Marketing software is one of the most popular topics in technology today. Even though it’s somewhat of a meta-category, marketing software can cover a variety of different concepts, including marketing automation, digital experience and personalization. Marketing software continues to evolve and diversify, and new solutions continue to enter the space as digital technologies advance and market demands change.
Given the amount of activity in this space, it can be extremely difficult for B2B marketers to create content that users find engaging and compelling.
That’s where CONTENTgine comes in. We manage a database containing more than 500,000 pieces of B2B content, including case studies, e-books and white papers. We distribute this content to tens of millions of email subscribers and collect billions of intent signals that help us learn critical audience engagement insights.
In our latest edition of the Top 5 most popular assets series, we analyze the most engaging pieces of content in the marketing software category to help B2B marketers understand how they can enhance their own content and join the Top 5.
Providing guidance through guides
Interestingly, all five pieces of content in the marketing software Top 5 were e-guides, providing readers with a step-by-step overview of a product or process. This suggests that a substantial portion of marketing software content consumers are looking for knowledge. They want information that can help them take practical steps to improve operational performance within their own teams, instead of looking for outright solutions or information that offers little to no practical application.
Despite this general consistency across the Top 5, there was a wide variance in subject matter. Some pieces focused on the use of their products, while others honed in on a specific approach to marketing. Additionally, there was also a significant difference in the extent that the author’s brand was mentioned. Some companies chose to lean heavily on promoting their offerings, while others barely mentioned their product or service information at all.
For example, Adobe, whose piece, “The definitive guide to lead scoring” served as an in-depth, 50-page report on how to approach the practice of lead scoring, didn’t mention the brand name at all. On the other hand, Lemnisk, who authored “Future-proofing customer experiences in an evolving MarTech landscape,” which discussed why businesses should own their customer data, mentioned specific product offerings in roughly half of the piece.
This suggests that many marketing software consumers find explicit product information equally as engaging as nonbranded knowledge — but the key is that they want to be shown how to do something.
Serving as a foundation
All five pieces of content in our Top 5 for marketing software aim to serve as foundations for users’ in-house digital marketing and customer experience strategies. And this is explicit. The pieces intend for readers to take the information they’re providing and use it to enhance their own output and performance, in the hopes of demonstrating their ability to provide value throughout the buyer journey.
Oracle’s piece, “Essential strategies for marketing automation,” which is a primer on establishing marketing automation, stated explicitly that Oracle’s solutions could help customers streamline and optimize the digital marketing experience. Adobe’s “Definitive guide to lead scoring” talked about the immense value of leads to both sales and marketing teams as well as the importance of using high-quality lead-scoring software to properly target those leads.
The idea here is to provide a foundational philosophy that customers can easily implement (using the step-by-step guides described above), which will help them deliver value and make them more likely to purchase the marketing software that complements those foundational approaches.
