According to a 2017 study conducted by MarketingProfs and the Content Marketing Institute, 23% of B2C marketers said their overall content marketing success was flat year-over-year. But why? The top two reasons cited are strategy issues (49%) and not enough time devoted to content marketing (48%).
Data from DemandMetric even shows content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing and generates about three times as many conversions. With the rise of content marketing, automation and technology to reduce waste and increase yield would suggest that practitioners today are actually doing content right. But the numbers are elusive.
A new paradigm has emerged where content, data and design are converging to power experience business. Brands today must optimize user experiences by leveraging the power of data to influence creative content in the first place. A strong content marketing strategy will deliver both powerful visuals and copy to end users, and we’ve entered an age where analytics and statistics can and should drive creative experiences.
At Truth®, one of the largest and most successful youth tobacco prevention campaigns, we take creative messaging seriously because our mission is not about selling products but saving lives. So how do we approach right-sizing messaging to drive success across our KPIs, which include ad recall, brand awareness, acquisition and repeat engagement?
1. Don’t just rely on qualitative assumptions or insights that you’ve created the best content. Apply data and science to test all content marketing activities.
Following our model for success, marketers must leverage data throughout campaigns to create more individualized profiles of target audiences. We use powerful message delivery systems that isolate people into segments built off of psychographics and behaviors and then conduct live experiential tests using sequential messaging and A/B testing. We further qualify users based on their propensity and qualified stage in the brand lifecycle. But how?
2. Test, test, test. Experiment with word order, word choice, images and others to drive the most conversions, regardless of what your purchase funnel may look like.
Recently, we launched a live test to see which “HERO” creative and content from our latest campaign stood out and drove the most recall and lift. Leveraging the power of Adobe Target for onsite personalization and A/B experimentation, we split audiences into a 50/50 control and experimental group. We were then able to recruit the populations by automatically creating two audience groups: 50% of unique visitors saw one advertising spot and the other 50% saw the other advertising spot. From there, the software quantified and qualified the outcomes of the creative exposure to each audience in real time.
Within just 72 hours, we reached statistical significance at the 99.9% confidence interval showing that one creative treatment had an average lift of 36.2% over our second creative treatment. The power of machine learning natively built into the data stack with intelligence driven by Adobe Sensei proved that one of the advertising spots should be the primary lean in creative for our audience.
The point here is that practitioners must define segments to test against, content to use for the test, then use powerful technologies to create the control and experiment group. Run the tests and you’ll come to conclusions on which segment and creative is the winner.
3. Leverage sequential messaging and audience-based marketing techniques to generate outcomes. Create a more precise user profile by using more hybrid audience stacking approaches such as meshing psychographics, attitudes and behaviors along with understanding where your users are in your purchase funnel.
In a second real-time test, we delivered sequential messaging tests across eight completely unique creative units. We took a large behavioral segment of people and split them into four unique groups to test each set of creative in an isolated environment with no spill of messaging across the four unique groups. Over a period of three weeks, we delivered messages in a “waterfall” to determine which creative not only drove the most views but also repeat visits, time on site and actions across all three categories in our engagement funnel. We determined only one combination of facts and creative drove a significant lift over all other tactics we had in the market. This creative drove more than 30% of all funnel conversions, making it a clear winner in terms of creative.
The bottom line is that practitioners should define segments across the purchase funnel and then create content experiences that drive action in at each level of the funnel. Then, leverage powerful sequential messaging tools to see what content pushes each audience down the purchase funnels and yields positive outcomes.
4. Apply data learnings to content marketing strategies. Once tests are performed and audiences are created, re-apply those learnings over and again.
So why is this so powerful? Because not only can we use this information to power new creative and content in development, marketers can also use this data to optimize both media and onsite experiences to lean into the most impactful visuals and facts that will drive the highest ROI. The most important thing is, do not take a one-and-done approach. Once marketers begin applying experimentation to content strategy and develop audience profiles, they need to continue to fuel the engine. Audiences get stale and need to be refreshed. Creative is always in demand, so if practitioners don’t continue to stress test their content, they are not adapting to consumer choices and changes in behavior.
In sum, whether you’re a public health nonprofit or a major CPG brand, among others, content, creative and data shouldn’t live on separate islands. Leaning into technologies from Adobe, Google, Hubspot or others can drive powerful experiences to the right audiences, while simultaneously measuring the impact of content marketing and creative to continuously optimize and improve outcomes.
We are in the age of big data, and with the technologies available, all teams across marketing can focus efforts on uncovering real content insights to refine future campaigns while also making quick decisions in real time to optimize existing campaigns.
