Content Marketing

Atomisation and the art of aligning content to a buyer’s journey

6 Jun , 2018  

In 2017, mobile devices overtook the desktop to become our primary access to the internet. But it’s too easy to think of a smartphone, a tablet or a phablet as just another avenue into our online utopia. What Mobile has done is to fundamentally change customer buying behaviours. It’s created an always-on culture and driven a preference for self-education. So the marketing challenge is not just about creating mobile-friendly content. You have to think about these changing consumer demands.

Customers want to get straight to the information that they think they want. They won’t wade through a white paper anymore, if someone else can take them directly to the content that’s most relevant to them.

Content marketing has been a hot topic for some time now, so it’s surprising how many companies are still not that smart about it. This is usually because they fall into the trap of talking about what they want to say rather than what the customer needs to hear. We did a survey of more than 50 software resellers in 2017 and this is what we found:

  • Around 80% of online content was focused on about 40% of the customer’s buying journey (mostly around the Solution stage);
  • Only about 15% talked about customer education, leaving less than 5% for vendor selection (sometimes nothing was dedicated to on-boarding!);
  • 20-30% of highly impactful content is lost in other content (usually because it’s written as part of bigger pieces targeting other parts of the buyer journey);
  • Whilst about 60% could easily be repurposed;

What this means essentially, is that the majority of companies still place a huge reliance on the customer to figure out what it is that they do. Interested parties are still expected to wade through reams of content to find out what they want. And worse, it doesn’t need to be this way!.

Content Atomisation

One of the key tenants of a successful digital marketing strategy is the ability to map online content to the consumer’s buying journey. Content atomisation is an incredibly powerful modern marketing technique to help you do this. It’s the process of breaking content into more digestible and searchable formats so that it can be more closely mapped to a customer’s decision-making process.

Agile provides their clients with a digital content audit service that will analyse all of their customer-facing content and map it to a perspective buying journey to see where the predominant focus is and therefore, where the gaps are. The audit will draw out key content highlighting what should be atomised, how it should be meta-tagged, what can be amended and what needs to be re-written.

This also allows the marketer to measure the impact of individual content and messaging much more effectively and to test new content more readily.

Good marketing people in the digital era, are using mobile-driven consumption preferences to take customers onto the next stage of their buying journey. The key to their success is providing the reader with a choice of options on different mediums to enable them to decide how they want to consume that information. That sounds like a laborious task, but as Microsoft’s partner analysis alludes to, most companies already have the content, they just need to repurpose it.

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