Elle Woulfe, VP Marketing at LookbookHQ, began her session at yesterday’s MarTech Conference in Boston with one question, “how did you measure the success of your last campaign?”
Most of the room would agree the accepted standard, by tracking:
- Clicks
- Downloads
- Form completions
- Attribution tied to revenue
Marketing has become about the numbers, and whether we’re hitting our targets and putting potential customers into the funnel. Marketing’s true role is to educate buyers.
The problem with this is that those people are only in the funnel because they clicked on stuff, which doesn’t tell us whether they’re really interested in what we have to offer. I’m like Elle. I download content All. The. Time. Where does it go? In a handy folder on my desktop of things I intend (truly) to read later. Do I ever get to it? If I’m being honest. Not really.
I would be your Sales team’s nightmare. I’ve clicked. I’ve downloaded. Your Marketing team has probably put my name and contact details into their pipeline. Counting clicks falls short, to the point that only 4% of those result in an actual sale.
As Elle put it, “you know what their fingers did, but what did their brains do?” What happens if you scored based on quality, instead of on volume? One person can just file your content away for another day, while another spends half an hour reading it cover to cover. The click tells you nothing.
So the one metric that identifies qualified buyers? The time spent engaging with your content.
Put yourself in your buyer’s shoes. Do you spend your time researching solutions, pricing, or capabilities if you’re not interested in buying? No.
The solution is to change how you deliver your content. Don’t let your potential customers hit dead ends. Let them binge. Keep them in the moment by offering them more. Keep them engaged. Content bingers are better buyers.
All it takes is a change in how you deliver content:
- Change the way content is delivered.
- Make every click the start of a journey, instead of a dead end.
- Zero in on your most engaged, sales ready buyers.
- Know how your content is being consumed.
- Have better insights on how your content moves buyers.
“What people do on the destination side of the click is more important than the click itself,” says Elle.
If interested, you can find the entire session presentation here.
