In this opinion piece, B&T’s resident tech-head and editor of Which-50.com, Andrew Birmingham, says many brands get the content marketing right but forget one big thing – the customer experience that should go with it…
Much of today’s content marketing conversation focuses on creation and distribution. Now a new style of marketing tech provider is emerging to solve an increasingly critical problem – ensuring the content is delivered as a great experience.
Research by companies such as Sitecore and others demonstrates the direct link between customer experience and financial returns, but a lot of the emphasis of marketing technology is on efficiency of the creative process – where companies like Adobe lead, or in distribution where Adobe and Salesforce compete with other platforms like Oracle and Marketo or even amplification services like Outbrain and Taboola.
By contrast, content experience, as delivered by businesses like Toronto based Uberflip is a relatively new field.
In simplistic terms Uberflip operates at a layer between a traditional web CMS (like for instance Sitecore ) and marketing automation platform like Marketo. Uberflip’s CEO Yoav Schwartz (pictured below) recently told Which-50 the reason content experience is critical is simply that it is the point at which the audience engages with the content and with the brand. “It’s where the audience become leads, and it’s the experience that is used to push those prospects down further into the funnel.”
Uberflip is built on the idea that the marketing tech stack is based upon four pillars.
“It starts with creation. Content marketers have predominantly figured out how to create content, but then they often skip straight to distributing that content. But when they want to measure what’s working they realize they can’t understand it because they have skipped over something very important. And that’s the pillar we help with with – its the experience pillar.”
According to Schwartz, brands need different content for difference personas and different topics … Or even for an account for account based marketing.”
By providing greater engagement for lead generation, for instance, a marketer can then tap into a platform like Marketo (an Uberflip partner) or other marketing automation solutions.’
“We make it easier to get premium assets without requiring landing pages or needing to involve other people to create those additional assets (such as an IT department or an agency).”
“We really streamline the process of understand what’s working with the analytics we provide.”
Diving deeper
“Content experience is really important beyond just engagement and lead generation,” he said.
“It is extremely important if you want to get into sales enablement. As the marketer you want to be able to control the content. And you still want sales people to have access to the content buy you don’t want to give them too much control you want to give.”
“And even further down the funnel,”he says “You want your success team to be able to create the right experiences for existing customers where there is potential for upsell and so forth.”
Web sites are often a static representation of a company’s brochure on the web, he says. “The site doesn’t change that often, but your content changes constantly.”
