Now more than ever, you need an effective integrated digital content marketing strategy that targets your most serious prospective buyers. But before your strategy can become fully baked and ready to serve, as it were, it requires a critical secret (or not so secret) ingredient, something akin to yeast for bread or butter for popcorn.
That special ingredient is data.
But not just any data – like you might find in a general analyst B2B software buyer report, for instance – but highly specific data drawn from the real-life content consumption habits and preferences of your prospects in the Microsoft Dynamics space. For example, if you target GP users, which types of content are they consuming the most? Does that differ from the types of content consumed by AX users? This data is hard to find, but luckily for Dynamics ISVs, MSDynamicsWorld.com (MSDW) has been collecting and refining such data for years. That gives us a mountain of extra knowledge and information we can apply to make our clients’ marketing programs much more targeted….and productive, than they would otherwise be.
Here’s how you can use user-specific data in the process of content creation. Content, after all, is ever more central to most online digital marketing campaigns.
There are lots of different types of content that you can consider creating—downloadable content (white papers, customer case studies, ebooks, product brochures), video content (webcasts, other recorded videos), audio content (podcasts), and articles (blog posts, advertorials). These can all be effective, but for it to be most productive, it must answer questions like these:
- Which types of content are being consumed the most (and least) by your prospects in the Microsoft Dynamics space?
- How does the content consumption vary by Dynamics product groups?
- How are these content consumption trends shifting over time?
- Which formats are trending up, and which are trending down?
- How many of the same prospects are consuming content in multiple formats?
One example of a trend we’ve discovered in assessing data on Dynamics user media preferences is a shift in preferences to video content. That data has enabled us to develop and refine tools to measure details like how much time individual users spend with particular kinds of videos. We bring that data to bear in helping our clients do the most precise and productive targeting of their email and other promotions among MSDW member users.
Marketing to Dynamics users has moved way beyond simply providing lists of attendees at a webcast. It’s all in the special sauce – the data. Smart use of data improves productivity, and reduces waste of precious marketing dollars.
This is the first of a three-part series on the increasingly essential role of proprietary data in driving Dynamics marketing strategy for ISVs.
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Photo by Maarten van den Heuvel on Unsplash
