MODERN MARKETERS INSIGHT GUIDE T HE NEW RULES. Secrets to identifying your most qualified leads

Transcription

1 MODERN MARKETERS INSIGHT GUIDE T HE NEW RULES CONTENT ENGAGEMENT Secrets to identifying your most qualified leads OF

2 The New Rules of Content Engagement I 01 INTRODUCTION As a modern marketer, you rely on content to fuel your funnel and generate qualified demand. But what if you could turn every click you generate into an opportunity for your prospects to engage with more of your content while you have their precious attention? Marketers have been missing out on a key element of the buyer s digital body language that could help them increase engagement with their content and identify their most sales-ready prospects. This missing link in the marketing value chain is content engagement the ability to track how your prospects engage with your content, what assets they view and how much time they spend. Knowing what happens after your prospects click can tell you a great deal about their interests, intent and readiness to buy. And their content consumption behavior is a key indicator of sales readiness. Buyers who consume a lot of content we call it binging are 2.4 times more likely to be sales-ready. In this ebook, we ll look at how the new era of content engagement is changing the playbook for marketers and the new rules you need to learn in order to better understand the content needs and preferences of your buyers. We ll also look at the fast-moving buyer and why accommodating and identifying these highly motivated prospects based on their content consumption behavior is the secret to driving demand and, ultimately, revenue. Binging \ binj\ing verb. To engage in an unrestrained and often excessive indulgence; to compulsively consume. In the B2B context, we define content binging as the act of consuming multiple pieces of content 2 or more in a single session as a prospect self-educates on a topic of interest. Marketers will quickly see their conversion rates flat-lining if they are not analyzing content consumption at a much deeper level. To keep from flat-lining, they must have a deeper understanding of a prospect s digital body language and this understanding must continue to evolve for marketers to remain competitive. David Johnson Director of Product Marketing Oracle Marketing Cloud Oracle Eloqua

3 The New Rules of Content Engagement I 02 THE BACKBONE OF MODERN MARKETING With 67% of the buyer s journey happening digitally according to SiriusDecisions, and much of it occurring before a prospect ever gets in touch with sales, marketers depend upon their ability to understand what prospects are doing online in order to gauge buyer interest and intent. This is called digital body language, a phrase first coined by Eloqua co-founder Steven Woods to describe the science of tracking prospects behavioral data to determine where they are on their individual buying journey so you can respond accordingly. The ability to read a prospective buyer s digital body language has become the backbone of modern marketing. But the fact that marketers routinely pass leads to sales that aren t yet ready to buy, together with the sobering statistic from SiriusDecisions that 94% of marketing qualified leads never close, suggests that marketers need more and better behavioral data to decipher whether or not a buyer is really sales-ready. What Signs Have Marketers Been Missing? Modern marketers have at their disposal a wealth of intent data about the initial stages of a buyer s online journey. Oracle Eloqua Analytics, for example, provides insights into users online behavior, e.g. what s they open, what links they click through, what website pages they view, what content they download, how often they return to your website, and so on, but this insight into a prospect s intent only goes so far. While you know the content and topics that are interesting to your prospects, you don t really understand the depth or intensity of their engagement. Are they merely requesting your content, or are they really consuming it? In order to influence, inform and educate your prospects, you need them to actually read or watch your content. In order for marketers to cultivate qualified demand, a 2-way exchange of information needs to take place: You need to provide content that has enough value for your prospect to want to view it and, in exchange, your prospect agrees to provide you with some information about themselves and consents to be marketed to again in the future. It s worth noting that this information exchange doesn t occur in a single event: We know a prospect needs to consume a lot of content to reach a state of sales-readiness.

4 The New Rules of Content Engagement I 03 Today, it takes far too long and too many touches to deliver the volume of content and the degree of meaningful engagement needed to move a prospect from not yet to buy now. The challenge for marketers is that they are operating in a climate where attention is a rare commodity and every touch point, channel and piece of content represents substantial cost and effort. Think B2B marketing isn t as transactional as B2C? Think again. To better focus your demand generation efforts and justify your spending on channels and content, you need to extend your behavioral insight beyond the click to understand how your prospects are interacting with your content and maximize the quality of the information exchange that is taking place. The end goal is to use this data to do more with the moment by getting your prospects to engage with more relevant content while you have their attention. 63% of survey participants indicate content plays a significant or very significant role in nurturing prospects through the path of discovery, consideration and purchase. Digital Body Language Benchmark Study, Demand Metric, June Just like B2C, B2B marketing is inherently transactional in nature. The difference is that, in B2B, each of the multiple transactions that occurs during a prospect s journey through your funnel is an information exchange rather than a monetary one. It s a content transaction. You give the prospect different content assets as they move through the various funnel phases (awareness, education, consideration, purchase). In return, the prospect gives you information either explicitly (e.g. a form fill or demo request) or implicitly (e.g. by reading what their content consumption behavior tells you about their sales-readiness).

