November 04, 2019 Andrew Warren-Payne
This post is the latest in our series on B2B marketing optimization and how to take your marketing efforts to the next level.
Throughout the past few posts, we’ve talked a lot about driving engagement and how it shouldn’t stop just because marketing has handed over a lead. Equally, engagement shouldn’t cease once sales closes a deal and customer success takes over. We want to keep buyers and customers, alike, engaged throughout their journey.
One way to keep engagement going is to have a place where buyers and customers can access content anytime they want it. One way to do that is to create content hubs where anyone can access a veritable buffet of information as they see fit.
Demand generation portals such as NetLine are well-known for acting as one-stop-shops for a buyer’s needs. But you should also create and optimize your own – and if you’re on ON24 customer, ON24’s Engagement Hub can help you create one. Read below to find out why and how.
Why are content hubs so valuable?
There are a whole host of reasons why content hubs are valuable to both your customers and leads, and to the marketing team as an engagement tool.
- Content hubs provide an opportunity for continual engagement. Whether your content hubs are used for early-stage marketing or existing customers, providing a content hub allows your audience to access content whenever it wants in one location. And as you can continually update them, there are ample opportunities for optimization.
- Content hubs allow buyers to educate themselves easily at their own pace. Whether someone wants to learn everything as quickly as possible by consuming binge-worthy content, or if they prefer to ‘snack’ on content over time, having a single place allows them to engage however suits them without needing to search across multiple locations.
- Content hubs can be personalized to fit your exact customer. This can be particularly valuable if you’re engaged in account-based marketing or are targeting specific industries, roles or verticals.
- Content hubs provide a resource for marketing, sales and customer success. If anyone wants to signpost a lead or a customer to further information, content hubs provide an easy way to do that.
What is content bingeing and why is it valuable?
Netflix and other streaming services have made binge-watching, where viewers devour an entire TV series in one sitting, a common occurrence.
B2B marketers can encourage prospects and customers to consume content in a similar manner through content hubs. Presenting lots of content of value in one place entices them to engage more than if they had simply been put in a drip campaign or nurtured slowly over time. This offers the following benefits:
- Bingeing allows for rapid learning. Whether your prospect is trying to educate themselves on how to solve a problem, or a customer is learning how to use your product, bingeing allows that process to be accelerated.
- Bingeing provides intent data. The information collected as a user engages can be used by marketing, sales and customer success to help tailor their approach to that individual.
- Bingeing helps to develop and strengthen relationships more quickly. As people become more acquainted with your company and its offerings, conversations – and the conversions that follow – become easier.
How can content hubs and content bingeing be optimized?
If you haven’t yet created a content hub, start off by creating key pages with compelling value propositions. Grab the viewer’s attention with titles and calls to action expressing how watching your webinars and downloading your content will help with a certain pain point or get them through a particular stage of their journey. You’ll also want to embed and organize multimedia assess that will entice viewing such as clips, webinar sign-ups and downloads of other assets that viewers can engage with.
Once you’ve done so and have a performance baseline to optimize against, here are a few things to try to optimize the performance of your content hubs:
-
- Test different content. Explore both different themes and messages, and different types of content. Try embedding and organizing multimedia assets that will entice viewing such as clips, webinar sign-ups and downloads of other assets that viewers can engage with.
- Create and test multiple content hubs. See if different approaches work with different audiences, and use the lessons to improve your other hubs.
- Use marketing automation to drive relevant visits. Whether you’re trying to push a prospect over the line to become qualified, or if you’re trying to reengage a customer that hasn’t been seen in a while, invite them to check out your content hub. You can also use ad targeting to create a custom audience of people who haven’t turned up recently and bring them back in.
Do you want to find out about how to create a binge-worthy webinar series? Find out how Magento did so by watching our on-demand webinar on ‘The Netflix Effect: Building a Binge-Worthy Webinar Series’.