The combined offering seeks to leverage the power of composability, an API-first architecture and generative AI to help customers identify, select, experiment and analyze personalized experiences across channels without creating new workflows.

“Personalization has long been a goal for marketers, but driving meaningful ROI at scale has been challenging due to fragmented tool chains, high development and content production costs and poor customer data integration,” said Karthik Rau, Contentful’s CEO, in a statement. “Ninetailed seamlessly integrates with Contentful, providing smooth workflows, code-free experiment creation and robust connectivity. Ninetailed’s products radically simplify personalization of digital experiences.”

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And just like Olympic viewership is skyrocketing, so are content budgets: 91% of leaders anticipate budget increases and, consequently, content production is expected to increase by 3X to 5X. As practitioners ramp up their content machines, practitioners need to balance quality with effectiveness to ensure their content meets buyers’ preferences.

“Content plays a pivotal role in B2B demand generation as it serves to educate, engage and build trust with potential customers,” said Ken Stout, SVP of Data Axle, a data, technology and marketing services provider. “Quality content positions a company as an industry authority, attracting prospects seeking valuable insights.”

With crafting quality content in mind, it’s time to look at B2B buyers’ contenders for the gold, silver and bronze medals of content formats to determine what assets resonate most strongly with prospects and customers.

Bronze: User-Generated Content

Coming in at the No. 3 spot is all forms of user-generated content, which encompasses everything from case studies to product reviews. Third-party validation is crucial to generating credible content: Sure, your team can tell buyers about how great your offerings are, but the bias is abundantly clear. Instead, savvy buyers are turning to industry thought leaders and influencer feedback to paint a clearer picture of the solution they’re about to purchase. But if you’re a marketer not already leveraging user feedback, don’t sweat: You likely have all the information already at your fingertips.

“Every marketer has excellent access to zero- and first-party data,” said Sarah Sehgal, Director of Demand Generation for OpenSesame, an educational technology company. “Zero-party data, specifically, comes from people raising their hands and intentionally sharing information, while first-party is coming from whatever platforms you have on your website that connect into our CRM or marketing automation tool. To generate more first-party insights, you need to go into those systems to segment and activate your audience by action to unlock that type of engagement.”

Silver: Digital Events & Webinars

Ah, the mighty webinar. While it was a close runner-up, it didn’t secure enough of the vote to jump up to the No. 1 spot on the podium. The medium’s popularity is clear, as it helps facilitate virtual connections and allows attendees to interact with their peers and learn from experts. In an era where time is valuable and buyers are looking for the most streamlined journey possible, webinars emerge as a formidable contender to provide comprehensive content and distill detailed explanations that are often not possible in static formats. However, to make the most out of this lucrative medium, webinars aren’t something marketers can sprinkle in whenever they want — it’s a strategy that requires a full commitment.

“Virtual events can’t be a targeted effort your company does here and there,” said Jason Widdup, VP of Marketing at Metadata.io, a demand gen platform. “They should really be an ongoing channel that’s a key part of your overall marketing strategy. If you’re just ‘spraying and praying’ or hosting one-off events, you can’t connect them to any of your other marketing efforts. You must cohesively weave the virtual events channel into overall marketing efforts.

Gold: Short Form Content

If B2B had a national anthem, we’d start playing it now! Whether you want to refer to it as the Michael Phelps or Simone Biles of marketing, short-form content was easily the GOAT for 67% of B2B buyers. As I’ve said before, the attention economy is in a recession as attention spans plummet: The average time that a person can focus on one thing has dropped from around 2½ minutes to around 45 seconds, meaning short is in — especially with 70% of B2B buyers preferring to learn about a company through articles and blog posts.

“We need to start looking at formats that are shorter and easier to digest: Everything doesn’t have to be this long soliloquy of what buyers need to do,” said Dana Harder, Partner at Unreal Digital Group, a demand generation agency. “Those longer-form content pieces have a place, but we also need to mix it up with short-form podcasts, social posts, video, interactive pieces and web-based content so it’s easier to find and for gen AI tools to pick up.”

If I had the Photoshop/Canva skills, I’d insert a fun image of an Olympic podium or photoshop each medalist into a flag-raising ceremony. However, despite my lack of artistic prowess, there’s no denying the ongoing power of content, as 48% of practitioners plan to publish content daily. With such an uptick expected in content generation, it’s essential that B2B practitioners to maximize their resources and ensure they’re providing buyers with the formats and mediums they’re most likely to engage with.

To uncover more into the current state of content marketing, check out “Navigating The Attention Economy Via Snack-able & Shareable Content.”

The post Ranking B2B’s Top 3 Content Formats For Buyer Engagement appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

Through the acquisition, PathFactory will leverage Uberflip’s platform to help address the growing demand for better buyer journeys at scale.

