Engagement is the holy grail of effective content marketing. You can have the best content in the world, but if nobody is reading it, consuming it, or sharing it, it's not going to move the needle for your business.

Today, it's all about a personalized approach. It should come as no surprise then that one of the cornerstones of successful conversion optimization is personalization. Utilizing data analytics, RevOps professionals can identify customer preferences, behaviors, and pain points.

Armed with this knowledge, businesses can personalize their marketing messages, product offerings, and customer support, leading to higher engagement and conversions. This takes extra effort because it demands multiple channels, multiple engagement techniques, multiple funnels, multiple campaigns, and typically more time and resources. But believe me, the ROI on this is HUGE!

As we delve into the realm of modern B2B marketing strategies, three significant themes have come to prominence: personalized and targeted marketing, advanced marketing automation, and the rise of content marketing.

When you understand your customers, you can engage them with marketing that offers them value and drives performance. The key to success lies in the use of first-party data — one of the hallmarks of any digitally mature business. This is information that is specific to your business and that customers willingly provide. When used in the right way, it allows marketers to understand and predict their customers’ individual needs, reaching them with relevant and meaningful messaging.

We’ve never had quantifiable data like this that I can take to executives and prove the value of what we’re doing.

I would advocate being wary of intent data providers. Instead focus on creating relevant, niche content for your ICPs, and then distribute this across core channels to build your own first-party data set, from which you can infer buying intent, rather than pay someone to do that (usually not very effectively) for you.

We've been using Turtl to do exactly this over the past three months, integrated into our own Workbooks CRM platform, and it's been a game changer in terms of lead flow and pipeline creation.

If 2023 was the year of hype around GenAI, 2024 will see B2B brands actively using GenAI to support content production. However, brands will need to ensure that they have the right tools and governance in place to avoid inadvertent legal and ethical harms like copyright infringement, perpetuation of biases, and sharing false information.

There’s a huge wave of authentic, user-generated content (UGC), heavily influenced by TikTok. It’s all about keeping it real and a bit rough around the edges, which frankly, a lot of people are loving. I’ve seen big brands adopting this UGC style, particularly in partnerships, because it’s relatable and it’s what grabs the audience’s attention.

Audience engagement data from interactive content shows you exactly who is interested in what. You can get smart with these kinds of insights. See what your best opportunities are. Start with the successful segments like SQL or closed. What did they read and interact with?

Once you have an idea of the type of content that brings the most pipeline success, use that intelligence as a basis for your lead magnets.

Frictionless omnichannel experiences allow organizations to not only provide customers with more purchase and fulfillment options but also enable customers to quickly switch engagement methods in case of channel disruption. This enables marketing leaders to better protect business-critical revenue streams.

Make sure to do your research before diving into content creation. When you understand your audience, you’ll cover truly impactful topics that resonate with the right people. The key to generating high-intent, high-value organic traffic is a data-backed content strategy.

Driving performance of your content is at the core of what Turtl offers, and as such the analytics we collect on your reader engagement is a critical part of delivering this value.

To nurture leads effectively, you need to understand their pains. Focusing on the breakdown of those problems and providing education on how to best solve them helps to build trust between you and your prospects.

Afterward, your job is to show that your solution is the right one and prove that you're capable of what you've promised you can do.

Marketers presenting demand content as PDFs are missing out on intelligence that shortens sales cycles. We’ve reached a point where critical content can deliver deeply personalized experiences. Personalized lead gen and retention content, user-led content journeys, and individual reader data will help demand marketers reach segments at all stages of the funnel.

We’re living with personalized experiences whether shopping online or listening to music. Now really is the time to make sure all of your content delights with relevance.

I think Turtl’s personalization features are the real sweet spot for us. It’s great for outreach because you can quickly build a piece of content and then automate it so that every recipient sees a personalized video on the cover page, for example. Having all of these custom elements appear automatically throughout the document is really powerful on a one-to-many scale. 

What’s important is that backlinks should come from a valuable source. You don’t necessarily only want to earn backlinks from any site with high domain authority, it’s better they come from relevant pages or terms you’re trying to gain genuine, worthwhile traffic from. 

A link from a niche source might be more valuable than having “empty” links with no anchor text in a viral campaign.

One thing that will never change in marketing is the connection between audience pain points and value. The more you understand your audience, the better product you can build and the better content you can use to build affinity and educate that audience.

