A client recently asked our teams to provide insights into the innovations we were seeing in content marketing, lead generation, and data marketing training. It was a broad request that we were quickly able to narrow down into four specific, closely related areas of interest.
Before we get to the bottom of it
let’s take a quick look at the source. You may not know this, but TechTarget has long been a leading provider of high-value lead generation services for IT companies. While our services have expanded, we still have a wealth of expertise in this critically important marketing function.
Our Content Marketing teams are self employed database responsible for managing over 5,000 lead generation campaigns annually, syndicating over 12,000 documents, and writing and analyzing over 100,000 emails promoting them.
All members of this group are specialized in particular technologies
So for each segment of the IT market, they are sales techniques that will ensure you a 33% commercial success rate experts on what works in lead generation and content marketing, what doesn’t, what’s emerging, what’s over-covered and how competitive the market really is.
They always know which advertisers are in the market, what types of assets are syndicated, what topics are covered, and what is (and is not) covered by promotions.
With this context in perspective
here are the trends we are seeing at the start of 2020:
1. Content marketers use intent data to improve results
According to many marketers, two areas need improvement:
– The effectiveness of nurturing campaigns in building the pipeline
– The effectiveness of using intent data to build the pipeline
The good news is that we see savvy customers combining these challenges into a winning strategy.
How? Consider these two points carefully:
First, in traditional lead generation campaigns, if the target contact doesn’t take action, you’re not capturing any of their information. This is a cell phone number very real reality. Therefore, the job of every promotion is to drive interaction. So your materials, offers, and lead generation creativity all depend on it. The content and construction of these promotions become critical.
When it comes to intent data
if you don’t have a content marketing good handle on qualitatively sourcing your contacts, you may not know what to do with them. The risk is that they won’t integrate seamlessly with your lead scoring and sales and marketing tracking engine. Becoming unproductive.
So, our clients focus on activity signals that incorporate intent data to build their pipeline. This opens up two opportunities for marketers: to start the process of educating and engaging these active contacts and accounts; and to test and try out new promotion ideas based on qualitative intent data.
2. Less “classic” offers can support nurturing
Over the past year, we’ve reviewed copy and offers from hundreds of nurturing campaigns to help our clients with their demand-gen programs. And we’ve noticed some specific trends.
The most interesting one seems to us to be the use of creative approaches, which are not limited to “classic” content offers. These are mainly offers for product demonstrations, meetings/appointments, webinars, podcasts and face-to-face events.
As a specialist we tend to advise against this approach
In pure lead generation. We rely on years of data that show that this type of content to promote simply does not work in lead generation.
But the goal here is different. In a nurturing approach, you don’t craft promotions and offers just to get a single response, but rather you educate prospects through a sustained campaign because you have their contact information and data that already establishes their recent interest. So you’re not hung up on the response rate KPI. You can even trade it for arguably more meaningful engagements and alternative nurturing methods.
Late-stage content can also work earlier in the buying cycle
As a general rule, later, content dedicated to contacts as that dedicated to the awareness or consideration phases. The reason is simple: if you are trying to generate a large quantity of leads, your chances are much better if your information addresses the broadest group with more general information. However, you should not abandon the idea of addressing more specific, technical and complex content, including in its first two conquest phases. For our part, we even encourage the use of content specific to the decision, which for example emphasizes comparative data.