E-commerce has made contextual marketing and smart content marketing famous. B2B digital marketing agencies around the globe have been quick on the uptake. And it's really not difficult to see why. A marketing audit will likely reveal that smart text addresses the major struggle of a long and arduous buyer’s journey. This typically results from the big spend and huge responsibility associated with B2B purchases. But smart content speeds up your buyer’s decision making and conversion from lead to customer by presenting them with the right content at the right time.
Let's start with the basics and say that;
74% of online customers feel frustrated with websites when content (e.g. ads, promotions, offers) have nothing to do with their interests (Janrain). Smart content helps you to prevent such frustrations by addressing two major contextual dimensions: timing and buyer persona.
Buyer Persona: By creating smart content that addresses the interests of your buyer personas, their pain points, goals, wishes, dreams, your website is more likely to keep users browsing and converting.
Timing: Adapting your website content according to timing means tailoring it to a user's lifecycle stage, or their stage in the buyer's journey. By providing the right content when your users are looking for it, marketers can guide buyers to the next stage of the buyers process - and another step closer to becoming a customer.
Smart content takes on many different shapes and sizes and can be used all over your website, emails, landing pages and more:
So, smart content works wonders for eCommerce, but why would it work for b2b, you may ask?
B2b marketing poses unique challenges such as big spend, which means a long and onerous buyer's journey, and, more often than not, buyers who have little time and patience to sift through pages of irrelevant content.
Yes, if you look at it that way you can see why smart content works wonders for b2b: it cuts down the strides between conversion steps by presenting the right content at the right time. Smart content not only saves your buyers time and cuts out unnecesary frustration, but also speeds up the b2b buyer's journey significantly.
Are you ready to give smart content a try? Make sure that you’ve implemented a strategy the HubSpot smart content way, which means using HubSpot’s CMS and having your marketing team execute the following smart content rules:
Before you can begin tailoring your blog posts, vlogs and choice of content for specific buyers it’s critical to understand who you are trying to communicate with. Now is the time to segment your leads according to three dimensions of contextual marketing: buyer persona, timing and the viewer characteristics.
Setting up a segment according to persona could be as general as simply focussing on one or two of your highest-value buyer personas. Want to be more specific than that? Narrow down your segments by using qualifying criteria such as geographic location, traffic source or type of device, and tailor your content accordingly. For example:
Segmenting users by particular geographic location (e.g. region, city or country) gives you the opportunity to create smart content relating to location-specific news and events.
Segmenting leads according to the timing dimension of contextual marketing takes into consideration how far along in the decision-maker process a specific buyer is. In inbound marketing we categorise the steps along the process in terms of lifecycle stages, e.g. lead, subscriber, marketing qualified lead, sales qualified lead, customer, opportunity or promotor. To learn more about the definition of each of these lifecycle stages, take a look at HubSpot’s definitions.
Smart content can be implemented practically anywhere within your new or existing content. You can optimise your email newsletters, website pages, the sidebar of your blog, landing pages, thank you pages, rich text modules, form modules, form fields and Calls-to-Action (CTAs) with smart content. The important thing here is to not go overboard. Start small to ease into the concept by selecting one or two simple areas, such as a smart form field or a couple of personalisation tokens in your email newsletter.
The next step is to optimise your website content for search engines. But keep in mind that search engines don’t pay attention to your smart content, they read your default content for categorising and ranking purposes. So, make sure you focus your SEO efforts on your default content.
And don’t forget about your first-time visitors! Because smart content will only be displayed to website visitors who qualify for one of your smart segments. First-time visitors and other users will be shown your default content. First impressions last, so make sure your default content is valuable and of high quality, or you may never get the chance to welcome a visitor back.
Just as there are many locations where you can use smart content, there are many different types of smart content. Making an appropriate match is vital to success. Here are the types of smart content and their appropriate locations:
Are you having fantasies about delivering a unique online experience for each of your buyer personas? Download your copy of our free ebook now to get access to a framework for creating content that wins over prospects and delights your customers.