“Today we bring together industry leaders that share a common vision for how B2B marketers can use generative AI to deliver better buying experiences that increase engagement and drive revenue,” said Dev Ganesan, CEO and President of PathFactory, in a statement. “Our aligned cultures, rooted in innovation and led by strong, experienced management, will guide our team’s success, accelerate product innovation and scale growth.”

Ganesan will continue to serve as CEO of the combined company, which will operate under the PathFactory name. Jeremy Schultz — Uberflip’s CEO — will join the PathFactory Board of Directors, while other executives from Uberflip will assume key roles within PathFactory.

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In fact, the search engine’s leaked documents support this theory, outlining the value of quality over quantity and reinforcing that relevant, high-authority backlinks are more beneficial than numerous low-quality links.

The Google Contradiction

For years, Google told marketers that links were crucial trust signals for brands. The company’s spam policy documentation previously stated, “Google uses links as an important factor in determining the relevancy of web pages.” In its most recent update, the company removed the word “important” to convey that links are just one factor in determining a website’s relevance.

Let’s put this into practice, shall we? During the research phase of a campaign developed for recipe site, Inspired Taste, we discovered that the website’s competitors were outranking it due to a lack of relevant and authoritative backlinks. Through a creative digital PR campaign and content targeting keywords in the “dessert” category, the site’s average SEO ranking increased by 3.6 positions within a matter of weeks. This correlated largely with several authoritative publications linking directly to Inspired Taste’s key product pages, as well as the significant buzz and engagement driven across social channels.

Leveraging Click Data To Fuel Relevance

Google’s recent leak also unveiled a nuanced tiered approach to link weighting that fundamentally integrates user click data. These tiers — low, medium and high quality — are determined by the volume and authenticity of user clicks, analyzed through data from Chrome and other Google services.

Low-quality links with minimal engagement are ignored in rankings, medium-quality links have moderate influence and high-quality links, which receive significant verified clicks, provide the strongest ranking signals.

Still, Google will continue making core updates to its platform, making it increasingly important for your brand to not only grab your audience’s attention but get them to stay longer and maintain their engagement. When it comes to long term brand loyalty, staying relevant is the most important factor.

Future-Proofing Your Brand

The good news for companies that have already dedicated substantial resources to link acquisition and SEO to reach customers on Google is that these strategies are still important. But, to increase prospects’ time on-site and maintain engagement, your brand must become and stay relevant. Here’s how:

Know Your Audience

Use data and insights that outline who your target audience is and what type of content is going to make them stop scrolling, engage and, most importantly, share with their friends and family.

Be Authentic

Stay true to your brand proposition: All content, whether it’s owned, earned or paid, should have a single thread running throughout that’s aligned to your key messaging.

Tap Into Trends

Monitor trends and sentiment across the news and social platforms to ensure your content is timely and topical.

Ensure It Aligns To Google’s Guidelines

Google has always been transparent with its E-E-A-T content guidelines, which stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness.

Make It Relevant

Create content that’s genuinely useful, timely and engaging. Ensure that it’s written with your target audience in mind but also references your commercial keywords (where appropriate) to help Google rankings.

Make It Shareable

With Google’s emphasis on audience engagement, it is crucial that the content, whether earned or owned, is enticing and encourages searches to click and share.

All in all, it’s clear that Google rewards brands that are putting customers and searchers at the heart of everything they do. Marketers should therefore focus less on chasing the algorithm and focus instead on building a brand. Creating high quality, engaging and relevant content, through earned and owned channels, to inform both a search engine, and their target audience, on what they have to offer by providing the best and most useful answers to their queries.

Beth Nunnington is VP of Organic Media at performance marketing agency Journey Further. With more than a decade of experience, she has garnered widespread recognition in catapulting brands to unprecedented heights of visibility and credibility. Equipped with a wealth of innovative digital PR strategies, Nunnington empowers businesses to amplify their content reach and harness the immense power of organic traffic. 

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With 48% of respondents indicating that they plan to publish content daily, it’s clear that content is an increasingly prominent aspect of B2B marketing strategies. With the increased pressure to produce more content, 81% of marketers are alleviating that burden by using AI to streamline content creation, while 93% leveraged third parties to create and distribute content.

“The marketing leaders we engaged through Sapio Research have clearly dedicated substantial budgets and resources to their content strategies,” said Susan Thomas, CEO of 10Fold Communications, in a statement, “Our year-over-year data shows a strong trend: Marketers are not only open to adopting new technologies and innovative approaches but are also willing to overhaul their entire strategies, processes, and content formats. This commitment is driven by the goal to produce high-quality content that truly resonates with and reaches their target customer profiles.”

