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Last year, it was almost impossible to avoid data in business headlines. The rapid development of generative AI has revolutionized the speed of information processing and opened the door to rapid change in most industries.
Inflation was also on an upward trajectory, further exacerbating the uncertain climate in which businesses currently have to operate.
The pressure is on for marketers, but the potential to do more with their data sets is increasing every day.
Given the emphasis on marketing team outcomes, here are three predictions for how outstanding content marketing practitioners will leverage data in the coming year.
1. Hyper-personalized content beats alternative content
Personalization has become a content marketing watchword in recent years, and its relevance continues unabated.
Generative AI is dramatically increasing the speed of content creation, so hyper-personalized experiences differentiate between content that people engage with and forgotten content that offers few lessons to those analyzing performance. .
Hyper-personalization means more than just changing your name. Hyper-personalization makes changes to the user journey more complex, for example rules that add or hide certain pages or videos based on the reader's preferences.
Businesses already know that personalization drives better content marketing results. In our recent research, 98% of businesses say personalization increases customer loyalty. This is a very important advantage when customers are on a tight budget and need to make more careful spending decisions.
Achieving the highest level of personalization requires going back to the basics of psychology. With the proliferation of content, attention spans are finite and increasingly limited, so metrics such as views only scratch the surface. You can collect more audience behavior data in the form of online documents through features like surveys, allowing you to directly collect opinions and adjust your content accordingly.
2. Email will continue to decline in B2B marketing strategies
Teams looking to rely on hyper-personalization to create more engaging content need deep and extensive data sets to work with, and email is well-suited to delivering it at scale. It is becoming increasingly clear that this is not the case. Privacy changes have lowered open rates and made it even more difficult to understand user intent.
Our research found that 46% of consumers rate personalized experiences as just “average,” and marketers are unlikely to change this attitude given inhibitors. . Marketers must work harder than ever to deliver consistently high-quality personalization to their targets.
To create content that impacts competitors, marketers can look to formats that allow them to collect first- and zero-party data, such as online documents. This gives you visibility that email campaigns miss. These are the paths to optimized content that marketers will pursue in 2024.
Brands can use data about how readers interact with content and what leads to conversions to assess whether their content is quickly and reliably driving leads through the funnel. is needed. New digital formats can automatically aggregate such data, providing better insight into a broader range of engagement metrics, from bounce rates to click-throughs.
Expanding and deepening the datasets extracted will give your team the extra validation and confidence they need when evaluating your marketing strategy.
3. Marketing teams should rethink data-driven decision-making
If your team makes changes to your marketing strategy over the next year, you need to demonstrate ROI. Especially as budgets tighten and decision-making processes become more pipeline-focused. The best way for a marketer to prove his or her worth in such an environment is with a roster of powerful, relevant data that goes beyond his own KPIs.
Economic uncertainty means that every purchasing decision a company makes is risky. As a result, the sign-off progresses further up the seniority hierarchy. For marketers, that means the story they tell senior board members needs to be complete. More detailed datasets built to personalize content allow teams to influence decisions further down the funnel into the sales pipeline. Visualizing who shared what and who participated and why can be extremely helpful when trying to prove your point with data.
Again, being able to reliably collect that data depends on the format of the content. Older distribution formats like PDF don't communicate lead engagement to users, making it difficult for marketing and sales to align, and it's difficult to draw connections between open rates and lead generation. On the other hand, visually stimulating and hyper-personalized content that grabs attention and generates feedback directly from your audience can help ensure that your marketing strategy is as aligned as possible with your future buyers and current customers. Masu.
Final thoughts: Data reigns supreme
The team that wins in 2024 will need to look back at the previous year and rethink their approach to data.
Driving leads, pipeline, and revenue are now on every marketer's mind, and the most successful content marketers appeal to fundamental principles about what their audience wants to see, and, importantly, what their audience wants to see. Use the format to your advantage by knowing what you want. So I'll do it.
Connecting more strongly with your audience through a methodical approach to data can mean the difference between those who make a positive impression on your company overall and those who struggle to prove ROI.
More resources on data-driven marketing
The biggest hurdle to success with data-driven B2B marketing [Research]
Three Pillars of Marketing Growth: Data, Technology, and Creativity
A 12-step guide to using data to drive marketing actions
8 rules of data-driven marketing
