Content marketing inspiration is everywhere you look. For teams managing limited headcount and/or budget, it’s especially important to leverage various marketing activities across your organization and turn them into content opportunities.
You want to mine the gold in your own backyard, if you will.
This approach is what the content team at Oracle Marketing Cloud aimed to achieve with our “Journey to Modern Marketing” campaign, a program that included a variety of content tactics, including high-value gated eBooks, videos, and blog posts.
The program started with a research study conducted in tandem with BtoB Magazine to learn about the modern marketer—from our audience’s perspective.
The study uncovered five attributes or competencies that comprise the modern marketer: Targeting, Engagement, Conversion, Analysis, and Technology. We used these points, what we refer to as The 5 Tenets of Modern Marketing, as a springboard for the integrated content campaign that ultimately spanned all our digital channels.
We introduced the first content asset in the series during our Modern Marketing Experience event in Europe last year, creating a focal point for the content’s main character, Modern Mark, as well as a social media presence to support engagement and program awareness.
Video as the Star
The guides, social components, and promotion for the blog lived on a landing page where an ungated video was used to engage visitors and support the educational assets.
The story of “Modern Mark’s Journey to Modern Marketing” was packaged into six videos in total: Five covering a tenet each and one trailer video, which was shared via social media and our blog to tease the upcoming content. Each of the videos supported the messaging of the guides created around the Modern Marketing theme in an engaging, entertaining way.
As a feature component in our multi-channel campaign, video helped to drive interest and awareness to our 5 Tenets collateral. This resulted in a 120% increase in engagement in comparison to our other campaigns and an 85% increase in attribution to the creation of MQLs.
In addition to supporting a prospecting campaign, the content also garnered significant and repeated engagement with current customers. The use of “reciprocal” content featuring an ungated video with gated follow-up content provided lead scoring and interest qualification opportunities for prioritized outreach.
Lessons learned from the Oracle Marketing Cloud team:
- Social media continues to be a very important channel for engagement/MQL contribution
- Multi-channel approaches to engagement are effective in unifying the audience experience
- Video is a great engagement tool, and drives interest across channels
- Video formatted in a series is a great way to generate interest around the “Journey” content concept, and keeps audiences engaged in their learning
In addition to video, here are other content components of the program:
High-Value eBooks
We created an eBook for each of the five tenets (the final will be released this month), which were the centerpiece offerings on each landing page and in demand gen emails. Each eBook was written in a how-to fashion to provide a prescriptive approach to managing each tenet of modern marketing. We also included case study examples and customer quotes, to focus on use cases and successes.
Blog Posts
Excerpts from each of the eBooks were used as blog posts to support the launch of all the guides. We offered bulleted lists, core steps, and takeaways with calls to action to visit the landing page. We also included the embedded journey videos into the posts for added engagement.
Social Media Posts
Images of Modern Mark steered our communities to engage with the content across Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google+. We used unique URLs to track the activity across social networks to understand where to allocate our ad spend most meaningfully.
Crafty content marketers know how to use what they have to maximize resources and budget, and to ensure your content messaging is consistent across the organization.
How do you mind the content gold in your own backyard?