When crafting effective content marketing strategies, identifying the appropriate target audience is one of the top priorities. While many B2B marketers understand intuitively who they should be targeting, they’re inherently limited by first-party data collection methods.
Ben Luck, CONTENTgine’s chief data scientist, conducted a deep analysis of our target account lists (TAL) to see if he could identify shortcomings in clients’ account-based marketing efforts and find new ways to optimize them.
He tried something simple: He combined the TALs of three CONTENTgine clients with the company’s own TAL to see what would happen.
The results were groundbreaking.
Engagement soared between ten- and twentyfold, and Luck identified new potential customers for our clients that they never even knew existed. Leveraging these findings could truly be transformative for content marketing strategies.
First-party data is limited by nature
One of the biggest challenges digital marketers face is determining which potential customers are actually interested in their companies’ services, and then crafting marketing campaigns that target them specifically.
Among the most effective ways of gathering that data is tracking user behavior on their own websites, learning about which pieces of content they’re consuming, the pages they’re visiting, and how much time they’re spending there. All of this information is used to gather intent signals, which helps pinpoint the accounts that are most likely in the market for a new product or service and might be ready to make a purchasing decision in the near future.
The downside of relying exclusively on first-party data is that marketers are limited to the accounts that are engaging with their own site. This is helpful, of course, but it doesn’t give them the full scope of the market; it excludes companies and individuals that might be ideal customers but who simply don’t know their services exist.
Building CONTENTgine’s target account lists
That’s where CONTENTgine comes in. We manage one of the world’s largest online databases of B2B content, consisting of a range of case studies, white papers and other assets. Leveraging this content library, we gather deep analytical insights about all the accounts engaging with the content in our database, helping us learn about those accounts and better gauge buyer intent.
Through our internal marketing process, we have sent over 50 million emails, newsletters and microsite web links, all of which contain assets that are selected based on specific accounts’ online engagement activity.
By collecting and analyzing this information, we’re able to organize it along specific demographic and firmographic information — including business segment, company size and job title. We use this data (along with other information we learn about accounts) to gather intent data about each account, helping us create vast TALs that our clients can access and leverage for their own marketing campaigns.
What can clients do with our TALs
The challenge most facing B2B marketers is simple: Finding a more effective (and cost-efficient) way to market their products and services to other companies. As we mentioned above, first-party data is limited, making it difficult to gain a complete view of the market.
In our data analysis, Luck supplemented the most effective strategies from three of our client companies’ TALs with some of the target accounts derived from CONTENTgine’s database that were selected to match our clients’ target audiences.
To say the combined TALs drove higher engagement would be an understatement; by combining the different target account lists into one, companies experienced 10-20x more user engagement. That’s nothing short of shocking.
This is just a sampling of the value our clients gain by working with CONTENTgine. When companies engage us, there’s no added investment required to see the benefits of these combined TALs; as part of our service, we’ll complement your target account list with accounts that we believe you should be targeting, based on our data and research.
Not only will you expand your contents’ exposure, you’ll also unlock new business opportunities.
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