Engagement in the Netflix Era – New Research on Always-on Nurturing

Hot off the presses
PathFactory released research via the Marketo blog on how the on-demand era has changed the game for B2B marketing – and what digital marketers can learn from Netflix.

PathFactory (formerly LookBookHQ)’s Insight Guide reveals the 7 things you need to know to engage your prospects in the Netflix era. As a Marketo LaunchPoint partner, we’re thrilled to publish our new research on the Marketo blog because Marketo customers live and breathe engagement. But even the savviest digital marketer has a difficult time getting and holding on to their prospect’s attention.

If any company has mastered the art and science of holding on to attention, it’s Netflix. Virtually everything Netflix does – from what quality content it produces or licenses from third parties to how it personalizes the viewing experience – is designed to hold on to your attention and keep you tuned in longer.

Engaged prospects want to binge but you’re only giving them drips
There are some stark contrasts between the Netflix on-demand model and how B2B marketers are delivering their content today. Traditional lead nurture campaigns, for example, work more like old-school network television, dripping one piece of content (think of it as an episode) per week. The problem with this approach is that it’s too slow: In the on-demand era, your audience is really busy and impatient. Engaged prospects want to consume a lot of content in a very short time and they don’t want to wait. Case in point: When is the last time you watched just one episode of House of Cards in a sitting? Chances are it was more like a half-season in one long binge-watching session.

Always-on nurturing
Marketers today need to be always nurturing, and they need to deliver their content in such a way that engaged prospects can “self-nurture” at their own pace. If your engaged prospects want to binge, let them. By embracing the idea of on-demand or “always-on” nurturing, marketers can:

• Nurture faster – Generate more and better-qualified leads faster. The “bursty” behavior of engaged prospects can generate lead scores in minutes and reduce time-to-MQL from months to days.
• Reduce or eliminate lead decay – Prevent leads from going stale by doing more with your prospects’ attention while you have it and accelerating engaged prospects through your funnel.
• Improve content ROI – With better engagement metrics about what types of content your prospects are actually reading or watching, you can do more of what works.
• Send fewer emails – Traditional nurture campaigns drip-feed prospects a single content asset per hard-won click, forcing you to send six emails over six weeks to try to get your prospects to engage with the six pieces of content you need them to read. That’s a lot of emails (and a lot of clicks) when you could be using a Netflix-style always-on nurturing model to turn a single click into engagement with multiple pieces of content.

Read the Insight Guide
To learn more, read our new Insight Guide for B2B marketers: Engagement Marketing in the Netflix Era: 7 Things You Need to Know.