It’s Personal: The New Role of Content and its Influence on Revenue

Eight seconds–that’s the average amount of time people are willing to spend reading a message. Rising competition, interactive technologies, and a host of post-pandemic distractions have changed how customers consume information. For marketers, this means one thing: a product or service pitch is no longer enough to drive an audience through the sales funnel. 

Succinct, personalized content captures your audience’s attention and drives bottom line growth. The secret? You must know your audience, communicate with empathy, and offer solutions to customer problems as part of your content strategy.

You must know your audience, communicate with empathy, and offer solutions to customer problems as part of your content strategy.

Below, I’ll highlight how you can achieve measurable success with content in a digitally saturated world and use strategic, customer-centric messaging to influence revenue and win loyalty.

3 truths that have changed content

Change is inevitable but not always unpredictable. A host of external and internal factors can precede change. As societies evolve, so must business.

As I learned in a recent course, three truths inspire changes to content in this era of customer-first engagement:

1. The volume of messaging people face will continue to surge
2. Even sophisticated technologies can’t add extra hours to the day
3. The world is becoming increasingly more complex

Since marketers have a significant responsibility to be attuned to changes in consumer behavior, it only makes sense for content to evolve accordingly.

Consider these stats from Rhoan Morgan’s book, Change Agents: The Radical Role of Today’s CMO:

• 74% of customers feel frustrated when website content is not personalized
• 75% of online customers expect help within five minutes
• 87% of customers think brands need to do better at providing a consistent experience
• Strong omnichannel strategies increase customer retention by an average of 56%

The bottom line? If you can give people a solution to their challenges, they may give you their time. It’s content that delivers that solution and helps fuels the effectiveness of your other marketing tools.

The bottom line? If you can give people a solution to their challenges, they may give you their time. It’s content that delivers that solution and helps fuels the effectiveness of your other marketing tools.

Content marketing vs. content strategy: how to incorporate experiences

It’s been said that even the best experiences are overrated unless you share them with someone else. This is key to developing relevant, engaging content because central to shared experience is the sentiment that “you’ve been there.” Knowing how to apply shared experiences across the buyer journey, however, takes some strategic finesse.

First, let’s clarify the difference between content strategy and content marketing since the terms are sometimes used interchangeably:

Content Marketing

• Involves the creation of written and visual elements (e.g.blog posts, social media messaging, emails, whitepapers, e-books)
• Crafted to drive specific, profitable action
• Serves as a means of connecting and engaging with your customers

Content Strategy

• Builds a bridge between the information provided to an audience and the call to action
• Uses content in various channels
• Establishes touchpoints and allows for measurement along the customer journey

Once you know who your customers are, what challenges they face, and how they prefer to communicate, you can begin to incorporate the experiences you share with your customers and prospects into your content and its strategy.

• It’s within the strategy that you plan for and place shared experiences through touchpoints
• It’s within the content itself  that your shared experiences reach and engage the audience and propel  them along in their journey

How to incorporate experiences

• First, think about what stories you will tell and how you’ll capture those experiences (e.g., social listening, customer surveys, analytics)
• Next, determine how you will tell your story. You may opt for plain facts or shape content through storytelling arts such as video testimonials
• When you move to the distribution level of your content strategy, think about how all stories come together on any given channel

Remember, a good content strategy should tell your story in many ways–video, blog posts, eBooks, whitepapers, and emails – and ensure all stories on each channel match the experience you aim to deliver. The end goal is to use shared experiences to help shape the buyer journey from prospect to customer and remind your customers that they can trust you to solve their problems.

The end goal is to use shared experiences to help shape the buyer journey from prospect to customer and remind your customers that they can trust you to solve their problems.

Quick tip: Learn more about how we simplify strategy at DemandLab.

How to tie content to revenue

Once your strategy is in place, and you’ve laid the foundation for more empathetic and outcome-focused content, you can begin to use that content to influence revenue. Here’s how to build a basic framework for tying content to revenue:

1. Listen to your audience. The development of customer-centric content is not a one-time activity. Consistent listening is essential to growing your audience; their changing needs may require shifts in content messaging. Engage frequently in two-way dialogue, then implement direct suggestions or feedback from your customers to facilitate accurate content revenue attribution later in the process.
2. Customize the experience. Collect as much information as possible about your customers across all touchpoints, and then select the data that is most significant for tailored messaging. According to campaignmonitor.com, leveraging segmentation in the right way allows you to increase revenue by as much as 760%.
3. Determine your core metrics. The proper messaging strategy should have key performance indicators (KPIs) built in to help you track your progress and tie back to revenue. Be sure to measure performance over several months and across all areas of the conversion funnel.
4. Leverage technology and analysis to track results. Use integrated marketing automation technology to demonstrate results. A good martech stack has capture mechanics and analytics solutions to measure leads and aggregate data from various channels for reporting.

Elevate the customer to support growth

Content marketing that supports bottom line growth now looks and sounds like the voice of the customer. Gone are the days of high-volume product messaging through every available channel. Today’s content is personalized to offer quick solutions to customer challenges and is supported by data that elevates customers’ individual desires, preferences, and behavior. By using content to sell experiences, you can cut through the noise of a digitally saturated world and improve the metrics most proven to generate revenue.

See how DemandLab helped one company use content best practices to develop and organize their content and brand-strategy materials to scale and align core messaging with their brand. Have questions or need support for driving conversions through content? The DemandLab team can help.