5 The New Rules of Content Engagement I 04 What s wrong with using proxies for engagement? KEEPING IT REAL WITH CONTENT ENGAGEMENT METRICS Would it be fair to say that after someone clicks your ad, fills out your form or downloads your marvelous piece of content, you really have no idea what happens next? Chartbeat looked at 2 billion page views generated by 580,000 articles on 2,000 sites and reported very little correlation between the number of clicks and the time spent consuming the material. Chartbeat also looked at 10,000 socially-shared articles and found that there is no relationship whatsoever between the amount a piece of content is shared and the amount of attention an average reader will give that content. Tony Haile, What You Think You Know About the Web Is Wrong, Time.com, March 9, 2014 For too long, marketers have had to rely on proxies for content engagement rather than the real thing. A greater number of social shares and likes must mean more people are engaging with your content, right? I mean, no one ever shares a link that they haven t actually read past the headline. And you can assume that if someone downloaded your content, they must have read it, correct? Not necessarily. For most marketers today, what happens after the click, conversion or download is a black box. Post-click content engagement is the missing piece of your buyer s digital body language. It takes the guesswork out of gauging a prospect s sales readiness and helps you better understand what assets are really working to educate buyers. The key to understanding sales readiness in a prospective buyer is knowing how engaged they are with your content after they click. It isn t enough to know that they downloaded your asset and intended to view the content and learn about a given topic, product or solution. You need to know whether or not they actually spent time with your content in the course of self-educating. We call this post-click content engagement. The ability to gain meaningful insights into a person s content consumption behavior is important because the general rule of thumb is that you will have more success engaging with a buyer who is in the act of self-educating. With attention in such short supply, the more you can do to accommodate your buyer in the moment, the better. Your busy prospect could be doing any one of a hundred different things, but at this particular moment, he or she has chosen to focus on your content so you better make it count.

6 The New Rules of Content Engagement I 05 THE RISE OF THE F A S T MO V ING B U Y ER what do the different behaviors mean? Content engagement is an indicator of Velocity & Sales readiness New research shows that an engaged B2B buyer looks very similar to a television viewer who binges on their favorite show: Over one third of prospects will consume multiple pieces of content in a single session if marketers accommodate their desire to binge. We call these engaged prospects fast-moving HIgh Content Engagement PDF PDF PDF fast moving buyer Sales Readiness = HIGH Likelihood to close buyers because they consume a lot of content in a very short period of time. Different buyers move at different speeds. The ability to facilitate the content consumption behavior of a fast-moving buyer who wants to engage with more content medium Content Engagement PDF PDF average moving buyer Sales Readiness = MEDIUM right now represents a tremendous opportunity for marketers. Why? Because there is a direct correlation between a fast-moving buyer s content binging behavior and their degree of sales readiness. Analysis of client data reveals that prospects who binge are 2.4X more likely to be sales-ready. Put another way, these buyers are your next marketing qualified leads (MQLs) LOW Content Engagement PDF SLOW moving buyer Sales Readiness = LOW % of Database and sales-accepted leads (SALs).

7 The New Rules of Content Engagement I 06 the world s most INTERESTED PROSPECT Meet Bob. Bob is a fast-moving buyer. He s just been tasked with purchasing a new solution for his company and, if he picks the right one, Bob is going to be a hero. To self-educate, Bob is binging on as much relevant content as he can get his hands on ebooks, solution sheets, case studies, videos, third-party reports and reviews. At this moment, Bob is the world s most interested prospect. Now meet Sally. She fits the same buyer demographic as Bob and, to your MAP and CRM, they both look the same. They both clicked on the same content offer, but Bob spent 7 minutes engaging with your ebook and then, because you packaged up several other pieces of related content for him, he went on to look at every other asset you presented, spending upwards of 15 minutes in total. I don't always binge on B2B content, but when I do I binge. $ Sally, on the other hand, spends a grand total of 15 seconds with your ebook before she tapped out and moved on to something more pressing. Unlike Bob, she s at least a year away from purchasing a solution and has nothing but time just none for you right now. So 15 minutes of engagement versus 15 seconds... Who would you say is more ready to talk to sales? Finding Bob in a Sea of Sallys. To detect fast-moving buyers like Bob, who may be hiding in plain sight in your database, you need to accommodate and find the content binge. Your value to Bob lies in your ability to help him get a good portion of his research done in those moments when he is ready to do it. If you don t provide relevant content in sufficient volume while he s doing his research, or make it too hard for him to find the information he needs, he will look elsewhere to get it. 97 % 33 % of engaged prospects will will consume every piece of binge on B2B content if it s content you put in front of recommended that marketers could improve the quality of their content by packaging related content together*. packaged in the right way**. 7 % them in the same session! * Demand Gen Report, 2015 Content Preferences Survey ** LookBookHQ client data analysis Content binging is defined as prospects consuming at least 2 assets in the same session.

