Unleashing the Power of Content Intelligence: What It Is and Why It’s Important

July 26, 2023July 27, 2023 Stan

As marketers, we know the value and importance of content and delivering it to our customers at the right time to increase the power of our campaigns and drive leads. To measure the success of the content being delivered, or its ROI, we rely on the data captured from content delivery tools, ad, and marketing automation platforms. There are hurdles to gaining this data with increasing privacy laws and adjustments by major tech companies to lessen consumers’ digital fingerprints (re: Apple Privacy). This is where content intelligence comes to the rescue.

Content Intelligence gives us the ability to capture the data we need to deliver timely and personalized campaigns as well as to build our strategy around customer personas and determine high-value accounts to develop relevant content and campaigns that will hopefully generate a more robust, and warm, lead funnel. According to Hubspot research, “over a third of marketers believe that data has a major impact on strategy by helping them reach their target audience, create more powerful marketing content, [and] understand which marketing strategies are most effective.” (Hubspot, 2023)

What is content intelligence?

Content intelligence is the use of software that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to conduct market research that gains insight into the most effective types of content that marketers can then use to build out their content strategy. Essentially, over time, by analyzing the behaviors of those consuming content along with market and competitor analysis, the software learns what content your audience is most interested in.

Content intelligence can also be used to create experiences that are tailored completely to the user by allowing them to choose their adventure, being served up new and relevant content as they go. By having a library of content available, the marketer will be able to curate content in the software and then by tagging and learning, will offer recommendations and journeys to each visitor that is relevant and timely.

Why is content intelligence so important?

Data

Traditional means of capturing data no longer serve marketers well in helping them to deliver best-in-class content and campaigns. Content intelligence, through AI and machine learning, can uncover engagement and customer information, such as what they like (or don’t), what other types of content they are consuming, and details about their topics of interest.

Customer data points like business vertical and position can also be captured through gated content, but ultimately the goal of content intelligence is to draw greater insights to help the marketer with creating deeper segmentations that will target the right audience and deliver the right content at the right time.

Traditional B2B decision processes are changing. It is more likely that there will be a team of individuals making buying decisions over a single decision-maker. “Over 80% of purchases now involve complex buying groups, and 60% have more than four people. That means champions, influencers, decision makers, ratifiers, and end users.” (Pathfactory, 2023) That means, only targeting specific job titles such as VPs likely won’t get the conversion you are looking for.

Through content intelligence you can build out personalized experiences for each of these individuals, helping them to make quicker and more effective decisions. They will also appreciate the attention to detail and the curated experience you are providing which they have likely come to expect from non-B2B, consumer-related industries.

Return on investment

As marketing budgets and teams continue to be cut it is more important than ever to prove the ROI of your campaigns. You are investing a lot in developing content and the tools that deliver it so you need to prove that it’s working and worth it. It is important to choose content intelligence software that has a strong analytics engine. The tools should be able to deliver three types of data:

Content engagement level data (number of impressions, how long they spent engaging, path of engagement, etc.)
Content comparison data (identifying similarities and differences between content types and the engagement each received)
Content-to-opportunity ROI (Closed opportunity revenue/number of impressions)

Having this information will allow marketers to make decisions based on numerical data rather than assumptions or only on email or ad click-throughs which by themselves don’t prove engagement with or value of the content itself. Choosing a content intelligence tool that has a CRM integration is critical so that the opportunity data can be shared and sales teams can use the data to speak to content that their customers have consumed.

Which is the right content intelligence tool for your business

Many content intelligence tools on the market offer different services. When deciding on which to choose it’s important to identify the problem you are trying to solve, or what you as an organization need, and then the solutions the software provides to meet those needs. Key items to consider are:

Analytics engine – what data will they be able to provide, how reliable it is, and how it handles privacy
Integrations – what platforms from your martech stack does it work with (ie. marketing automation platform, CRM, webinar tools, video hosting services, website, etc.)
Automation – will the software take the analytics and AI to create algorithms that automatically create content journeys
Customer success support and education – it’s important to know you have a team behind you that will help guide you through the process of building out your content intelligence strategy and implementation. If things don’t go to plan, will they be there to help, and do they have the resources for you to learn from?

Some popular solutions are Optimizely, Hubspot, and Pathfactory. Pathfactory, for example, uses its brand of engagement data to curate personalized experiences for visitors by presenting them with personalized content delivered by AI-generated recommendations. They use the data they collect to report on high-performing industries, accounts, and which content and channels are working best.

They integrate with most of the big names in each category, such as Salesforce.com, Oracle Marketing Cloud, Adobe Marketo, Vimeo, YouTube, DemandBase, WordPress, Google Analytics, and more. They also have a customer success team that trains and supports from pre to post-implementation. To see Pathfactory in action check out how content recommendations are used throughout the Relationshipone.com site.

As the marketing world continues to lift and shift, including tools like content intelligence in your martech stack will become more and more critical in being able to deliver quality content to engaged audiences while continuing to learn and grow from the data being provided.

To learn about other ways to create personalized content experiences for your customers, check out this blog post on Content Recommendations with Oracle Guided Campaigns, and as always feel free to reach out with any questions.