By RobeRt Rose, Chief Strategist,

Content Marketing Institute

MaRketing Data:Vitamin D for your

Content MarketingUnderstanding

how strategic data management makes

content marketing healthy, wealthy

and wise.

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intRoDUCtionVitamin D: The Value of Data to Healthy Content

There should be little doubt that content marketing as a strategic approach to B2B marketing is expanding. CMI has found that a majority of B2B Marketers indicate they plan to maintain or increase

their budgets for content marketing initiatives– a consistent trend over the past four years. In fact, this year it was almost 90% of those surveyed. Content – and how marketing and sales teams are using it to interact with customers across an increasingly complex buyer’s journey – is fundamentally reshaping the way many B2B businesses craft their go-to-market strategies.

However, this evolution isn’t without its challenges; the largest being that so many content marketers struggle with attributing measurable success to their content efforts. A July 2014 study performed by Forrester Research substantiates this conclusion by finding that B2B marketers aren’t proficient at the practice as yet. Their research found 85% of B2B marketers couldn’t currently attribute any business value to content activity. As the report’s author, VP and Principal Analyst Laura Ramos, wrote: “this disconnect reveals a more fundamental problem with content marketing today. It doesn’t produce expected results.” In fact, the study found that 62% of these marketers only create content to “fill in the gaps” on a campaign-by-campaign basis. The Forrester report also revealed – 47% of B2B organizations focus only on creating content for the company website, online ads, email and social media. Ramos concludes “the data shows an acute focus on acquisition that practically ignores the rest of the buyer’s journey.” This aligns with our own research at CMI – where year after year, “creating enough content” and “creating content that engages” are the two primary reasons that B2B marketers struggle with the practice altogether.

But the question is “why”? Why are B2B marketers struggling? One answer may lie in where B2B marketers are focusing their content efforts – and struggling to connect content to the very customers they are trying to serve.

47% of b2b organizations focus only on creating content for the company website, online ads, email and social media.

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Marketing Data Management is Key to Understanding Your Audience

Marketing data, and the productive management of it, continues to be a challenge for all B2B

Marketers – CMOs, demand centers, and marketing operations leaders struggle with keeping

it maintained. Content marketers have traditionally stayed far away from the marketing database.

And with good reason. According to the Netprospex 2014 State of Marketing Data Benchmark

Report,– more than 25% of the average B2B database is simply inaccurate. And two-thirds of

companies surveyed had an overall data health scale of “unreliable”.

But that database can be an important key to capturing

the attention of your customers and prospects. A

whitepaper titled “Demand Generation Strategies”

isn’t nearly as compelling a title as “Tech Marketing

Strategies for a Startup Budget”. The ability to get specific

when promoting your content across channels where

attention span is limited, is often dependent on whether

the associated fields in your database are complete

and accurate. They can make all the difference in the

effectiveness of the pieces you write. Combine that contact knowledge with buyer persona

insights, and online behavior, and all of a sudden the content you’re creating is not only strategic,

but will actually drive conversions, engagement and ultimately revenue for your business.

In this paper, we’ll discuss ways to marry marketing data management practices with strategic

content marketing creation, as well as methods content marketers can use to make themselves for

more valuable to the C-Suite.

25% of the average b2b database is simply inaccurate. and two-thirds of companies surveyed had an overall data health scale of “unreliable”.

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5 Data Management Prescriptions for Healthy Content Marketing

In B2B, your company and contact database is the center of gravity for all your prospect and

customer communication. It also serves as an important resource for segmentation, targeting

and buyer engagement strategies for content marketers. But problems in quality lie just under

the surface and can de-rail the best-intentioned plans. In fact, according to the US Department

of Labor, even with still relatively high unemployment rates, almost 8% of Americans (almost 2

million) voluntarily leave their job every single month. With a total universe of about 146 million

Americans in the workforce (based on current unemployment levels), that theoretically means

that everybody changes jobs about every 5 years (actually 4.6 according to the Bureau of Labor

Statistics). Without even taking into account incomplete or bogus information, this provides a

pretty compelling case for every B2B marketer to ensure his or her data is as fresh as possible. In

fact, think of it this way: if the customer data is more than 4 years old – there’s an 88% chance that

it’s out of date.

Let’s get B2B Content Marketing into better data shape.