Thought leadership has become crucial for executives in choosing a B2B partner. The issue is that many companies just don’t realize how important it is. While they are inundated with content, thought leadership consumers don’t think most of what they see is of extremely high value.
But when done right – built on rigorous research, deft argument framing, and relevant narratives written from the customer's perspective – executives will rely on thought leadership content even more to inform their business decisions

Unlike the typical scoring out of 100, I use a ‘Golden Number’ of 10 points, which would make the lead an MQL and ready to be passed along to our Sales team.

This could be achieved in one action; for instance – if they visit 10 of our web pages – that behavior shows considerable interest in the product, so they are assigned 10 points and instantly become a marketing-qualified lead.

I use an online behavioral and engagement model rolled into one, focusing more on how a potential lead engages with our content and online engagement. This allows me to understand how familiar a potential lead is with our service and brand.”
With this data, our Sales teams can be more direct and accurate in their messaging to potential customers, minimizing the risk of wasted time or over-explaining subjects they may already have good knowledge of.

A successful lead scoring model requires consistent feedback and buy-in from both the Sales and SDR teams.
All scores should be reviewed each quarter by Marketing and Sales in conjunction with conversion analysis to ensure your lead scoring model is producing the highest quality, sales-ready lead.

I use a combination of known reader data, and content insights extracted from each Turtl Doc, to score prospect’s interest level or sales readiness.

I manage lead scoring systems at Turtl and make sure we understand a lead’s intent and efficiently turn marketing qualified leads (MQLs) into sales qualified leads (SQLs).
Our goal is to help the Sales team prioritize those people who are further down the sales funnel. It’s not just better for you but for the leads themselves. If Sales understand where the lead is in their journey, it allows them to be more direct and accurate in their messaging.
Ultimately, lead scoring not only saves your team time but saves the business money by not wasting resources on dead-end leads.

It’s not the best content that wins.
It’s the best-promoted content that wins.

Traditional marketing talks at people.
Content marketing talks with them.

When we create something, we think
will our customers thank us for this?

We’re having to rethink our approach to communication to ensure we can communicate effectively with our colleagues. Whilst we had a digital approach before, we must utilize this even further to encourage collaboration.

Even in the midst of massive global uncertainty, people will still leave a company if they don’t feel valued

People look to thought leaders for a reason. They say something new, exciting, breakthrough, or unexpected. Be bold. Get behind what you’re saying and say it with conviction. It’s okay to be controversial.

We often associate the idea of thought leadership with big consulting companies, like McKinsey, Accenture, or Deloitte, for example. It's an extremely useful approach for all kinds of companies though. Consider, for example, Moderna, an industry leader in the development of mRNA vaccines and therapies (starting long before Covid). The company uses its insights to help educate everyone from physicians and regulators to patients and consumers on what mRNA is and how related therapies impact human health. 

But thought leadership isn't limited to major innovations and B2B companies. It's also used effectively by brands selling everything from mattresses to financial services. In these cases, the focus is usually on educating potential customers on what they're buying and how they should go about it. 

Bombas, for example, makes the conversation about its mission — helping people in need — an integral part of the customer experience. Bombas is one leader in a movement among a growing number of companies to do good in the community in visible and proactive ways. They're promoting awareness and inspiring all kinds of people to take action. And they also happen to make great socks

People look to thought leaders for a reason. They say something new, exciting, breakthrough, or unexpected. Be bold. Get behind what you’re saying and say it with conviction. It’s okay to be controversial.

I define thought leadership as creating a conversation that informs and shapes people's thinking.

Turtl’s Personalization Engine simplifies content personalization at scale by enabling quick and easy configuration of interactive, modular content – all without requiring design or coding skills. The teams sharing the content can then effortlessly personalize it in seconds, without having to worry about creating or editing the central documents

I think Turtl’s personalization features are the real sweet spot for us. It’s great for outreach because you can quickly build a piece of content and then automate it so that every recipient sees a personalized video on the cover page, for example. Having all of these custom elements appear automatically throughout the document is really powerful on a one-to-many scale

Turtl empowers its customers to drive their reader engagement to the next level with tailored content to the target audience. Personalization can be easily set up to drive ABM at scale, creating custom material from user selections, file upload or even automatically driven from a CRM /Marketing automation tool to provide the full streamlined experience

Turtl has been an extremely vital tool for the ABM team at Jabra…Using Turtl's personalisation Engine, we are now able to generate highly engaging, customized customer-facing documentation in minutes, rather than hours. We have seen the amount of time it takes to deliver a piece of content decrease by about 80-90%, giving us time to focus on delivering additional value to our account teams and customers.