8 The New Rules of Content Engagement I 07 marketer s tactics NEED TO EVOLVE The rise of the fast-moving buyer empowered, timestarved and impatient for more right now has caught many marketers off guard. Traditional demand generation and content marketing programs tend to follow a pretty standard tactical execution: Promote a piece of content to grab someone s attention Convert on the content when the prospect clicks through But if the goal is to use content to cultivate more sales-ready buyers in less time, your notion of what constitutes a conversion, and your tactics for converting initial attention into sustained engagement, need to adapt and mature. Today, the conversion is usually considered as a form completion or sometimes simply a webpage visit. It doesn t take into account whether the content being promoted was actually consumed that is typically assumed. And marketers tend to measure the quantity of conversions, not the quality of those conversions whether or not a meaningful information exchange ever took place. LET S TALK TACTICS Today, most marketing programs employ a 1:1 ratio in which a single piece of content is promoted and delivered per hard-won click or touch-point with the expectation that you ll be able to get your audience s attention again in 2 weeks time with another content offer. This is simply not quick enough to satisfy fast-moving buyers. Given that it requires a lot of content and education to produce a qualified prospect, the ability to move prospects through multiple content assets in the fleeting moments of attention you are able to generate just makes sense: Why deliver a single piece of content when you can give prospects the option to engage with multiple related assets if they are ready for more right now? Think of it as turning every touch into a potential mini-nurture track. Leading brands are doing this today and B2B marketing as a whole is poised for a major tactical transformation as marketers extend their grasp of digital body language to include post-click content engagement.

9 The New Rules of Content Engagement I 08 The role of MARKETING AUTOMATION Every day, modern marketers leverage the power of marketing automation to refine, target and optimize their programs, customize content, automate communications and streamline their marketing, demand generation and lead management processes. While marketing automation has proven indispensable for pushing content offers to prospective customers and hosting those content offers, it was not designed to streamline the delivery of multiple content assets per touch or to measure post-click engagement. Let s Go Back to Bob and Sally for a Sec Your marketing automation platform can tell you that two people with the same demographic traits filled out a form to view your new ebook, but it can t tell you how long they spent consuming the content. Marketing automation won t help you differentiate between a prospect who simply downloaded an asset and one who actually read it. To your marketing automation platform, those two people (Bob and Sally) look exactly the same, but if you could take into account their behavior after they downloaded your asset, you d know that one spent 7 minutes reading the ebook and the other had it open for all of 15 seconds. Which one would you say is more ready to talk to sales? An overreliance of marketing automation alone to determine the sales-readiness of prospects can create a lot of false positives and a high rate of lead disqualification once they re passed to sales, leading to subpar MQL-to-SQL conversion not to mention the sales time and capacity wasted following up with prospects who are not yet ready to buy. Similarly, the lion s share of lead scoring models tend to value the quantity of interactions (the number of click-throughs, pages visited and assets downloaded) without considering the quality of the exchange or what happened after the click. They are missing a key element of engagement and an important indicator of sales readiness that can only be uncovered by factoring in post-click content engagement. CLICKED read for 15 minutes CLICKED BOB SAlly read for 15 SECONDS Who would you say is more ready to talk to sales?

10 The New Rules of Content Engagement I 09 Welcome to the new era of CONTENT ENGAGEMENT The good news for modern marketing is that we re starting to see a shift in focus from getting a prospect s initial attention to sustaining that attention post-click. New tools, systems and integrations now make it possible to deliver multiple content assets in a single session and to track and measure what s happening after your prospect clicks. Adding this deeper insight into content engagement and layering it in with the intelligence gathered by marketing automation allows marketers to separate the casual researcher or consumer of content from the truly engaged and qualified prospect who is ready to buy now. Actionable engagement data may be fed directly into Oracle Eloqua, for example, to improve lead scoring, segmentation, nurturing and personalization, as well as more accurately identify qualified prospects.