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1. Create A Great Wellness Plan: Define The ‘Who’

One of the largest challenges that B2B content marketers have is actually closing the gap between the

personas they’ve spent the time and effort to create – and the verification of those personas against who is

actually visiting and consuming the content they are creating.

The investment in persona creation is considerable and - as many marketers discover only after beginning - it’s

a process that’s never really complete. People change, habits change – and the business’ ability to engage with

them as people change. But, at its core, persona development is mostly developed using qualitative information

that marketers glean from interviews, research studies – and ultimately a synthesis of that information into a

representative profile of the “needs” and “beliefs” of that person.

Successful B2B Content Marketers must have the ability to understand which of these personas are actually

engaging with various pieces of content. They must reference that with important data points at the individual and

company level. It’s only after the marketer marries this data to the target personas that he or she can answer the

questions: Are we describing their challenge and the solution to it in the most relevant and compelling way?

getting HealtHy:The first step is identifying the challenge and the existing gaps in our “knowledge”. Best in class B2B Content

Marketers are first taking a look at their marketing database and assessing the needs in concert with their persona

development. The key is getting together with the data management team (maybe that’s simply the marketing/sales

team or a partner or both) and starting to map out a plan to ensure the right data attributes are captured for persona

development.

As one basic example, the marketer might ask: “can we map

industry data – which we can acquire without having to ask for

it - with the company name so that we can understand whether

engagement we are driving with our new content is actually

reaching the right size company or right industry?” This type of

exercise allows us quickly to revisit our personas and content

to ensure alignment with business objectives. Identifying the

gaps in our data capture plan – that will help us map a more

complete identification of who is actually consuming our

content is the first step in developing a robust wellness plan.

Establish a baseline metric for your data health now (both

accuracy and completeness) and a goal metric for health for six

months or a year from now.

Metric:

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2. Developing A Regimen: Segment & Prioritize The Audience

Once the marketer has the gaps needed to marry the content with its consumption, the next

step is designing a data model that continually improves persona segmentation over time.

Remember, just like persona development itself, our approach to a “data story” is a process. It’s a

continuous process, not a project that will stop after a certain time.

Successful B2B Content Marketers don’t just identify the gaps in the data for a particular campaign,

or even a particular function (e.g. sales enablement or lead acquisition). Instead, marketers must

start to apply the different demographic attributes – as well as the beliefs and behaviors –of a

persona that can be collected at different stages of the buyer’s journey. This is a critical piece in

ensuring the ability to “measure all the way down” and truly understand where content is playing

an important role in not only generating MORE traffic – but actually attracting BETTER traffic – that

matches our targeted segments at a higher density.

Additionally, this work helps to identify the priorities for what “comes next”. The marketer may

make decisions about what kinds of programs will first “fill the gaps” of missing data – rather than

run programs to add new members to it.

getting HealtHy:It’s simple: getting quickly to the underlying “data story” is as important as getting to your content

story. Once the marketer understands where the gaps are in the immediate data collection – it’s also

time to take an assessment and then prioritize and plan where the data model can be made even

more complete over time. It may be a total re-marketing campaign to clean the data. It may be that it

just makes sense to start from scratch. Or, it may make sense to prioritize one particular target data

segment in order to develop keener insight.

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Creating a segmentation and prioritization of data in both the short term and long term helps to

inform the targeting strategy with content. As a working example of this, one B2B manufacturing

organization we worked with discovered by looking at both their data and content that while

they were initially targeting an executive level buyer persona, they were actually attracting a high

number of lower level influencer personas. But, when they actually closed a deal, it was from the

buyer persona. Additionally, they discovered that many of these influencers were falling out of

the engagement process early on. So, what was happening? Basically, they discovered that the

influencers that had the capacity to understand

the executive-level content were making

a great business case to their boss. But a

good many couldn’t – and consequently gave

up. Therefore, based on this segmentation –

they (among a number of other things) decided to

prioritize more instructional content to the

lower level influencer – helping them to make a

business case to the executive buyer.

Ultimately, creating a great data story helps to

guide the content strategy, giving the marketer

greater insights into the customers needs.

Create a goal and an associated metric for the persona targeted vs. persona

reached. For example, you may associate your content targeting as 60%/20%/20%

toward three personas. Associate the actual reach of your content to that goal

using the marketing data collected.

