In March 2020, when the world began to witness the beginning of a new pandemic -the first of the 21st century- there was a fact that caught our attention and that could have serious consequences in the lives of billions of people: the slowdown of the Internet due to the extraordinary increase of user traffic at a global level.
According to a New York Times report, quarantines around the world made people even more dependent on the Internet to communicate, work, learn and be entertained. This caused unprecedented pressure on the global Internet infrastructure, seriously affecting browsing and download speeds in Asia, the United States and Europe.
Although we know that the above was motivated by a specific and unexpected event, this situation put on the table a problem that has been increasing in recent years and, while still not a threat in the short and medium term, poses an increasing challenge for brands in the digital era: to ensure that their Content Marketing strategies achieve the engagement, relevance and visibility desired in their audiences, in the midst of a cyberspace increasingly saturated with information and with thousands of options for learning and entertainment.
At Castleberry, we know that the best option to achieve this is through data and Artificial Intelligence, in order to help brands know and understand their audiences better; their tastes, desires and needs, to create useful, personalized and valuable content, with which they can generate more leads, build customer loyalty and close more deals.
However, the problem we have detected is that many companies not only continue to resort to “guessing” to decide what content to create and how to speak to their audiences, but also several of them still rely exclusively on traditional resources such as the Buyer person, which while helping to identify the customer profile to impact, does not clearly establish deeper and more determining aspects of their needs and interests. For example: the type of language they use, the content they consume or their personal opinions about it.
Making sure that the brands’ Content Marketing strategies reach the desired objectives, in a network increasingly overloaded with information, that is our main goal. That is why we bring the marketing and sales teams of the companies we work with closer to tools with which they can monitor what their audience is reading and speaking, so that they can adjust their content strategies to their tastes, desires and needs.
Unlike the Target Audience, the Buyer Persona does not establish a generic segmentation of a certain social group, but, on the contrary, recreates a fictitious profile based on the real data of the audience with specific characteristics. This is how, while in the case of the first one, a Gym can establish that its clients are women between 27 and 30 years old, of high class and fond of sports; in the case of the second one, on the contrary, the same business can determine
that her ideal client is called Ana, she is 28 years old, mother of 2 children and loves to exercise in her free time left by her job as an executive of a large company to clear her head.
Although this method relies on data collection to achieve a greater understanding of the client’s needs, it falls short of what is required as it is unable to provide brands with more detailed and relevant information about the more specific interests of their audiences. For example, knowing the content they read, the topics – and subtopics – they like, and even the language in which they communicate.
In other words, the Buyer Persona is intrinsically limited by the data available and the ability of the marketing and sales teams to analyze it. Therefore, their approach is based more on providing demographic data (gender, age, location) than on bringing together answers about what really motivates and interests the audience. Likewise, it does not take into account the behaviors that consumers have on the Internet, so it also fails to establish the purchase and/or consumption motivations of the audiences about a certain product, topic, service or online content.
It is clear that B2B Content Marketing demands highly personalized digital experiences, so knowing what audiences want and need is not a negotiable issue. But how can marketing and sales teams achieve their desired goals without encountering the common pitfalls mentioned above?
The answer is simple: through data and Artificial Intelligence tools, such as True Content®, with which brands can understand – at last – how to build the most appropriate B2B content, based on what their audiences read, talk, think and consume.
Successful B2B Content Marketing strategies are not only those that aim to solve the needs of companies selected as customers or leads, but, fundamentally, those that seek to satisfy the needs and interests of employees in key positions. In short, it is the latter who design and execute the strategies and/or actions of the companies.
For this reason, it is essential that brand sales teams know how to identify the content consumed and preferred by both the companies and their employees. In this sense, our True Content® tool allows to identify not only the topics that audiences read the most, but even the subtopics they consume; managing to identify their tastes and interests in a more specific and personalized way.
For example, if the objective of a brand is to sell financial technology to banks, it can begin by establishing the customers it wants to impact through Account-Based Marketing (ABM) and then discover the content that decision makers in these companies are consuming, through True Content®. This will allow them to know, for example, which of them prefer to read about “banking omnicanality” and which, on the contrary, are used to talking about “electronic security”, in order to adjust their content strategies based on those particular needs and interests. Discovering, in addition, new opportunities for their products and services.
Likewise, this tool also gives brands the possibility to know the language with which their audiences communicate, allowing sales teams to segment and personalize to the maximum their speeches and Content Marketing strategies, in order to generate more leads and close more deals.
When it comes to achieving goals in Content Marketing, not only is it sufficient to select and develop the most attractive and relevant type of content for the audience, but it is also essential to know how and in what way to distribute it.
With tools like True Content® companies’ marketing teams can dig deeper into the issues that their customers and/or leads consume, whether through newsletters or other content formats – such as podcasts and webinars – to position themselves as industry leaders.
In addition, this tool also helps determine the Content Placement Score; an index that shows how likely it is that the article made resembles the best articles published for that audience in the world. So, if there is a high probability of similarity, marketing teams can amplify (distribute) that content by, for example, investing in advertising; placing it in the header as the main headline of their blog (or content hub); or including it within the newsletter so that their sales colleagues send it directly to key customers.
In an increasingly information-laden and over-saturated world, understanding what kind of content the audience is most interested in, and knowing how to communicate it, is vital for brands to achieve their Content Marketing goals. That is why it is essential that companies’ sales and marketing teams use data-based tools and Artificial Intelligence, such asTrue Content® instead of continuing to use traditional resources such as the Buyer Person, which, while helping to clarify important aspects of the audience, is not able to identify their particular tastes, interests, needs and motivations; from which – at the end of the day – the truly successful Content Marketing strategies are built.
