Improve performance

How to enable powerful content across each function

Takeout1. Content is on the increase. 2. Marketing empowers the whole business to win the content game. 3. Break content compromises on speed, evaluation and optimisation. 4. Use new tools to breed cross-function, brand consistency. 5. Personalise content with real time data feedback.Content generates data, provides data to improveOnce data becomes the common language to unite marketing and business goals, content can assume its proper role in driving results.

"The requirement for marketers to show ROI on their content activities is becoming more widespread. This is not something marketers should hide from. It is a great opportunity to show exactly how much marketing contributes to wider business success."

2015 Content Marketing Benchmarking Report, B2B Marketing

Second only to great customer service, content is an incredibly powerful tool for businesses to influence buying decisions. Marketing knows this. The rub lies in the fact that many companies still approach content without a strategy for ensuring its effectiveness, even though content output and budget is steadily increasing .

Marketing’s opportunity is to empower the entire organisation to win the content game. Start by measuring how content works .. only then can you improve on it.

"Almost half (45 per cent) of B2B marketers have significantly boosted the volume of content they’ve produced in the last 12 months. Looking ahead, a similar proportion (44 per cent) expect to increase the volume even further over the next 12 months."

2015 Content Marketing Benchmarking Report, B2B Marketing

Break the three content compromisesThe great news is, although there is a formidable sea of marketing technology out there, some of it focuses on what will be best practice in a year, not just what is today.And it’s these technologies that can and will enable the transformative marketer to create performance-improving content without compromise.

1. Creation versus designBy identifying simple-to–use, branded platforms, marketing helps the organisation create a seamless look and feel. The functions with the most relevant expertise are empowered to create content that helps customers, without marketing losing control of brand identity.2. Frequency versus qualityWith cloud-based creation tools with built in analytics, rough raw content can be developed fast and tested 'live'. Real time data-flow back to the creator means content can be quickly optimised, re-served, re-evaluated or culled. Weaker ideas are quickly identified and discarded, so time is available to develop stronger concepts: improving productivity, efficiency and ROI.

3. Speed of response versus time to evaluateWith cloud-based content tools incorporating analytics, there’s no need to wait weeks or months for campaign results. Teams can respond with frequent, piecemeal updates.The business's customers immediately benefit from up-to-date information: whether finance (share price charts) HR (compliance documents) or sales (price or feature change), and the business gains efficiency. Personalise properlyAutomation disappoints if we assume it guarantees personalisation. Content must start with a strategy for personalisation, grounded in customer data and analytics.

"The tools we now have are game changing. We can now properly review content performance and personalise our customers’ experience to deliver better commercial results."

Paul Hackett, Managing Partner, Proximity

Proper personalisation results when marketing uses its most valuable asset (customer data) to influence the content of its content, and is able to do so in near real-time. Producing engaging content is still a top content challenge for UK marketers going into 2016.

"A major barometer of the sophistication of an organisation’s inbound marketing operation is the degree to which it is personalising messages and content."

2015 Content Marketing Benchmarking Report, B2B Marketing

Personalisation of content is a primary contributor to content’s engagement status — it’s time marketers get it right.