As TechTarget’s Director of Marketing and Product Operations, I’ve spent the last 13 years helping our customers generate millions of quality content marketing leads. I know all too well what it’s like to live and die by open rates, clicks, and conversions.
Over the years my team has tested and implemented
Hundreds of changes to our content marketing strategy to increase engagement, streamline internal processes, and revamp our promotional truemoney database strategy. While most of these changes have helped boost engagement and conversion, four tactics continue to outperform the rest:
Sales Staff Based Targeting for Activity Based Targeting
Personas are a great way to understand our ideal buyers, improve marketing content messaging, and develop more personalized content. What they i need a website for my law firm don’t do is help us identify and engage the people who are actually looking for our products. Let’s be honest, sometimes our best customers don’t look anything like the personas we have on the shelves. That’s where behavioral data can help.
See unlike persona targeting
Activity targeting gives you the unique opportunity to promote your content to people you KNOW are in an active buying motion. And that’s asia phone number important. In fact, after analyzing over 6.5 million content marketing emails from TechTarget, we learned that when we email people who have recently researched technology on our network, they are 5x more likely to engage with our content marketing emails than contacts who may fit an ideal buyer persona but aren’t actively researching.
Determine a content strategy that aligns with your lead generation goals
In a constant effort to get leads through the door, many of us have a marketing content bad habit of creating content that tries to please everyone while connecting with no one. To avoid this, you need to choose the path that best aligns your content with the outcome you want to achieve.
Do you want a high volume of leads that may not be a perfect match for your ideal customer type, but that give sales a better chance of finding deals and opening doors? Or do you want a lower volume of very high-quality leads that are a direct match for your ICP, but that might limit your exposure to deals in the market?
Here are the two most common approaches you should consider before developing new content:
High lead volume broad content
Use content topics that appeal to multiple personas. Examples include content that addresses revenue growth, department alignment, expense reduction, general tips and tricks, or content from third-party experts and analysts. Avoid content that is highly technical, feature-focused, or uses role-specific language and keywords. Broad content will generate more leads, but will have more false positives.
High prospect accuracy niche content
Use content designed to resonate with a specific persona/role or industry based on shared interests and characteristics. For example, if you want to attract security professionals, promote content that uses their common language, talks about the specific security features of your products, and addresses security pain points, fears, and aspirations. Niche content will attract fewer leads, but will have fewer false positives.
Make sure you promote quality content
While creating high-quality content takes more time marketing in the long run because it’s harder to promote, erodes buyer trust, and has a noticeable negative impact on campaign performance.
The difference between strong and weak content is striking: strong assets outperform weak assets in email promotions by 1,167%. Here are some key characteristics of what makes a strong asset or a weak asset. These observations hold true for the 12,000+ assets we syndicate and promote each year.