Holly to introduce Jaclyn
Jaclyn’s Mission statement: I am passionate about one main thing: customer success. I support organizations with marketing automation roadmap development and execution from a strategic, advisory, and technical configuration standpoint.
Jaclyn Slide
So why am I here today?
TapInfluence has graciously invited me to share my experiences as a Principal Consultant working with numerous Oracle Marketing Cloud customers on their Content Strategy journey. Today I would like to focus on a few key elements: 1. What exactly is content marketing? 2. Key elements needed to develop a content marketing strategy 3. Perhaps a little inspiration to get your organization on the path to creating a new content marketing strategy or re-vamping an existing strategy.
Specifically, the groundwork that needs to take place to ensure content is created with a PURPOSE and not created for the sake of just having another piece of content in your content library.
Jaclyn Slide
So what is Content Marketing?
“Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.” – Content Marketing Institute
Gain Insights from “Digital Body Language”
Having a defined content marketing strategy ensures that your clients and prospects will get the information they need to make informed buying decisions. And content marketing works hand in hand with marketing automation systems, because as your prospects engage with your digital content, you’ll gain insight from their digital body language. Using this knowledge, you can communicate with your entire audience (via email or on the web) in ways that are aligned with their interests and business needs.
Oracle Marketing Cloud http://www.eloqua.com/resources/best-practices/content-marketing.html
Holly Slide
Jaclyn Slide
Content Marketing Dysfunctions/Mistakes
Having absolutely no idea who your target audience is or i.e buyer persona
Providing content that is of no relevance to your current & future customers
Your content marketing is obsessed with talking about your product or service versus how the product or service is going to make someone's life or business better/more successful. *Thing to think about – are you creating more & more content for the sake of “having” content in your library & not addressing or solving problems for your target audience.
Leveraging the same messaging & same channels to distribute your content
Stray away from strategy (how can we meet our goals?) to a tactic approach (What do we know how to do?)
5. Disregard nurturing your customers & building a relationship throughout the buyers journey
Jaclyn Slide
Content Marketing Dysfunctions/Mistakes
Having absolutely no idea who your target audience is or i.e buyer persona
Providing content that is of no relevance to your current & future customers
Your content marketing is obsessed with talking about your product or service versus how the product or service is going to make someone's life or business better/more successful. *Thing to think about – are you creating more & more content for the sake of “having” content in your library & not addressing or solving problems for your target audience.
Leveraging the same messaging & same channels to distribute your content
Stray away from strategy (how can we meet our goals?) to a tactic approach (What do we know how to do?)
5. Disregard nurturing your customers & building a relationship throughout the buyers journey
Jaclyn Slide
Content Marketing Dysfunctions/Mistakes
Having absolutely no idea who your target audience is or i.e buyer persona
Providing content that is of no relevance to your current & future customers
Your content marketing is obsessed with talking about your product or service versus how the product or service is going to make someone's life or business better/more successful. *Thing to think about – are you creating more & more content for the sake of “having” content in your library & not addressing or solving problems for your target audience.
Leveraging the same messaging & same channels to distribute your content
Stray away from strategy (how can we meet our goals?) to a tactic approach (What do we know how to do?)
5. Disregard nurturing your customers & building a relationship throughout the buyers journey
Jaclyn Slide
Content Marketing Dysfunctions/Mistakes
Having absolutely no idea who your target audience is or i.e buyer persona
Providing content that is of no relevance to your current & future customers
Your content marketing is obsessed with talking about your product or service versus how the product or service is going to make someone's life or business better/more successful. *Thing to think about – are you creating more & more content for the sake of “having” content in your library & not addressing or solving problems for your target audience.
Leveraging the same messaging & same channels to distribute your content
Stray away from strategy (how can we meet our goals?) to a tactic approach (What do we know how to do?)
5. Disregard nurturing your customers & building a relationship throughout the buyers journey
Jaclyn Slide
Content Marketing Dysfunctions/Mistakes
Having absolutely no idea who your target audience is or i.e buyer persona
Providing content that is of no relevance to your current & future customers
Your content marketing is obsessed with talking about your product or service versus how the product or service is going to make someone's life or business better/more successful. *Thing to think about – are you creating more & more content for the sake of “having” content in your library & not addressing or solving problems for your target audience.