Metric:

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3. The Right Exercise at the Right Time: Data Informs the Buyer’s Journey

Of course one of the keys of getting healthy is to match the right exercise with the right part of

the regimen. But there is, likewise, a need to understand how each exercise contributes to the

next phase of fitness. Similarly, mapping content to the buyer’s journey is only half the equation.

The data captured DURING that journey must also be managed in an intelligent way to understand

which data does (or does not) affect an outcome at some phase of that journey.

Jeff Ernst from Forrester captured this well in a blog post he wrote discussing how B2B marketers

still have a “blind spot” when it comes to the buyer’s journey. He said:

“You need to recognize that the B2B buying process is not one big decision; it is a series of micro-

decisions. And the company that wins the business is the company that is there to answer those

questions and provide fresh insights that influence how the buyers think about the problem so that the

buyers can confidently advance their journey”

This is an important point. Marketers not only have to develop a plan to deliver content at the

most relevant point in a buyer’s journey – they also have to develop a plan that asks (and actually

retrieves) the right data at the right point in a buyer’s journey.

Now, there has certainly been quite a lot written on “progressive profiling” – where marketers ask for

increasingly more information based on what stage of the journey, the frequency of the last visit or

even in type of content consumed. But if marketers go down the road of “progressive profiling” they

must do so intelligently – lest they build bigger databases, containing ever more fields of useless data.

getting HealtHy:As content marketers actually take the time to first identify the gaps in their existing data, then clean

and prune that data in order to make smarter decisions and priorities about segments to target – they

will also benefit by aligning the future data capture (as well as appending through third party services)

along the optimal content mapping and buyer’s journey insight.

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The key here is to identify the absolute must-have information at each stage – and how that applies

to the decision that will be made at a specific point in the buyer’s journey. So, for example, one B2B

software company we worked with deployed a content marketing program that included a thought

leadership blog. Registration for subscription to the blog was part of the education portion of their

buyer’s journey. But, the next stage was not to pull them into the sales process – but rather just to

interest them enough to identify themselves for contact. Therefore, an Email Address was the only field

required. Using a data service, the software company could then identify the “quality” of subscriptions

they were getting – matching domains to industry and company sizing – and establishing email

campaigns to invite them to Webinars and other educational events based on that segmentation. Then,

and only then, was each of those registration forms expanded to include additional elements for the

next part of the buyers journey.

This is the critical piece here. It’s not just having one type of registration form that gates ALL content –

independent of the stage the buyer may find themselves in. Taking the extra time to understand:

What value is THIS content providing

What stage is the buyer likely to be in for this piece of content

What is the kind of content this customer is most

likely to want next (what should we be putting in

as a call to action)

How do we also progressively ask for more information

based on the “non-linear” nature of the journey

How can we use external data to enhance the

intelligence we have at various stages

As content marketing begins to play more of a

substantial role over more conversion points (the

“micro-decisions” as Ernst called them,) creating

a plan for progressive profiling and evolving data

attributes will be a critical piece of a healthy strategy.

Establish a baseline and an ongoing measurement for form conversions.

Monitor the increase in conversions as you both decrease and optimize the

fields for which you ask for information. Additionally, measure the depth (by

pieces of relevant information gathered) as customers go deeper into the funnel.

Metric:

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4. Monitor Your Heart Rhythm: Match Explicit Data With Behavioral

The concept of delivering the right content to the right buyer at the right time is the brass ring for a healthy content marketing program. This is where the promise of delivering the right content to the

right person at the right time is met. But the only way this is achieved is by not only understanding the explicit data that the customer provides (e.g. name, title, email, industry, preferences etc…) but also the behavior of that individual over time. Best-in-class B2B content marketers are collecting this behavioral data and integrating it into their marketing data strategy.

This is certainly one of the biggest benefits proposed by new web content management tools (or CXM- Customer Experience Management as it’s called now) as well as MAP’s (Marketing Automation Platforms). In fact, chances are that most B2B marketers already have a method to capture at least some level of behavioral data – but don’t actually utilize any of it to optimize the content experience.

