For content marketers, finding out that the campaign you worked so hard on didn’t hit the spot is incredibly frustrating. It’s even worse when the campaign was for a must-hit event, such as your company’s coveted user conference, and your team missed delivering on a key KPI for marketing qualified leads.
More often than not, the problem boils down to your Marketing team not knowing your ideal customer profile (ICP) well. As a result, content marketing efforts failed to spark prospects’ interest. The opportunity, and all that effort, were wasted.
If that scenario is the sort of thing that keeps you up at night, then read on… because it doesn’t have to.
Why mistargeting happens: you don’t know what you don’t know
Many ICP identification exercises start in a vacuum, where opinions from stakeholders in Sales, Marketing, and the C-Suite guide the output. When this happens, the absence of a data-driven approach usually leads to content marketing letdowns.
With the advent of Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) and tools such as Google Analytics, there’s a way to avoid the guesswork and arguing. You can finally present information about what types of users are visiting your site, using your mobile application, and engaging with campaigns. Your marketing team can be well equipped to challenge incorrect opinions and anecdotal evidence with hard facts.
Even a quarter’s worth of this data can be a gold mine to identify who is engaging with your brand.
Identifying your ideal customer profile (ICP)
Simple embedded tags on your website and mobile application for Google Analytics or your Customer Data Platform of choice can collect behavioral data for both anonymous and known users. You’re required to give end users the ability to opt-out, but brand loyalists are typically ok with sharing personal details because they trust your brand and are expecting value in return.
This 1st party customer data can now be tied with things like a utm source for anonymous users or an identifier such as email or telephone number for known users, giving you the basis for developing your ideal customer profile (ICP).
Create audience cohorts for your ICP
Both CDPs and Google Analytics offer you the ability to create Audiences: segmented cohorts of users grouped together based on criteria that you set. For example, you can create an audience cohort to show how many users came to your website from a particular utm source. This can be your KPI for a particular campaign engagement. More complex Audience criteria can identify users following a particular journey on your website, a real time running list of users that signed up for a demo, or users in the last 30 days of a free trial.
Once you have these audiences set, you can do so much with them. For example, it’s possible to feed these lists to Facebook, LinkedIn, or Google Ads to discover lookalike audiences. These lookalike audiences can quickly enlarge your targeted surface area and help you run an effective marketing campaign.
Content marketers designing campaign landing pages or email communications also need the ability to author and preview content that matches with the right audience. That’s where feeding those coveted audiences into your Enterprise CMS comes in.
Supercharge your Enterprise CMS with customer data
An Enterprise CMS, such as OpenText™ TeamSite™, can enable authors to create personalized content variants based on targeted Audiences. Imagine building a dynamic page that serves up 3 different content flavors depending on the utm source, such as Facebook, Google Search, and Instagram. This is a great way to craft more compelling experiences for anonymous users.
For known users you could take things even further, making your web pages or mobile app experiences highly personalized. For the user that signed up for a demo and returned to use it after a few days, you could offer an in-app promotion tailored just for them. You could also send promotional emails out to users holding items in their carts to compel them to take the last step.
Now, all these personalization examples have been commonplace for savvy content marketers working with their developers to write code that offers personalization at runtime. Unfortunately, the existing process is archaic and inefficient. Non-technical content marketers see their projects stalled due to Jira tickets. Asana/Trello workflow assignments taking too long to be completed because developers are tied up. A CMS that can let content marketers design and publish data-driven personalized pages on their own can dramatically improve your ability to bring experience innovations to the web and react to emerging opportunities.
Intrigued? Learn more by contacting us and see how TeamSite’s Experience Studio, powered by OpenText™ Experience CDP and Google Marketing platform, can make authoring personalized content a reality for content marketers without leaving them beholden to developers.
Author: Shabih Syed, Senior Principal Solutions Consultant
