By Anne Murphy and Jean Spencer
Financial services is one of least trusted industries globally, and without building a relationship with prospects based on integrity and accountability, it’s hard to get new customers on board—which is where content comes into play.
76% of financial services professionals believe content marketing is the most effective way to regain trust. Dun & Bradstreet, a data and analytics company with financial as a significant portion of their portfolio, is no exception.
By investing in Kapost to manage their marketing content processes and analysis, and focusing on persona- and sales stage-based content efforts, they’ve built a marketing strategy that connects deeply with prospects and delivers actionable data around what’s working or failing.
One of the biggest issues marketers face, says Brad Young, the global content strategy leader at D&B, is not knowing if the content you’re creating is making an impact on the revenue and growth goals of the company.
“We ‘content people’ like to think of [content’s] value in terms of likes and tweets and page views and the folks in the hallway saying how much they liked their blog post,” explains Young.
“But true success is in aligning your approach to the mission of the company and delivering experiences that drive that home.”
To build a data-based marketing engine driven by content, Young suggests the following four steps:
“First, you have to actually know what the goals of the company are. Second, you have to work your inside game—networking across the company to understand how those goals manifest themselves from product to product, persona to persona, and then applying those learnings to content development. Third, you have to think of content as a continuum and take responsibility for integration and consistency of storylines from top of funnel (really emotional, broader reaching stories) to end of funnel (promotional stuff that tells why your products and services are better than the guy’s down the street). And fourth, you have to learn to respond to the feedback that matters most: sure, your boss and key business stakeholders, but more important the feedback you get from the data.”
Critical components of getting this operation up and running are organization and access. Often, content is lost somewhere in a spreadsheet or email, and the right people aren’t able to find what they’re looking for.
“Worse than spreadsheets—[content is] probably living in some email somewhere, and you probably had to delete the attachment because you hit your email capacity and couldn’t send a response, so when you have to go back and refer to it later for your next ebook you can’t find the attachment.”
Kapost provides a single content hub, with all assets consistently tagged and organized for the execution of a persona-based marketing strategy.
“We have clear, concise use cases that map our customer pain points to the data-driven products and services Dun & Bradstreet offers,” says Young. “Kapost helps us map to these very easily and stick to the lanes—the persona-based topic areas where we can credibly meet knowledge needs and satisfy curiosities of our target audiences.”
In many organizations, creating content is considered a tactic. But at it’s most effective—like at Dun & Bradstreet—content drives marketing’s efforts and ties directly to business goals and buyer needs.
“Asking your data the right questions based on business goals and then listening to and learning from the answers is critical.”