A study conducted last year by IBM (through recently acquired company Silverpop) found that 45% of marketers are capturing and actually consolidating customer behavioral data. But then only 17% of those surveyed assessed themselves as “practitioners” of using this data at all for marketing. But, according to that same study, of that small group who is actually capturing, and using behavioral data – these marketers find themselves contributing to 34% of the pipeline vs 26% for those not using it. That’s pretty easy math to do: how would you like a 10% lift in your content marketing program – by incorporating data you are probably already capturing in some capacity?

getting HealtHy:Context is truly one of the most important things that, as marketers, we can capture to understand the true nature of the audiences we are trying to influence. And, the first step to developing a plan here is to understand the different types of behavioral data you are already (or could easily be) capturing. Then, the objective is to categorize it against the goals that you’ve set up in other parts of your plan (see above). There are generally two types of behavioral data you could be utilizing:

Ambient Data. This is the data that we can derive without even knowing who the audiences are, but is simply collected within the context of their consumption of content. For example, marketers can use systems to acquire behavioral data that can both collect and optimize content display based on browser type, or device (e.g. mobile vs. desktop), ad campaign URL’s, or from third-party data sets such as weather, or even reverse IP (Internet Protocol) lookup on a company. Then, they can use this data

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to serve up a more “journey optimized” experience for their content, or simply capture it to understand visitors more completely. For example – one B2B organization we worked with is using ambient data collected from visitors on whether they are arriving from a mobile device to highlight specific video content (shorter, and mobile optimized) – and easy navigation to directions to their field offices.

Implicit Data. This is the data that marketers can derive from observing and tracking the behavior with either a known or unknown visitor. For example, a team can track the behavior on a Web site and begin to optimize experiences, and track the consumption, of specific pieces of content based on a series of clicks. As a visitor clicks on more content in a particular category, certain preferences are implied – and persona attributes can be assigned to that record if he/she becomes known through giving some explicit data. One of the main drivers of using implicit data is, of course, lead scoring – where certain platforms can assign weights to various CTA’s and once a critical threshold has been reached – transform that prospect into a lead. But even beyond that, this behavioral data can be appended to the database to provide additional insight into that customer’s attributes. This can be as simple as appending the customer record with the list of white papers downloaded, blog posts visited and/or webinars attended. Or, in a more sophisticated sense, can be used to assign new persona attributes to a particular record. For example – we worked with one B2B company that was selling various types of power equipment. They had tagged all of their content in a way that if someone came in and, for example, browsed the blog post on solar power, attended the webinar on hydro-electric power, and the CEO’s video on the importance of alternative power sources – they received a persona attribute of “Eco-Passionate”. In this way – when it came time for a sales rep to have a conversation with that prospect – the rep knew which way to immediately steer the conversation.

Of course, integration of all of these types of data into a holistic profile is what ultimately gives the content marketer the ability to deliver true value to a healthy content marketing program. Understanding where and how you will grow your target audience, by both enabling your technology to capture it, and applying it from the top of the funnel all the way through the journey is the key to a successful content strategy.

This is what brings us to the final piece – which is delivering that actionable insight.

Start to optimize content in real-time based on behavior, then track engagement across your

consumed content by individual personas. Enrich your marketing database with behavioral data

and measure the types of content being consumed vs engagement of targeted personas (e.g who you thought would consume it vs. who actually did) to

ensure the success of your content programs.

Metric:

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5. Track Your Progress: Report On Actionable Insight

If someone is engaged by our content, submits as a lead, ultimately becomes a customer - but no

one is there to measure it, did it count? While looking at it from a business strategy we’d like to

think the answer to this is “yes”. However, there are still far too many content marketing programs,

where the answer to this question is a clear “no, it doesn’t count”. Why is that?

In our experience at CMI, far too many times B2B content marketing programs are cut short or

transformed into traditional sales programs – not because of the progress being made – but by the

inability to track the health of the program and create actionable insight out of it.

It is important to understand that one of the biggest benefits of a smart B2B data program, aligned

with a content marketing strategy, is not necessarily the generation of more activity through the

pipeline. Certainly more leads are often a positive result. But more traffic, more leads and more

activity at the top of the funnel can also be detrimental. When sales is wasting their time on leads

that are unqualified, or simply at the wrong stage in their buying journey, it can take precious time

away (as well as add costs) to the business.

As noted in the beginning, the Forrester Research study concluded that B2B marketers right now have

an “acute focus [only] on acquisition that practically ignores the rest of the buyer’s journey.” Developing

a measurement plan that reports on how marketing data is becoming deeper, more accurate and

generating even greater insight into our consumer can, in many cases, be value enough for a healthy

content marketing program.

getting HealtHy:Even B2B marketing is inching closer to focusing on “real-time” interactions with customers. The

requirement for us (despite the length of our sales cycle) to react more rapidly to the needs of our

customers has never been more pronounced.

