Webinar Brief

METRICS KEY TO CONTENT SUCCESS AT ALL STAGES OF THE BUYING CYCLEHOW MARKETERS ARE AVOIDING “CONTENT

SHOCK” AND STAYING ABOVE THE NOISE

SMcurata

Metrics Key To Content Success At All Stages Of The Buying Cycle ▯ 2

Modern marketers are looking for ways to stand out in today’s noisy content marketing space. They need metrics that help gauge the overall effectiveness of their content, as well as define the right marketing mix for their audience.

In a recent webinar, titled: The Future Of Content Marketing, Maggie Jones, Content Marketing Specialist at Marketo, and Michael Gerard, CMO at Curata, addressed the current state of content marketing and offered some predictions on strategies that will help marketers create a flow of relevant content and optimize their content investments.

A More Measured, And Measurable, ApproachAs more brands increase their content calendars, there is a concern about quality content being buried — and disrupting B2B marketers’ campaign effectiveness. Both Jones and Gerard referred to this current glut of content as “content shock.”

Gerard: Content consumers simply lack the ability to consume all the content that they desire or

encounter. So they’re overwhelmed, not just from our own content, but from the thousands of pieces of other companies’ content as well. So the move to marketers becoming the next gen of publishers is going to continue, but we really need to think about how to differentiate what we provide to our audience and how to break through this noise.

To help track how their content is performing in the crowded marketplace, Jones pointed out that content marketers need to measure their content and ensure that it is as effective as possible.

Several important early-stage metrics she suggested include:

• Consumption metrics: such as total visits, number of downloads and time spent on your site;

• Search rank metrics: like the lead’s overall authority and mapping keywords to buying intent;

• Vanity metrics: such as Facebook “Likes,” Retweets and blog comments; and most importantly, in the mid-stage of the buying cycle,

We really need to think about how to differentiate what we provide to our audience and how to break through this noise.

-Michael Gerard, Curata

Metrics Key To Content Success At All Stages Of The Buying Cycle ▯ 3

You need to create content marketing processes that are incredibly agile, incredibly flexible, and above all, incredibly responsive.

-Maggie Jones, Marketo

• Attribution metrics: such as the number of touches a lead has had with your company, help identifies the most valuable, purchase-ready buyers.

Whether you are looking at metrics in the early, mid or late stage of your sales funnel, lead gen metrics should be measured at every single stage. One of the best ways to prove success is to show exactly how many leads moved from one stage of the sales funnel to the next — and ultimately converted to a sale.

With these metrics, Jones said marketers can follow the buyer’s progression through the buying cycle and see what pieces are making the buyer take action. She also added that having an overall understanding of your past content and knowing what was effective will keep your content marketing strategy up-to-date.

Jones: Really diving deep into all of those metrics — and actually knowing what’s going on with your content — is how you’re going to optimize it. No matter what happens

to the future of content marketing, knowing these metrics is going to keep you up to speed.

While metrics are important, you need to develop a strategy for adjusting your content based on feedback from your target audience. To stay agile and responsive, marketers need to work with their sales team to understand what’s working and closing deals — along with what’s not working as well as expected.

Jones: So how do you get credit for telling your story, regardless of how technology changes, or marketing changes or how buying changes? You need to create content marketing processes that are incredibly agile, incredibly flexible, and above all, incredibly responsive. I’m singling out responsive here because the best way to figure out what’s going to work tomorrow is to figure out what is working for you today — and to figure it out quickly and accurately enough to actually impact your content marketing strategy.

Metrics Key To Content Success At All Stages Of The Buying Cycle ▯ 4

You have to align content with buyers and think about personas — not just individual personas either.

-Michael Gerard, Curata

Buying Stages, Personas Boost Content PlacementAnother key goal for content marketers is to make sure that the right content is seen by the right audience in the right place, at the right time. Creating content for certain stages of the buying cycle is a great way to tailor content to meet a consumer’s expectations and also lead them along down the funnel.

Jones: To measure and respond to our content’s performance, we map all of our content to buying stages — early, mid and late stage content. Early stage content is for prospects who might not even know what our product is. Mid-stage content is for people who have shown some interest, and late-stage content is very product-centric. Dividing up our content this way is a critical part of our content measurement strategy because it really forces us to define what each piece of content is supposed to do. This also makes it possible to actually measure that piece of content’s success.

When it comes to a B2B buyer, there is typically a team involved in a buying decision. While individual

buying personas are important, making sure you understand the buying persona of a B2B buyer is also crucial to creating the most effective content.

Gerard: You have to align content with buyers and think about personas — not just individual personas either. Team personas are interesting because it’s basically thinking more about the buying team, especially in a B2B situation, so make sure you’re thinking about that as part of your content strategy. Then, getting back to rising above the noise, how do we drive innovation in content development? How do we make sure that we have a good process for inspiration and ideation?

The Content Marketing Mix: Curation Is KeyWhile it would be great to produce all of the company’s content in-house, it is not the best option for today’s content marketers. If your organization is new to content marketing, the voice of your content might not be strong enough to be heard in such a loud industry.

Metrics Key To Content Success At All Stages Of The Buying Cycle ▯ 5

Marketers need to tap into the power of curation, and go out to find the great content out there that’s applicable to their audience.

-Michael Gerard, Curata

Gerard: I like to say that we need to stop egocentric marketing. Even if we’re talking about it in our customer’s voice and we’re not talking about our own organization, we need to bring in an external voice — and external perspectives— even if they’re different from our own perspectives. We need to bring that into our content marketing.

Other content strategies, such as curation and syndication, can help strengthen the relationship between your company and other thought leaders of the industry, while also making your content more valuable for buyers.

Gerard: Marketers need to tap into the power of curation, and go out to find the great content out there

that’s applicable to their audience. Sometimes it’s national information on energy. Sometimes it’s specific to a certain location of one of their markets. They find that they’ve organized it, and added their own commentary around a specific piece of content. They provide direct attribution and they publish it right within their blog alongside of their created content. The result was that they significantly increased their traffic, have a much higher quantity of leads going into their funnel, gained trust in the eyes oftheir audience and increased their thought leadership.

Metrics Key To Content Success At All Stages Of The Buying Cycle ▯ 6

About Demand Gen ReportDemandGen Report is a targeted e-media publication spotlighting the strategies

and solutions that help companies better align their sales and marketing

organizations, and, ultimately, drive growth. A key component of our coverage

focuses on the sales and marketing automation tools that enable companies to

better measure and manage their multi-channel demand generation efforts. For

more information, visit www.demandgenreport.com.

About MarketoMarketo is a provider of marketing automation software that helps marketing

professionals keep up with an ever-changing ecosystem where real-time

engagement across various digital channels is a necessity. By offering a

complete solution that is powerful enough to solve real-world challenges and

easy to adopt and use, Marketo aims to stop any disruption for marketing and

sales professionals from common challenges that come with digital channel

engagement. Marketo also combines completely integrated tools for multi-channel

campaign management, social marketing automation, event management, inbound

marketing, and customer data management with powerful analytic tools to make

sense of it all. For more information, visit www.marketo.com.

About CurataCurata is a provider of business grade, content curation software that enables

marketers to curate the most relevant and highest quality content as part

of a successful content marketing strategy. Best-in-class marketers across

a wide range of industries rely on Curata to quickly find, curate, share and

analyze content on specific issues or topics in order to establish thought

leadership, own industry conversations and drive qualif ied web traffic. For more

information, visit www.curata.com.

411 State Route 17 South Suite 410Hasbrouck Heights, NJ 07604

P: 201.257.8528 F: 201.426.0181

SMcurata