Conversion = Content + Context + Conversation
Content is customer experience
A study from the Content Marketing Institute found that 89% of organisations are committed to content marketing. However, only a third of respondents assessed their content marketing plan as 'Sophisticated' or 'Mature' and only a quarter described their results as very or extremely successful.
What does sophisticated, mature or—better still—successful look like? Content marketing is extremely important to many b2b organisations, but it’s not enough on its own.
We see content marketing, and in fact all marketing, as part of creating positively impactful customer experiences. The same principles of brand experience should apply to content marketing.
Content is often the first encounter a customer will have with a brand. Content must deliver a useful, meaningful and relevant brand experience. For content to lead to conversions, it must take account of context, and it must be part of a bigger conversation.
Content marketing in context
Sometimes the secret of great content marketing is timing. A major advantage of a marketing automation platform is having a content calendar. Blog posts and social content on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and other platforms can be scheduled in advance.
Having an automated content calendar is wonderfully liberating. Seeing planned content go out on time and on schedule without a mad rush back at the office makes a huge difference. Your marketing teams can spend more time thinking ahead when they don’t feel they’re rushing to catch up.
A well-planned content calendar takes account of your reader’s context. Your content schedule can be designed to reflect your buyer’s business and budget cycles. You can plan content to be released alongside major industry events and conferences, as well as moments in the cultural calendar such as Pride or Eid.
Paradoxically, a well-planned buffer of scheduled content enables spontaneity. When you know the marketing motor is already running, you’re free to add in content that’s more of-the-moment. You can respond to significant news or business events with your point of view on how these are relevant to your customers. The regular beat of scheduled content is enlivened with fresh and topical perspectives.
Reposting can be very helpful in getting your ideas in front of your audience. People’s timelines are a river of content, but busy people may only dip their toe in from time to time. Reposts don’t have to be pure repetition, they’re a chance to highlight another facet of your content.
The web is full of advice on when is the best time to schedule content. These publicly available statistics are a great place to start. However, everyone has that information available to them so as in all things, your own data may be more valuable. Keep an eye on your engagement data so that you can see when your audience seems most receptive to your content. Adjust your publishing schedule accordingly.
All your content together creates its own context. The more blog posts your website has the more inbound links and the more pages to be indexed by search engines you have which, in turn, improves your rankings and the increases the number of visitors you get. In fact, large quantities of posts can raise search engine presence by over 400%.
Content marketing as conversation
Context isn’t just about timing. Content is experience. To really engage with people in their situation, content has to be more personalised. Content must feel more like a conversation.
Our marketing automation platform allows dynamic content to adjust based on what you know about your customers, their past relationship with you and how they are interacting with you now.
Imagine you run a bike shop that sells mountain bikes, racing bikes, commuter bikes and electric bikes. You decide to run a promotion on accessories. With just one dynamic email and landing page prepared for the promotion, the text and imagery that each type of customer sees can be personalised to them based on their purchase history with you. What if the commuter bike customer has been spending time on your racing bike pages? Maybe they’re looking to buy another bike. In that case the platform can start to include racing bike content. Suddenly you are able to produce differentiated, personalised, relevant engagements at scale.
Some universities (such as Sheffield) allow students to customise their own prospectus. They can select the course content and lifestyle information that they think is most relevant to them and build their own so that it can be downloaded or printed and sent to them.
In the CMI research, content that educated prospects about their topics of interest outperformed more creative storytelling by approximately 30%. Your audience could build their own white papers featuring the topics that they most care about. It’s a more personalised experience for them. But interaction reveals intent. You can ‘listen’ to the selections made by your site visitors in order to better understand who they are and what matters to them. This insight feeds into your next communication or content creation. To the customer, they get to personalise and control the content they receive, but to your systems it should be as if they are completing a questionnaire.
From content to conversion
If content is experience, then content is part of your buyer journey and part of your customer relationships.
The most beneficial strategies use a mix of distribution channels to reach potential clients where they are, build brand awareness and industry authority and trust, and move them through to purchase. According to the CMI research, email outstripped other distribution methods as the most effective, followed by blog posts and then social media platforms.
The buyer journey might start with being interesting or attractive, but it has to move into being worth spending time with, sharing ideas, listening and responding, paying attention to interactions, providing more information to each other and ultimately making a commitment to purchase.
Different sorts of content, with different channels, and with different degrees of personalisation are required at every stage of the buyer journey. A rigorous content marketing strategy will invite people to form a relationship with your business, and provide a path for them to do so.
An idea for content can’t only be about getting your point of view out there. For each channel, each choice of format and for each stage in a buyer journey, the issue has to be how this content is relevant to your audience, and what role it plays in building a relationship.
To make content that converts, your capability has to go beyond content production. For many organisations, even content production is a big challenge. Marketing automation can help you to learn more about your prospects and customers and how they interact with you. It can liberate you from the administrative overhead of scheduling and management.
But marketers must use this insight and freed-up time wisely. Think about context to decide when and where. Think about conversation to decide who. Think about conversion in a buyer journey to decide why. It’s not about getting stuff out– it’s about moving things forward.
Let’s start our conversation. We’re interested to hear about your ambitions, and we’d love to show you how 1827 Marketing helps businesses strengthen their relationships with customers and prospects.
Schedule a demo to find out how 1827 Marketing’s blend of strategy, technology and creativity can help your business deliver personalised content that converts.