The general advice when using a form for lead capture is to reduce resistance and keep it short. But you can find out more about your audience once they’ve downloaded your content by using strategic quizzes, surveys, and polls inside the piece. We can dive into individual engagement analytics in Turtl, which not only helps us segment audiences for personalized content experiences, but also gives our Sales team sharper intel

Gating is a contentious issue but essential for lead generation. Next, focus on delivering a personalized content journey that sparks a relationship. In B2B lead generation, you’ll gather high-intent leads from the start if you’re serving relevant content – so use reader and journey analysis to direct your lead magnet content

Our case study library is scaling fast. We film our customers explaining how Turtl has improved their content marketing, so we can use these success stories across various marketing materials – and we’re constantly gathering quotes from customers too.

This type of content helps build engaging and authentic case studies presented as real-life success stories. Content like this is powerful at the bottom of the funnel – the stage where people are seriously considering your brand – giving social proof that can tip leads towards conversion

Intent data is useful as it identifies people researching your solution. But you need to know what to do with this data. What's become more powerful is an organization's ability to accurately score leads by adding higher-net-worth data to their CRM, and using it to recognize those in the market who are ready to buy, using engagement behaviour to identify intent

Migrate a site and forget to 301 redirect the URLs. URLs build value from keywords, backlinks, and other factors, changing them without redirecting is a critical failure for SEO and it happens ALL the time.

Buy spammy backlinks. Google has done work recently reducing spam. So avoid buying backlinks from dodgy dealers.

Delete content just “because”. If an SEO has designed your content structure, there’s probably a reason behind it. Deleting paragraphs you don’t like, or deleting entire blog posts you don’t think fit your current audience, is a drastic move to do without consulting someone.

Remove internal links. Often clients will change the links in their header and footer to suit the visitor of the homepage. They should just be aware that those links do speak to search engines about what content they consider important—and removing them may impact results. Especially, if removing an internal link creates an orphan page, which often happens with product pages.

1. Update old content. Most content isn't very well optimized, and even content that was once optimized will need a refresh every year to ensure it's still competitive and adaptive to changes in search. I've seen blogs 2x in traffic without adding a single piece of new content, that's the power of updates

Assuming you already have a library of content on your blog, there are two things you can do that'll accelerate traffic this month

There’s no great mystery to getting started with backlinks. First, you have to define what a good backlink looks like to your company - which sites do you want to target? Do you want to set domain rating or organic traffic limits? As with everything in content marketing, I’d always focus on quality over quantity. Then it’s simply a case of finding websites that match your rules and approaching them! You can try all sorts of backlink plays, but for starters, I’d always look at customers, partners, and your LinkedIn network.

Cognism’s SEO team spends 10% of its time on backlink outreach (10% of a roughly 40-hour week = 4 hours each per week). That’s a good amount of time to dedicate to it if you don’t have unlimited resources at your disposal. We track any backlinks secured on a Google sheet and use Asana tasks to provide weekly updates on progress.

One thing that will never change in marketing is the connection between audience pain points and value. The more you understand your audience, the better product you can build and the better content you can use to build affinity and educate that audience. Always start with your audience and then backtrack into keyword research. I'd suggest never doing either keyword research or content planning in isolation

There's no question in my mind about the ROI of content marketing. I've seen it generate millions in value for every SaaS company I've worked at

Increasingly, your content needs to build a rapport with your prospects. Your voice and tone – that is, the way your brand’s writing sounds – play a big role in differentiation, and help your reader to feel what you’re like to work with

To unlock the potential of those who advance the world

Helping our clients create the future

To help our clients make distinctive, lasting, and substantial improvements in their performance and to build a great firm that attracts, develops, excites, and retains exceptional people

To help our clients make distinctive, lasting, and substantial improvements in their performance and to build a great firm that attracts, develops, excites, and retains exceptional people

To help our clients and our people excel. We are one of the world's leading business advisory organizations. Our size, strength and resources will help us carry out our mission now and in the future

Becoming the world's largest bank by market capitalization

To become the world's premier financial services company.

To become the world's most admired bank by 2015.

(Your value proposition is)...the place where your company’s product intersects with your customer’s desires. It’s the magic fit between what you make and why people buy it. Your value proposition is the crunch point between business strategy and brand strategy.

Content drives demand. But there is a catch – average content might generate leads, but you need compelling, useful, and persuasive content to drive true demand. The most successful demand generation leaders are partnering closely with content and comms teams to shape strategy and messaging, collaborate on creation, distribution, and optimization, feedback metrics and impact, and create aligned targets to support shared revenue goals.