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Understanding the consumption of content

at an aggregate level through Web analytics

will only get the marketer so far. Truly

gaining insight into how your content is

improving the quality of leads, the value

of customers and the deeper insight into

them is only available through a robust and

healthy data management program.

A CMO at a financial services software

company once relayed to me that he no

longer looks at Google Analytics as a measure

of how his content marketing efforts are

moving the business forward. “Traffic”,

he said, “is the least of my concerns. The

blogs we have set up across our different

product groups are there solely to help

sales understand what topics, concerns,

discussions and challenges our customers

are having. The data generated by those

blogs is appended to every record we keep

on prospects and qualified opportunities.

My measurement is feedback from

our sales group – and the number of

quality discussions they have with those

opportunities. My goal is to simply help those

prospects come to the logical conclusion that

we are the best choice for them.”

Create a great dashboard for measurement, one that tracks the right

things and will be the most effective way to show your success. Today’s content

marketers need a dashboard that shows the increasing quality, depth and overall health

of the marketing database overtime.

Metric:

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ConClUsionNot Just Healthy Content Marketing - A Healthy Business

So, what does the future hold for B2B Content Marketing and Data? One thing is clear. If B2B marketers are to truly succeed with content marketing as a strategic cog in their marketing process

– they will need to change their approach to both content AND data more broadly. There is simply no argument that both content and data are affecting the business. Research firm IDC has predicted that enterprise data will grow at 60% annually. Forrester has predicted that enterprises are growing unstructured content at a rate of 200% annually. So, content and data will affect the business – it’s now just a matter of “how,” not “if”.

So for the B2B organization, content and marketing data can be by-products of the organization; an on demand service that simply operates from campaign to campaign, occasionally helping but more often weighing down the business. Or, content and marketing data can be the strategic asset that it has (or can) become – helping to differentiate and create success for every part of the business.

The marriage of creative content marketing, and intelligent marketing data management is truly one thing that can keep a company healthier than it was before, wealthier today and wiser for tomorrow.

if b2b marketers are to truly succeed with content marketing as a strategic cog in their marketing process – they will need to change their approach to both content anD data more broadly.

aboUt netPRosPex:NetProspex is the smarter B2B data partner. We help marketing and sales organizations optimize their

revenue impact by increasing the quality and effectiveness of their marketing database. Thousands of

B2B organizations rely on NetProspex to manage their marketing data in order to fuel high-performing

marketing campaigns and accelerate the creation of sales pipeline. To make marketing databases

accurate, targeted and actionable, the company offers a suite of data services backed by its proprietary

CleneStepTM verification technology and the industry’s largest and most accurate reference database of

B2B contacts and companies. For more information visit www.netprospex.com

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ReFeRenCesNot Just Healthy Content Marketing - A Healthy Business

1. Forrester Blog: Most B2B Marketers Struggle To Create Engaging Contenthttp://blogs.forrester.com/laura_ramos/14-07-16-most_b2b_marketers_struggle_to_create_engaging_content

2. MarketingProfs and CMI 2014 Content Marketing Budgets Benchmarks And Trendshttp://www.marketingprofs.com/charts/2013/11759/2014-b2b-content-marketing-benchmarks-budgets-and-trends

3. Sirius Decisions: The Impact of Bad Data on Demand Generationhttps://www.siriusdecisions.com/TheImpactofBadDataonDemandCreation.aspx

4. Forbes: 2 Million Americans Leave Their Job Every Monthhttp://www.forbes.com/sites/alanhall/2013/03/11/im-outta-here-why-2-million-americans-quit-every-month-and-5-steps-to-turn-the-epidemic-around/

5. Bureau Of Labor Statistics Estimate on Job Tenurehttp://www.bls.gov/news.release/tenure.nr0.htm

6. Jeff Ernst Blog: Marketers Have A Blind Spot In The Buyer’s Journeyhttp://blogs.forrester.com/jeff_ernst/12-07-26-b2b_marketers_have_a_blind_spot_the_buyer_journey

7. Behavior Gets Better Resultshttp://www.silverpop.com/blog/Behavioral-Marketers-Get-Better-Results

8. BizTech Magazine – Data Storage http://www.biztechmagazine.com/sites/default/files/88473-wp-data_storage_df.pdf