Ridding the world of marketing crap
And good riddance
It’s not often that you sit through a webinar and come away with some real insights. Fortunately, today’s webinar conducted by Mintigo on improved lead generation through “Content Intelligence” delivered — and hit on some important truisms facing marketers.
As a company that espouses the “power of relevant marketing”, Mintigo struck a chord. Zeroing in on the content marketing deluge – i.e. “crap” – that is drowning customers and prospects, the Mintigo folks got to the heart of the matter: effective content cannot just entertain and inform, it must contain material that “authentically matters to the people you’re trying to reach”.
So how do you make this determination? It boils down to segmenting your content based on your prospects’ identifiable traits and self-proclaimed areas of interest. “Content Intelligence” uses more personalized and relevant communication to clusters of targeted prospects based on big data analysis of multiple sources (think websites visited, news preferences, blogs read, social postings and more). By extracting the needs and interests of prospects, you can segment them into interest groups, clusters and personas.
Make no mistake, this is hard work. And Mintigo is the first to say so despite the fact they offer up what they declare to be the world’s first Customer Search Engine that automates a lot of the heavy lifting involved.
One of the key challenges of content marketing boils down to producing enough fresh content – and figuring out what topics to communicate – to continually engage targeted prospects with information that is highly relevant in order to trigger more click-throughs. And this means that engaging the right content development shop to help fulfill this need is becoming one of the most strategic decisions facing marketing departments today. The days of “spray and pray” marketing are history. Welcome to the era of content intelligence.