The Evolution of Content Intelligence at PathFactory

At our annual user conference Compass this week, we announced the addition of our Content Intelligence Center at PathFactory, designed to make it easy for marketers to understand their company’s content inventory at scale. As a leader in Content Intelligence, this latest release strengthens our Intelligent Content Platform with new functionality, surfaces an additional use case for our platform, and delivers a wealth of knowledge about an organization’s content and engagement levels to multiple marketing roles.

The Content Intelligence Center Origin Story

We’ve never shied away from trying to help our customers address their biggest challenges, and have continuously evolved through a combination of internal expertise, customer feedback, executive leaders in marketing and sales, acknowledging industry shifts and trends, and the amazing partnerships we have with leading vendors in our space. It’s the latter that sparked an idea for what would become our Content Intelligence Center, giving us one more reason to be grateful for the leader in account engagement, 6sense.

While working with the 6sense team on our implementation of their amazing ABM platform this year, they asked us to provide a list of key topics that would inform their AI-driven intent model. Measuring intent, identifying the real buyers (those ready to purchase), and creating engaging and meaningful interactions is the path to success. The keywords and phrases we presented were important also in how they would implement, test and iterate, and ultimately measure the success of their solution and the impact on our business. Covering both strategic and tactical areas, this idea of compiling a list of topics or phrases that are important to our go-to-market strategy made a lot of sense and played into how we initiate a majority of campaigns and other marketing programs, whether directly or indirectly. Extracting the highlights from the CMO’s head is often the starting point to building out a successful advertising campaign for example, and syncing with the marketing operations and web teams on measuring the SEO and SEM effectiveness involves heavy research into hundreds or even thousands of keywords and phrases. One important feature when building out our Content Intelligence Center is the addition of what we’ve defined as “key marketing topics,” which are a range of strategic and tactical topics that align to a company’s go-to-market strategy. Examples include business focus areas, industries, names of products or solutions, SEO/SEM documentation, persona targets, and other key words and phrases that marketers want their content to be an authority on.

Content Should Move the Needle

We know that creating new content is expensive and time-consuming, and it often gets wasted. It’s also difficult to measure how effective it is, as often the feedback (when it’s even provided) is anecdotal. We all want to create engaging content that gets consumed and shared by our target audiences. In addition, marketers need a better way to measure, strategize, and plan so they can execute programs more quickly. With this in mind, adding our topics into the mix opened the door for us to build on the AI capabilities in our platform to catalog, research, and provide detailed information on both existing data and new, unknown data. Circling these ideas within my CMO network validated this content gap and brainstormed several immediate use cases; it was clear there was a desire for this functionality.

It was clear that adding additional content intelligence features to our Intelligent Content Platform needed to encompass all product modules, driving benefits for every single PathFactory customer and strengthening the appeal for prospects. The evolution of our AI, data models, and recommendation engines is only as strong as the content library behind it; without strong content, your programs and campaigns will suffer.

3 Steps to a Successful Content Strategy

Creating your content strategy involves taking three key actions:

1. Completing a full content audit, gaining a thorough understanding of your existing content, and research externally produced related content that your core audience is consuming. Content audits are time-consuming and exhausting, but necessary. Without doing this exercise, you cannot complete the next 2 steps effectively. While auditing involves a lot of manual effort, there are ways to speed the process, and make it easier moving forward if it’s addressed on a regular basis, at minimum quarterly or twice a year, depending on your number of assets.
2. Once you know what you have and where it lives, you can make sure it’s properly tagged and ensure consistent descriptions and naming conventions across all your content types, let’s call this content governance. These are essential steps for an intelligent content platform like PathFactory to work. Once you’ve identified all the content you want to retire, update or edit, and use, you can also prioritize new content creation. After you’ve compiled your key marketing topics, our Content Intelligence Center analyzes all your existing content against those topics and automatically provides information such as related keywords, a content relevancy score, and detailed asset information against each of those key marketing topics.
3. Competitive positioning and comparisons are hard. In addition, our Content Intelligence Center also pulls in external search engine results and additional external information to show what people are searching on and consuming related to each topic. Armed with this combined knowledge, your content strategy will be fueled by data-driven insights into both your existing and future content assets.

Power Your Content Strategy with Confidence

As we were building this module’s functionality and looking at the actions it would enable marketers to take, we realized that the benefits this would provide were significant around taking a strategic approach to building and maintaining great content. PathFactory has been driving successful use cases including nurture, web conversion, enablement, and ABM for our customers. The addition of this new use case also affects the other 4 use cases because without great content you cannot have great web conversion numbers, properly nurture, successfully enable your teams, nor can you properly target your top accounts. And, without content intelligence, your content strategy will lack the robust data you need to successfully address and scale these other efforts.

Combining your existing content data with external information and the input of topics provides a compelling way to approach content strategy. With our Content Intelligence Center we want to enable quicker and easier methods for marketers to:

• Understand what content speaks to their organization’s mission and strategic direction
• Improve and streamline their content strategy and development process
• Combine key marketing topics with AI to understand what content really resonates with your core audience and moves the needle
• Surface and identify content gaps and compliance risks for SEO, accessibility, and overall corporate alignment
• Quickly and easily research ideas for new content generation

Oftentimes, content is the last frontier in any campaign strategy and yet we believe it should be the protagonist to success. The PathFactory Content Intelligence Center enables a running start.

Leading with Education

As with any emerging trend, there are several different definitions as to what exactly content intelligence is and how it can be used. We believe it’s important to communicate the benefits of content intelligence for B2B marketers who want to learn the building blocks and strengthen their knowledge in this emerging discipline, as well as define the applicability within our Intelligent Content Platform. And, importantly, to align on a common language or vernacular. We wanted to enable marketers to be able to have a strong enough grounding to be able to have a conversation with their data science or business intelligence peers.

Along with the announcement of our Content Intelligence Center, we also announced the Fundamentals of Content Intelligence certification this week. The course will be available first for PathFactory customers, with the general public to follow. We also believe in leading by example, and to-date, nearly 90% of Pathies have completed their Content Intelligence certification and received their completion certificates. Our course is officially listed on LinkedIn and those who pass can add this to their profiles.

The knowledge gained from completing this course will help marketers speak with confidence on these topics, enable them to champion intelligent ideas within their organization, know how to apply these to address key marketing use cases, and drive new ways to achieve goals and objectives.

If you’re interested in becoming content intelligent, start your path to certification here.