As B2B marketing continues to evolve marketers are continually challenged to identify and attract the right types of buyers and influencers and keep them engaged along the customer journey. As the CMO at i2c – a global payments processor I work for, I deal with this problem every day. Targeting, reach and engagement are all elements of the buying process we must absolutely nail to be successful in building a pipeline and keeping our name in front of the right prospects. It’s also crucial for driving account based marketing (ABM) initiatives.
Targeting Personas, Geographies and Use Cases
One way we are doing this is by targeting curated content which we categorize as “thought leadership” content that is aligned to specific identified use cases and buyer personas. We are working with XIQ to leverage their ability to curate massive amounts of content into high targeted news digests. Currently, we are curating and targeting across the following categories:
- Core Persona (left) – News and information that appeals to our target personas in the payments industry.
- Geography (center) – Curated information around our subject area but specific to a regional market, in this case the Australia/New Zealand payments market.
- Use Case (right) – Trends and stories as the pertain the crypto currency market – a payments use case we support.
Thought leadership curation and delivery at scale
One of the challenges in today’s B2B content marketing approach, combined with the overuse of marketing automation platforms is information overload which leads to content shock. There is too much content for the average person to consume in every industry – and a lot of it isn’t very good.
XIQ helps us solve this problem by leveraging artificial intelligence tools that analyze the best information from thousands of sources instantly. Curating content at this level of scale let’s us provide real value to our target personas by offering industry information that they can’t easily find quickly. The quality of the content output is very high and the result is that we are seeing engagement and open rates in the range of 20%. This means the target personas we are going after content they love. And, we are not experiencing a significant level of unsubscribes and opt-outs that plague marketing automation approaches.
Viral attraction – gaining subscribers
Another key aspect of the approach is positioning the news digest as thought leadership. Doing this makes it non-threatening to the reader. We curate our own content into the digests as well, in the form of blog posts that link back to our site or to thought leadership projects we do with vertical media partners. We simply ask readers to share the digest within their own companies and networks if they like what they are reading. This helps us acquire subscribers directly into our marketing database. And, what we are seeing is that the right persona targets are virally subscribing – a low key and low cost way to gain valuable contacts we can then market too.