Marketers Scale Budgets To Fuel Content Boom

Throughout the research, marketers acknowledged the vital role of content marketing — and they’re responding in kind to boost its growth. When asked about increasing budgets, 46% invested at least $500,000 annually, which aligns with the global trend of heightened content creation. Specifically, 92% of marketers reported producing more content compared to the previous year, and nearly 40% have increased their output by 3X to 5X.

AI & External Resources Fuel Content Boom

When questioned about AI’s role in content creation, 81% of marketers confirmed using AI (36% frequently, 45% occasionally), while just 19% said they rarely or never use AI for content creation. Another content efficiency boost in content creation and delivery was the use of third parties such as agencies and contractors, as 93% of marketing leaders used third-party resources. In terms of tapping in third parties to create content, 31% of companies outsourced 50% to 74% of their content development, while 53% outsourced 50% to 100% of their content development.

The Power Couple: Social Media & Video

Social media content topped the list of preferred content preferences, with 46% of marketing leaders prioritizing this content format for 2024, with video a close second (41%). For marketers with budgetary constraints, social media offered a cost-effective approach to scaling content and aligns with growing audience preference for shorter formats – compared to resource-intensive, longer formats like E-books and white papers (used by less than 15% of marketers).

Data-Driven Content: Leveraging Analytics

The marketing landscape is saturated with content, placing immense pressure on generating marketing qualified leads. Nearly half (48%) of global companies are now making content creation a part of their routine. Notably, this trend is especially prominent among B2B organizations (37%) and those with larger budgets.

While Google Analytics remains the primary tool (42%) for measuring content effectiveness, other website and CRM tools are a strong second (36%). Interestingly, these same website analytics combined with research, trigger decisions for new content for at least 50% of marketers making content decisions.

To view the full findings of “The Engagement Equation: How B2B Tech Marketers Are Creating and Delivering Content That Captivates in 2024,” download the full report now.

The post Amidst Content Boom, 91% Of Leaders Report Growing Budgets; 92% Anticipate Content Production Increases appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

Specifically, ChatFactory seeks to:

• Provide tailored AI-generated answers, content recommendations and auto-generated customized microsites;
• Transform static website repositories into interactive information hubs based on a users’ content and resources;
• Create a custom agent experience for key accounts with specific, tailored content, including secure access to private assets including discovery, contracts and pricing;
• Share instant, human-like responses to buyer questions in real-time; and
• Leverage AI confidence scores and user ratings to optimize content and identify gaps in the buyers’ journey.

“ChatFactory cuts through the clutter of clunky, traditional chatbots and hard-to-navigate vendor websites to give buyers the information they need, when and how they want it,” said Dev Ganesan, President and CEO of PathFactory, in a statement. “By enhancing the self-directed buyers’ journey, vendors are able to generate more qualified leads and close more sales. It’s a win-win for buyers and sellers.”

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As Klaudia and I were plotting out the season, we knew we needed to give fan-favorite (and #B2BMX veteran!) Pam Didner the first episode. She’s a B2B marketing consultant, author and speaker, and she’ll be keynoting the upcoming #B2BMX East, as well as hosting a workshop and campfire-style keynote on-site. She also hosted a workshop at #B2BMX East, which gave us the opportunity to chat with her on the show floor at the event. Klaudia and Pam sat down to talk through all things go-to-market (GTM) strategy, including the role of content, AI and alignment.

Sadly, I missed the recording because I was hosting a panel discussion, so I know all too well how FOMO-inducing it is to miss an opportunity to learn from Pam. I’d hate to put my dear readers in the same boat, so I’m here to share a brief overview of her blueprint for successful GTM strategies (though you’ll have to head over to your podcast player of choice to unlock all of Pam’s expertise!).

1. (Properly) Structure A GTM Plan With Clear Goals & Timelines

Pam emphasized the importance of structured GTM plans and advised practitioners to start building their strategy by first determining what departments need to be involved, which typically includes the product team alongside marketing and sales. From there, she suggested businesses scope out the timeline while also being very specific about what they want to accomplish.

2. Prevent Misalignment By Understanding The Root Of The Issue

Pam explained that the primary hinderance to sales and marketing alignment lies in how each department approaches their responsibilities — marketing traditionally focuses on top-of-funnel, while sales prioritizes lower-funnel activities. The two departments essentially speak different languages, which causes them to approach the same goals with varied actions.

3. Shift Marketing Over To A Sales Mindset

To help bridge that mindset gap, Pam suggested that marketers start thinking like a salesperson — and the first step is to move away from nurture initiatives and into “hunting.” Next, she reminded marketers that their content isn’t necessarily applicable to sales and suggested they create more relevant assets for sales. For example, given sales’ stage-based approach, Pam suggested marketers break up their content accordingly.

