Empower Self-Nurturing With PathFactory’s New Explore Product And A Smarter Recommend
B2B marketing faces many challenges but, in 2017, many of those come down to effectively using and measuring the success of content. As the sheer volume of content produced by B2B companies has increased, the channels through which marketers can distribute that content haven’t kept pace. Meanwhile, buyers’ attention spans continue to decrease as more brands fight for mindshare.
We hear this all the time from our customers – primarily demand generation marketing leaders at enterprise B2B companies. They’re always trying to do more with less and they’re expected to get better ROI at the same time. Budgets and headcounts just aren’t increasing as fast as expectations. It’s not easy being a B2B marketer these days.
This reality is reflected in the data, too. Generating traffic and leads, and proving ROI, are the leading challenges marketers face in 2017. At the same time, however, somehow a whopping 65% of B2B content goes unused. There just isn’t enough bandwidth to distribute all of that content to the right buyers at the right time.
Accommodating natural buying behavior to achieve better outcomes
These insights strongly informed where we wanted to go next with PathFactory’s Intelligent Content Platform. As a company, we’re obsessed with solving these problems for B2B marketers.
As we reviewed our conversations with customers alongside the latest data, we decided to double down on one of the foundational aspects of our platform: helping B2B marketers empower their buyers to self-nurture.
Since the dawn of marketing automation platforms, marketers have been trying to control their prospects’ buying behavior by measuring clicks and converting leads through funnel stages. Unfortunately, it’s time to face the hard truth of marketing: the buying process rarely goes as smoothly as you’d like. When human beings are interacting with your marketing (and they are), it’s chaos.
The good news is that marketing technologies today allow you to measure the chaos. The bad news: you can’t control it. Not much of it, anyway.
Smart marketers – the ones who are winning – are embracing the chaos by getting out of the way. They’re rethinking their landing pages. They’re measuring content consumption instead of clicks and form fills. And they’re helping potential customers accelerate the buying process by delivering more relevant content per click than traditional drip nurture and one-and-done campaigns. As a result, these self-nurturing, content bingeing buyers stand out from low-quality leads that are nowhere near ready to buy.
Today, we’re proud to unveil new and improved self-nurturing capabilities that are now available in PathFactory’s Intelligent Content Platform.
Introducing Explore, a new type of content experience
First, we are launching Explore, an exciting new product that allows marketers to aggregate relevant content and create beautiful landing pages, microsites, and newsletters in a matter of minutes. It’s an easy-to-use, omni-channel solution that doesn’t require expensive designers or developers to create tailored content destinations. Explore pages look great on mobile, desktop, and when they’re integrated into email campaigns or newsletters.
There are many ways to use Explore pages to encourage your audience to consume more content on the destination side of the click:
- Nurture campaigns: Don’t waste your hard-earned clicks on one-and-done content experiences. Encourage people to binge on your content and self-nurture.
- Post-event content round ups: Never choose between video, slides, recaps, or other valuable content assets again. Let your audience choose for themselves!
- Resource centers: Aggregate related content in resource centers that don’t force visitors to wade through every piece of content you’ve ever published.
- Account-based marketing: Create personalized content destinations for target accounts at scale without having to burn the midnight oil.
Making Recommend (even) smarter
The second significant area where we have improved content self-nurturing is with our AI-powered product, Recommend. While the machine learning technology still displays the most relevant content to visitors, now they can take over control by filtering content by topic type when they see something that really interests them.
For example, say an anonymous visitor lands on your website all about transportation. You might display three pieces of content on three different topics: planes, trains, and automobiles. (Yes, I love that movie!) However, what the visitor really wants to learn about is trains so they simply sort on that topic and all train-related content is displayed.
This allows marketers to showcase many pieces of content for many different audiences while allowing a combination of AI and visitor self-discovery to do the work for you in providing the most relevant content experience. Additionally, you can also see exactly what topics each visitor is interested in to better understand buyer intent.