Leveraging the same messaging & same channels to distribute your content
Stray away from strategy (how can we meet our goals?) to a tactic approach (What do we know how to do?)
5. Disregard nurturing your customers & building a relationship throughout the buyers journey
Jaclyn Slide
Four Key elements that will help you develop a content marketing strategy include:
Develop your personas
Define your buyers journey
Audit your content library
Map content to your customer journey & persona
Metrics
Jaclyn Slide
You need to deliver the RIGHT content to the RIGHT people.
If your target audience is:
the VP of Sales at an enterprise company
you don’t want to create content for a sales coordinator at a startup
Developing personas helps you understand the type of content needed
What are the pain points you should touch on & help your persona with – SOLVES a problem
What might be a key driver in your messaging that resonates with your personas – PROVIDES relevance
Where do your personas seek validation? – Provides insight into the CHANNEL that you may use
Jaclyn Slide
Since buyers are doing much of their education on your product or service alone it is imperative that you have content that is relevant or speaks to them throughout their journey.
What does this mean?
Well it means: Answering the buyers questions at each and every stage of their journey
Jaclyn Slide
Key Questions:
What is your persona’s motivation at each stage?
What questions is your personas asking or seeking answers at each stage?
Key messages & value propositions
Most Likely to Respond to (List Offers) These are call-to-actions you will infuse into your content
Jaclyn Slide
Audit your existing content library to understand what pieces support the different buying cycles that your audience needs. This also sheds light on the buying cycles you are lacking content for. Content must be organized around topics that are most relevant to your audience.
What does relevant content mean?
In short it means understanding and answering questions about your product or service that current or prospective customers have throughout their buyers journey.
Jaclyn Slide
Timing—Potential customers want different kinds of content at different stages of their research and purchase process. Similarly, newly engaged clients need different content than those who are deeply familiar with your organization.
MAP your Personas against their Buyers Journey and what content will propel them to the next stage in their journey.
TIP When mapping your content to your buyers journey, think of 3 main stages
EARLY Stage (Interest & Learn)
Industry trends, benchmarks, analyst coverage, 101 education, how-to documents
MID Stage (Evaluate & Justify)
What is the product or service and how exactly does it work?
Solution or product comparisons
Pitfall analysis
Readiness assessments
Choosing a vendor
LATE Stage (Justify & Purchase)
Demos
Case Studies
How to buy?
“What is it like to own X product?” or “what is it like to work with us?”
Source: Content Marketing That fuels growth, Ebook, Captorra
Jaclyn to talk about B2B content
Holly to talk about B2C content
Jaclyn Slide and Holly
*Website Traffic/Reach:
This metric measures the total of a company’s website visits, email database, social media following, blog subscribers, and anyone else touching your content or marketing messages.
Key: Measures the top of the sales & marketing funnel
*Leads Generated/Prospects Acquired
Key: A lead who can be contacted can be moved through the buying cycle
Click thrus
Key: Success of call-to-actions, demonstrates the quality of content
*Lead to Marketing-Qualified Lead (MQL) Ratio
Key: Effectively measures the movement of a prospect to a marketing qualified lead and potentially a customer (B2B)
Conversion Rate
Key: Metric that showcases path to purchase (B2C), goal is to achieve the highest possible conversion rate
Average Deal/Purchase Size
Key: Understanding purchase size by segment can help you tailor your content creation to attract more ideal customers
Revenue
Measure at the end of your sales cycle but also throughout the month. C-level executives will thank you!
Holly Slide
Jaclyn Slide
Jaclyn Slide
Key Takeaways
- Allows users to publish content in a channel that they frequent
- The Pulse provides users with content that is relevant & accessibility is right at the users fingertips. Allowing users to easily access content that is relevant to them through the right channel is a match made in heaven that LinkedIn has perfected.
Jaclyn Slide
Key Takeaways
- Farmers has perfected the concept of answering the questions that their customer’s have & how Farmers can help. VERSUS talking about Farmer’s products & Services. As we talked about earlier content should answer questions & solve problems at each stage of our buyers journey.
Jaclyn Slide
Key Takeaway
Content is easy to navigate from Accounting, Corporate Governance, Finance to Marketing the articles are in-depth yet sucinct. My thought is that we should never stop learning and to challenge ourselves. Therefore it’s a joy to see an educational institute excel with content marketing and making it available for others to access the thoughts & ideas of some of the best and brightest.
