Last week I attended the CEB Sales and Marketing Summit in Las Vegas, and it was a complete whirlwind of new concepts and sessions that I’m so excited to bring back to my team! One of the final breakout sessions I attended was “Unlocking the Power of Content across the Customer Journey” with Pam Boiros from Skillsoft. As a total marketing geek, I walked out of this session thinking I can’t wait to get my hands on my team’s content and start atomizing it all!
In this session, Pam talked a lot about this new idea of the “atomization of content.” On the surface, this is basically about breaking down your team’s broader pieces of content into multiple variations of new content. For instance, the first step of atomization involves taking one of your team’s larger informational whitepapers and repurposing it to create an infographic, a blog post, a checklist, and a video. Varying the type of content and where it is distributed maximizes the number of views, shares and ideally conversions. But, we who consider ourselves modern marketers already do this, right?
Well, the new concept of atomization that Pam explained is that each micro piece of content created in this process should be targeted to a specific buyer in an exact phase of the buying process. To do this, one would use information from the broader piece of content and repackage it into an infographic specifically for buyers in the early stage of their purchase journey, then take that same information and create a blog post or one-pager for buyers who are further along in their journey and have more specific questions, and so on. Taking your existing content, using the information you already have, and creating content to answer buyers’ specific questions at every stage of their buying cycle: that’s atomization.
Content marketing isn’t just about how frequently your team can create a guide and blast it out to an email list. As modern marketers, we need to take a step back and think about what we are trying to achieve with each piece. What buyer question are we answering with each piece? What types of content do buyers typically consume during each stage of the customer journey? Where do buyers go to find the answers to their questions? How can we help this specific buyer at this specific time?
The theme of atomization and content personalization was consistently discussed throughout the week. It was touched on in another awesome breakout session I attended, “Using Marketing Content to Qualify Customers as Ready to Buy,” presented by Joelle Kaufman and Jason Seeba from BloomReach. Joelle and Jason showed examples of how they approach their content strategy. The takeaway in a nutshell? Your best content isn’t the content that’s viewed the most, it’s content that identifies where a target account is in their buying journey.
That’s powerful—and indicates the next generation of content marketing! In this age of the customer-led buyer’s journey, it’s about time that we stop using the same content for a number of different purposes and start repurposing for our buyers’ needs.
