FOCUS 3: Insights Shining a light on dark data

How insights and opportunities go missing, and where to find them

Common areas of dark data and how to turn on the lights

❶ Mindshare

Marketers put a lot of time and money behind content to reach readers, but measurement of actual mindshare typically stops at the surface level. This leaves teams in the dark about the value and impact of their content, unable to optimize in a way that drives revenue. Optimizing for mindshare starts with how to measure it.

❷ Sellers

“If sales are happy, I’m happy” is a good way to live a peaceful life as a marketer. However, it can end up removing your reader from their rightful place at the center of the conversation. Often, it is not clear if content is actually used by sales teams, not to mention if it is engaging and converting the readers they send it to.

❸ Relevance

The most powerful way to engage a buyer is by creating content that matches their interests and values, delivered at the right moment and in the right way to capture their attention. But while 75% of businesses think they're excellent at personalization, just 48% of customers agree. Where are the gaps? We investigate here.

❹ Impact

Classic measurements of content success like opens and clicks are interesting, but they don’t tell you anything about attention or impact. To know where to focus, marketers should “shift part of their content marketing budgets from actual content marketing initiatives to measurement and analytic efforts.”

How two marketing leaders used improved measurement to drive business outcomes

Redstor -
abm and sales enablement

Gareth, CMO at Redstor, envisioned an outbound growth strategy using modern technology that reflected the people-centric and industry-leading nature of his company.

5x increase in monthly MQLs
Actionable account insight to drive ABM strategy
Cross-functional insight into seller and buyer engagement
Moved to a 100% digital content strategy to save on printing/PDF costs
Production efficiency went from weeks to hours

Cisco -
demand gen and comms

Faith, Marketing Director at Cisco, was tasked with streamlining a legacy content machine that felt outdated, expensive, inconsistent, and offered limited insights for her disenfranchised team.

Actionable reader and lead insights to optimize content
Used insights to boost average read times to 7½ mins
Achieved 7x more readers at a tenth of the business cost
Content projects delivered in days not weeks
Noticeable team empowerment and excitement for creative and innovative tool