11 The New Rules of Content Engagement I 10 The new era of content engagement is about fulfilling the promise of marketing automation by understanding and optimizing the buyer s end-to-end journey. If you can do this, you can: Market to an audience of one Understand and cater to the unique needs of your individual buyers based on their content consumption behavior, so personalization finally becomes more meaningful and more powerful than just using a person s first name in an . Be more responsive Dynamically react to your buyer s content consumption and leave one-size-fits-all marketing behind once and for all. For example, if you send bob nurture A and you know he clicked through and viewed content assets A, B and C, there s no need to send him nurture s B and C. Instead, you can fast-track Bob directly to nurture D so he can pick up where he left off. Bob will like this too because he ll have a few less s in his inbox! Move from your schedule to theirs Transition from scheduled marketing that forces every prospect to move at the same slow speed to an always-on engagement model that empowers buyers to move through your content at their own pace, consuming as little or as much of it as they want while you have their attention. It s about recognizing who is in control of the buyer s journey today (hint: it s not you) and making it faster and easier for buyers to consume your content at all stages of their journey from first contact through to the point where they are educated and ready to talk to sales. 01 ENGAGEMENT IN ACTION With several Markie awards under their belt, the B2B marketing team at Intel Security knows a thing or two about how to drive stellar results. So how does a highly evolved modern marketing organization get even better returns from their existing programs? Harnessing the power of LookBookHQ and oracle Eloqua, Intel Security is delivering more content per click on average 2.5x more assets viewed and accelerating the path to purchase. By rethinking their approach to lead nurturing and enabling busy prospects to binge, Intel Security is crushing conversion with a MQL-to-opportunity conversion rate above 15%.

12 The New Rules of Content Engagement I 11 MAKING AN IMPACT with Content Engagement 02 ENGAGEMENT IN ACTION Imagine if you could move qualified prospects through the buyer s journey in less time and with far fewer clicks. According to an IDG Enterprise study on customer engagement*, buyers of B2B technology solutions consume at least 7 pieces of content per persona before a purchasing decision is made. So let s assume that to get your prospect to engage with the 7 key content assets that will make them educated and qualified, you need to get them to engage with you 7 different times. Now let s assume that those touches are happening over a variety of channels , paid search, display ads, etc. If we average out the cost of those touches (not factoring in the time, effort and cost of producing the content assets and offers), we can estimate that the cost of moving a single prospect through this content journey is anywhere from $500 to $2,500 or more depending on channels, industry and buyer role. And that s just one prospect. We know that large considered B2B purchases typically involve a number of buyers working as team to choose the best solution. For enterprise decisions, up to 17 people may be involved in the purchase process. This means marketing would ideally need to make about 120 unique points of engagement across multiple channels in order to fully influence the decision. A global market leader in the logistics industry has built a multi-touch welcome and re-engagement campaign powered by LookBookHQ and Oracle Eloqua. The company has been able to achieve 28% of their average content asset views per quarter through a single content journey. The program has enabled them to capture and convert the attention of new leads, as well as mine their database for hidden gold by re-engaging inactive leads and identifying engaged prospects and MQLs that would otherwise have been overlooked. Now imagine that you are able to move your prospect through more or even all of those touches in only 1-2 clicks versus 7. Your acquisition costs just dropped by 60-70%! *2014 IDG Enterprise Customer Engagement Survey, IDG Enterprise, December 18, 2014.

13 The New Rules of Content Engagement I 12 And that s just the beginning: What if you could also unburden your sales team of all those leads that aren t quite ready? The impact would be greater focus on those that are sales-ready and better conversion and lead acceptance rates. Let s assume a generous lead acceptance rate of 15% that is, 15% of the leads marketing passes to sales ultimately become opportunities. Imagine if you could double that. The outcome would be fewer leads passed to sales, but a far higher rate of sales acceptance for those leads because they would be truly qualified (fewer false positives). The velocity of these qualified leads would also be positively impacted because now sales would be able to dedicate more of their time and attention to the leads with the highest likelihood to convert. The experience for your prospects will also be much improved. On the marketing side, you can target in on exactly the kind of content your prospects want to see based on their past engagement, which means you won t be sending people a bunch of s with content that isn t aligned with their interests. People have a word for irrelevant content: It s called SPAM. On the sales side, your reps won t be bothering people who aren t ready to hear from them. These are the kind of results that marketers can achieve with a heightened focus on packaging and delivering content to get less qualified leads to higher levels of engagement before they are passed to business development or sales. By adopting a more accurate measurement of sales-readiness, you will not only see an immediate impact on conversion, but a significant and lasting impact further down the funnel. 03 ENGAGEMENT IN ACTION National Instruments (NI) is layering new insights into the buyer s journey and using actionable data to extract more value from their Oracle Eloqua-powered multi-touch lead nurture program. By using LookBookHQ to deliver a content journey and track real post-click content engagement metrics, NI has seen a 168 % increase in time spent with multiple assets compared to their previous approach of serving up a single piece of content. 42% of visitors binged on NI s content and, of these, 15% consumed 2 assets and 27% consumed 3 or more assets.

