12. Get agile. Analyze your
data, but more
importantly, do something
with it.
13. Marilyn Cox is a Modern Marketer and Director of
Marketing Communications, at Cincom Systems Inc. She
creates strategic and tactical marketing communications
that help achieve corporate objectives. Follow her
@marilynecox
About Me
Since 1968, Cincom System, Inc. has helped thousands of clients
worldwide by solving complex business problems with its software and
services, with an average return on investment of more than $30 to $1.
About Cincom
Editor's Notes
The demand for content is an ever increasing trend. Content strategy is essential to marketing success, but it can also be very overwhelming. What I find is that content strategy is overwhelming because organizations don’t know where to start. What you’ll learn is that the information needed for a strong strategy can be found within your marketing data and engagement.
The first thing we did at Cincom was to audit our content. We identified where our content resided and we began tracking the performance. We identified web pages, social posts, offers, etc. We segmented our content into 8 month, 8 week, and 8 day classifications s we understood the relevance duration of each piece. We thenscored each piece based on the activity we tracked in Eloqua.
By mapping and measuring our existing content it was very easy to see where we needed to focus our content development efforts. For example, when evaluating our sales funnel we discovered that 24% of sales qualified opportunities were lost due to emotional disengagement. We never heard from them again. We now understand that our new content creation needs to address this phase of the buy-cycle.We can also analyze which roles within an organization we have the most success with. If 80% of successful approaches occur at the Sales VP level, we better ensure that we have enough early stage content to appeal to that persona.
But developing this new content can also be a tedious task. We uncovered a fantastic gem using Eloqua when we began to pay close attention to trends in engagement. The data in Eloqua allowed me to see unintentional messages and content opportunities I hadn’t been aware of. For example, for one of our product teams, when the words “customer” and “customer communications” were used the engagement in our inbound and outbound communications spiked. However, this “customer” focused content was buried in secondary and tertiary web copy and occasionally eluded to in social posts. But that’s where we sae engagement. Our lower level web pages and social posts were outperforming our campaign communications and offers. With this this data in hand we could now very quickly make adjustments to existing content and develop new content around our customers’ customers. We’ve seen almost a 50% increase in our campaign engagement having made this change.
So, what good is good content if it only resides in the hands of marketers? Because we follow the Challenger Sale methodology, our sales teams understand the need to be well educated in their industries. Using Eloqua sales tools like Engage and Prospect Profiler our sales organization can now leverage relevant content at the right point in the buy-cycle. By mapping our content to the buy-cycle, and creating templates that align with the sales process and sales stages, sales can deliver, measure, monitor, and leverage the effectiveness of the content.
Lastly, we committed to agile marketing. We were always good about reviewing content performance, but the review would typically occur after a campaign. At that point recommendations for improvement would have to wait until the next campaign. Cincom has committed to analyzing our data regularly. We do more than watch trends, although that’s important. We look for opportunity within our data. What adjustments can be made in real-time? What content potential should we seize? This process has made us a much more effective marketing organization.
You need to get a clear picture and lay everything out. Make the data work for you.Take the guesswork out of your marketing. Overcome the content conundrum with marketing analytics
Get everything in line.Sort and organize with data
Look and Listen to People - and the Data.Crowdsource for new content opportunities
Deliver the right information at the right time.Don't overwhelm.Too much ... is too much.
Be ready to change.Evaluate. And Act.Keep Moving.Keep Ahead of the Wave.