“In terms of channels, I believe every new technology is a potential canvas for content. This is relevant for both new customers and customer retention. Is your content creating opportunities, leads, or deals? It will require integration with marketing automation systems to figure out what the content journey is, what content is needed for the path to lead someone to become a customer, and how we attribute that content. Even if you tell stories, you need to be able to measure how this content will affect your bottom line. “In terms of strategy, content marketing is going to go more towards measurement of performance. What does the future hold for content marketing? That exchange is what brand storytelling is all about.”īrands need to give something to the customer that is worth the exchange of their attention or their dollars. For you as a marketer is to answer those questions and be as useful and valuable to the customer as possible. Your content should answer questions they have in their day-to-day life or jobs. Content that is educational and help them solve problems. You need to give them content that is valuable to them and their professional or personal lives. Brands need to give something to the customer that is worth the exchange of their attention or their dollars. “What’s exciting about content marketing is the notion of a value exchange. It really depends on the timing and the customer journey in regards to what content you should be creating.” How is brand storytelling customer-centric? Only when a prospect is very far down the funnel should you start letting your product do the talking. If you’re selling B2B software, how do I educate prospects about the problem? How do I give them some thought leadership to think about the challenges? Once you’ve helped them identify the problem, then ask how you can help them think about solutions, and not necessarily your solution. If you’re United Airlines, ask how you can inspire someone to take a trip. We’ve all heard stats like 75 percent of the buyer journey is complete before a prospect even talks to sales, so when they’re not ready to buy, then the two schools of thought are at odds. Probably 96 percent of people who come to your website are not ready to buy. The problem is that most people aren’t ready to buy. If someone is ready to buy, then tell them about your features. You need to think about the customer journey and where they are in the funnel. This data helps you create KPIs that inform what you create.” Is brand storytelling at odds with letting your product speak for itself? Third party sources are often places you can gather relevant data too. You can capture this data in your marketing automation system or in Google analytics. We’re actively moving towards the performance era, where we really need to start setting up KPIs to help us measure whether we’re really driving leads. We’ve seen a shift to what I call the engagement era, where we’re measuring attention and engaged time on different pages. “We’re moving away from the pageview era, where we would only measure metrics such as unique visitors, shares, and so on. Once you have your own audience, you can retarget them. You can then start forming hypotheses, such as people who read X then also read Y. Begin asking what the content journey is for your audience and where they’re headed. Get your audience to subscribe and start giving you information. Publish content to your own property so you can start driving an audience to it. However, you need to use data to make content decisions. Using your gut isn’t always a bad thing when you know your audience, as there’s a very human element to telling stories. Creativity has a big role in creating quality content. “I don’t want to discount the art aspect of marketing here. The goal is to create content that works.” How can we use data to drive business results with content? We need to align ourselves with business results so we can show that content drives opportunities, leads, and sales. Of course you need to tell stories that show how your brand is different and stories that are valuable for your audience, but people often forget the second half of the sentence: drive business results. For me, it all boils down to marketers telling exceptional stories that drive business results. “Brand storytelling has become a buzzword, as has content marketing. What the future holds for content marketingīelow are some of the highlights from our conversation.* What is brand storytelling?.How brand storytelling is customer centric.Story of your brand versus your product speaking for itself.How we can use data to drive business results with content.Shafqat Islam, the co-founder and CEO of NewsCred, was a recent guest on our podcast, B2B Nation.
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