlined the six different “stimuli” that leave a lasting impression on the audience. This includes:

• Self-centricity;
• Contrast;
• Tangibility;
• Focusing on the beginning and end;
• Visuals; and
• Emotion.

Emotion in particular is a part of every single human being’s mindset, so leveraging it in content can effectively boost engagement, and push the audience further down the pipeline.

“One of the buttons we need to push in the audience’s brain is the emotional button,” Lewis said. “Emotion plays a major role in the customer and thinking about that during content creation will help it succeed.”

In the end, Lewis noted that there are three things businesses need to know about their customers: Their pains, their gains and their claims. According to Lewis, addressing these areas during content creation process will not only boost engagement, but give your company insight into your prospective buyer in order to nurture them efficiently and effectively.