PDF:
The last
black hole
of content marketing
Nick Mason – 7 November 2023
Description
Who am I?
It's nearly 2024 –
Why on earth am I talking about PDF?
1. Content is 25% - 30% of marketing budget
2. 50% of us increase spend each year
3. 80%+ of B2Bs invest in long form content
And 99% of the time,
long form means PDF
Long form covers some of our most
critical content assets, such as...
• Thought leadership
• Case studies
• Reports
• Whitepapers
• Proposals
• Product information
...and more
We rely on these assets to...
• Build our brand
• Generate demand
• Deliver leads
• Support ABM / ABX
• Enable sales teams
But if it ain't broke...
Only 30% of marketers report
real success from content efforts
The cost of inefficiency
And all this at a time when there is more pressure than ever to account for the results of every marketing dollar
I'm here to evangelise about the opportunities for long form content
in 2024 and beyond
Coming up1. The medium
2. Data, data, data
3. Modern buyers
Part one:
The Medium
The PDF story starts in 1992
No need to support
• Video
• Interactivity
• Dynamic content
• Device responsiveness
• Tracking
• And so on...
Today, these are exactly the tools with
which we fight the battle for attention
55% of marketers say engaging their audience is a top three challenge
But we wanted to go deeper!
350 participants
Modern tech
4 way test
The interactive version scored
10x longer read times
5x more positive brand impression
NERD TIME
Psychology sidebar
But again, so what?
Well actually, they sort of do
And we pay for them implicitly
Ok, well we'll do a webpage then
We studied that as well
In summary
Part two:
Data,
data, data
Every single piece of digital marketing provides a ton of metrics
Again, so what?
If you don't know what's going on,
you can't act intelligently
So what if?
1. What if data could help us
understand what's driving engagement?
Our long form content should be
capable of deep reporting including
Magic Quadrant for engagement
What correlates with good results?
Does it make the boat go faster?
2. What if data could help us
understand intent?
Our long form content should be one of our richest intent data sources
Understand and manage intent over time
Convert the right people at the right time
OPPORTUNITIES
Spot the right accounts
Build out the buying group
Understand pipegen
3. What if data could tell us
what good looks like?
There are benchmarks for
• Email opens / clicks rates
• Landing page conversions
• Website bounce rates
• Cost per social lead
• etc etc
We analyzed 35 billion data points
Get your copy
tinyurl.com/mrx9szp4
4. What if data (and ML) could suggest
what we should do next?
Part three:
Modern buyers
How many times have you checked your phone in the last 30 mins?
We only have time for
the most relevant messages
Ideally, our content would adjust to show the most relevant information based on what we know about the reader
PDF can't do that
TO WRAP UP
We looked at the three black holes of PDF
We saw how they cost us
Thank you
for listening