14 The New Rules of Content Engagement I 13 F A S T -MOVING BUYERS IN FOCUS Let s look at a real-world example. Cetera Financial Group is the second largest independent financial advisor network in the US. Cetera s fast-moving buyer strategy, which integrates LookBookHQ and Oracle Eloqua, has had a significant impact on their business. We are more aligned and efficient as a team, we ve earned the credibility of our sales team as a viable source of leads, and we have the trust of management to be leaders in our niche, challenging the status quo. Eric Hansen, Director of Demand Generation Cetera Financial Group, Inc. # % 2.4 X Source of MQLs Cetera s next generation strategy has established the company s marketing organization as the #1 source of qualified leads. Increase in contribution to revenue By accommodating the binging behavior of engaged prospects, Cetera has been able to drive better content engagement and double marketing s contribution to revenue. Increase in MQL-to-SAL conversion Prospects who demonstrated content binging behavior (consumed multiple pieces of content in a session) were 2.4X more likely to be sales accepted. Cetera s evolution from scheduled to behavior-driven marketing, and commitment to accommodating the binge behavior of their most qualified prospects, has earned the company Oracle Markie awards for best cross-channel marketing program (2015) and best lead-nurture program (2014). Cetera uses LookBookHQ content experiences as the destination for 70% of the clicks they generate across all marketing channels. LookBookHQ packages related content into a journey and makes it easy for prospects to self-educate in real time, whenever and wherever they engage.

15 The New Rules of Content Engagement I 14 THE V A L UE of content engagement As the case studies show, the ability to measure and act on post-click content engagement provides tangible benefits: For the Modern B2B Buyer: Busy B2B buyers are empowered to self-educate at their own pace and they don t have to waste time hunting all over the web to find the information they need because you ve packaged everything into a cohesive content journey. For the Modern Sales Professional: Business development and sales reps can personalize their follow-ups based on what individual buyers read or watched. Less time wasted on buyers who aren t yet sales-ready means more time to spend with qualified buyers. For the Modern Marketer: Marketers can better understand their buyers based on their content consumption behavior and expedite qualified leads to sales. Fewer false positives, more sales-accepted leads and the ability to connect the dots between spending on channels and content and ROI. Are You Ready to Find Your Fast-Moving Buyers? We hope you found this ebook on the new era of content engagement useful. We d love to chat about how solutions like LookBookHQ and the Oracle Marketing Cloud can help you drive deeper content engagement and identify fast-moving buyers who are sales-ready right now. Visit us today: $ LOOKBOOKHQ.COM

16 The New Rules of Content Engagement I 15 The LookBookHQ content engagement platform integrates with Oracle Eloqua to enable the delivery of personalized content experiences that hold on to your prospect s attention and convert it into deeper engagement with your content. The ability to track and sync post-click content engagement data between LookBookHQ and Oracle Eloqua feeds into sophisticated program logic for classifying leads, nurturing and targeting based on their content engagement. Using LookBookHQ and Oracle Eloqua, modern marketers can easily: Add LookBookHQ content experiences to Oracle Eloqua s and landing pages Use forms for progressive profiling and new lead generation Package related content of any type and promote the next asset in a compelling way that is aligned with the buyer s journey Enable prospects to move through your content at their own pace Track and measure real engagement with assets within LookBookHQ content experiences Use content engagement data in lead management activities including lead scoring, lead nurturing and intelligent campaigns Create personalized LookBookHQ content journeys for audiences based on lead data in Oracle Eloqua Provide your sales team with insight into content engagement so they can prioritize and personalize follow-ups LookBookHQ, Inc. All rights reserved. The LookBookHQ logo is a trademark of LookBookHQ, Inc. All other product and company names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders. LookBookHQ assumes no responsibility for any inaccuracies in this document. LookBookHQ reserves the right to change, modify, transfer or otherwise revise this publication without notice.