4. Allow Content To Power The GTM Journey

Speaking of content, we all know it’s king, and in the ever-lengthening B2B buyer’s journey, one of the primary ways to keep buyers’ attention is through a compelling piece of content. According to Pam, the same ideology applies to GTM strategies. She explained that when a company launches a product, nobody knows about it or its features, and the best way to educate is via engaging assets.

5. Embrace AI On An Individual Level

Pam was one of the first industry bigwigs to discuss AI and its role in B2B sales and marketing, so we naturally had to ask her about the current landscape. She shared two primary pieces of advice for our listeners:

• Don’t worry about falling behind, as AI is still in its inception and has a long road ahead; and
• Don’t get overwhelmed by the oversaturated landscape, because the power is ultimately in users’ hands to pick and choose the AI tools they use.

We’ve barely scratched the surface of all the nuggets of wisdom Pam shared — to learn more about the topics we briefly discussed, make sure to tune into episode one of the 10th season of the “B2B Marketing Exchange Podcast” now! If you’d like to hear Pam speak in-person, make sure to register for the B2B Marketing Exchange East now!

The post The Blueprint For A Winning B2B GTM Strategy appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

Leveraging an ensemble model approach to AI, Da Vinci reportedly uses the power of deep learning, predictive AI and generative AI to help generate highly personalized content and messaging tailored to each customer. According to Movable Ink:

• Creative IQ will curate content for each customer based on their unique tastes, preferences and motivations via short-lived content, subject line generation and prediction and multi-objective optimization;
• Messaging IQ will monitor all data to determine the highest likelihood of engagement, with a focus on automatically optimizing when and how often a customer receives a message; and
• Performance IQ includes enhanced analytics and reporting tools designed to provide insights into creative asset effectiveness, audience trends and engagement metrics, as well as automatically and continuously experiment to eliminate A/B testing.

“Capturing customer attention is more challenging than ever,” said Vivek Sharma, CEO and Co-Founder of Movable Ink, in a statement. “Click-through rates hover around a mere 2% — batch messaging programs must do better to engage their entire customer base and drive bottom-line metrics. Da Vinci empowers brands to engage their full customer files and boost revenue while optimizing for brands’ unique business objectives. The one-size-fits-all approach is a relic of the past. Welcome to a new era of precision, prediction and personalization.”

The post Movable Ink Adds 3 New Features To AI-Native Personalization Solution appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

Specifically, the new features include:

• Personalize, an A/B/n testing and segmentation engine designed to remove obstacles regarding implementation and operationalization of personalized content;
• Brand Kit, a writing assistant that seeks to produce brand-relevant, AI-generated content at scale to align with a brand’s style and messaging;
• New extensions for Contentstack Automate, including fully automated sequences that address the complete lifecycle of personalized content and experiences; and
• Expanded Academy and a new AI Accelerator program that features additional tools, training and support on practical AI use cases.

“Brands are experiencing a relevancy crisis: Our customers tell us they fear digital sameness and feel overrun by tech and the pace of change,” said Neha Sampat, Founder and CEO of Contentstack, in a statement. “We know that [while] personalized digital experiences are the solution, they’re also significantly hard to achieve. Today’s announcement makes personalization at scale simple and real.”

The post Contentstack Unveils AI & Automation-Powered ‘Personalization Reimagined’ appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

Solution Overview

Content Guardian is reportedly the first AI content detection platform with eight built-in content checkers to detect AI-generated content.

Back-Of-The-Box Details

Key features include:

• Integrations with eight AI content detectors;
• Aggregated confidence scoring;
• Native WordPress integration for seamless workflow;
• Sentence highlighter for sentence-level checking;
• Web app for flexible content checking; and
• Checker analytics and history.

Who It’s For

According to the company, Content Guardian’s launch comes at a critical time, as AI-generated content creates new challenges for publishers, content marketers and businesses. It’s been projected that by 2025, 90% of the content available on the internet will be produced leveraging generative AI. Systems like OpenAI’s ChatGPT have demonstrated the ability to produce remarkably human-like text on demand, making it increasingly difficult to detect if content is human or AI-written, exposing businesses to reputational and plagiarism risks.

This trend has spilled into search engine optimization, prompting Google’s March 2024 core update to reduce non-original content in Google Search Results by 40%.

What Makes It Special

Content Guardian compares content against multiple top AI content detection systems. Going beyond any single detection tool, it is allegedly the only platform that combines results from eight different AI detectors, providing an aggregated confidence score so users can determine if the content appears to be human or AI-written. Additionally, research has indicated that single content detection tools, when used independently, exhibit inconsistencies and false positives for detecting AI-generated content.

Contact

Content Guardian

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