Four Proven Tactics to Get Tech Buyers to Engage with Your Content.

Four Proven Tactics to Get Tech Buyers to Engage with Your Content.

As TechTarget’s SVP of selling and Product Operations, I’ve spent the last 13 years helping our customers generate many quality content marketing leads. i do know all too well what it’s like to live and die based on open rates, clicks and conversions.

Over the years, my team has tested and implemented many changes to our content marketing strategy to increase engagement, streamline internal processes & revamp our promotional strategy. While most of those changes helped boost engagement and conversion, four tactics still outperform the rest:

1 - Trade persona-based targeting for activity-based targeting

Personas are an excellent way to understand our ideal buyers, improve messaging, and develop more personalized content. What they don’t do is help us identify and have interaction the actual people who are looking for our products. Let’s be honest, sometimes our greatest customers don’t look anything like the personas we have on the shelf. That’s where behavioral data can help.

See, unlike persona targeting, activity-based targeting gives you the unique ability to market your content to people you KNOW are in an active buying motion. which matters. In fact, after analyzing over 6.5 million TechTarget content marketing emails, we learned that once we email people who have been recently researching technology on our network, they’re 5x more likely to interact with our content marketing emails vs. contacts who may fit a perfect buyer persona but are not actively researching.

2 - Determine a content strategy that aligns together with your lead generation goals

In a constant effort to keep leads coming through the door, many folks have a bad habit of creating content that attempts to appeal to everyone yet connect with no one. To avoid this, you've got to pick the lane that best aligns your content with the outcome you want to achieve.

Do you want a high volume of leads who may not perfectly match your ideal customer type, but gives sales more chances to seek out deals and open doors? Or do you want a lower volume of very high-quality prospects who directly match your ICP, but could potentially limit your exposure to in-market deals?

Here are the 2 most common approaches you should consider before developing new content:

High Prospect Volume = Broad Content

Use content themes that appeal to multiple personas. Examples are content that discusses driving revenue, aligning departments, lowering expenses, general tips, and tricks, or content from third-party experts and analysts. Avoid content that’s highly technical, feature-oriented, or uses role-specific language and keywords. Broad content will net a better amount of leads but will include more false positives.

High Prospect Precision = Niche Content

Use content designed to resonate with a selected persona/role or industry based on shared interests and characteristics. for instance , if you would like to attract Security professionals, promote content that uses their common vernacular, speaks to the precise security features of your products, and addresses security pain points, fears, and aspirations. Niche content will net a lower amount of leads but will include fewer false positives.

3 - ensure you’re promoting high-quality content

While creating high-quality content requires longer and more investment, it’s well well worth the effort. Weak content finishes up costing you more in the long run, as it’s harder to market, erodes buyer trust and features a noticeable negative impact on campaign performance.

The difference between strong and weak content is stark – Strong assets perform 1,167% better in email promotions compared to weak assets. the subsequent are some key characteristics of what’s makes a strong versus a weak asset. These observations hold true across the 12,000+ assets we syndicate and promote per annum.

The below table showcases the qualities of strong content vs. weaker content:

Strong vs. Weak Content Assets for Technology Buyers

4 - Personalize your content offer supported a prospect’s most recent interests and actions

In the world of B2C, email personalization is that the norm. We’re all familiar with relevant, timely marketing communications supported our recent purchases, searches, and views. Yet many in B2B haven’t trapped – especially when it comes to how we promote our content.

The good news is it’s not as hard as it used to be. Personalized content marketing at scale sounds daunting, but it doesn’t need to be. a method we started improving our email personalization is by using intent data. rather than just sending everyone on our list the same content, we segmented our prospect list supported recent technology research behavior and promoted content that directly aligned to their interests (similar to the way Amazon promotes new products or services we may be interested in).

To prove that this was well worth the additional effort, we A/B tested it and located that personalization increases email engagement by over 12x! Well worth the extra effort to segment and send.

I hope these takeaways will facilitate your make immediate improvements to your content marketing programs. For more information or advice on how you'll use intent data to improve your marketing and sales performance, read more here.