The insights opportunity

What's to gain from getting this right

What do sales and marketing functions in tech companies actually want to know?

1. Who, specifically, has a hand in the purchase decision and their roles in the process

Why is this useful?

Know where the power lies, who’s buy-in is most important and who’s pain points to prioritize. This can help sales teams reduce the length of the sales cycle by focusing efforts on the right people and their needs.

2. What the different buyers’ motivations are driving the purchase

Why is this useful?

Sales and marketers can be more persuasive in their communications and conversations by speaking to the specific motivations driving the buyer’s research and early interest in your product or service offering.

3. Which topics, problems, and products are of greatest interest to buyers

Why is this useful?

This kind of insight is required for personalizing communications and conversations to more effectively qualify and nurture prospects as well as create compelling customer experiences.

Insights from content interactions can drive revenue

Your content can deliver much more than a useful answer to a prospect, buyer or customer's question. It can answer your questions too – if designed to.

By tracking which topics and types of content individual buyers interact with and engage with the most, marketers can discern buyer motivations, pain points, and product interests. These are precisely the kinds of insights that help both marketing and sales teams deliver more personalized customer experiences and conversations, resulting in business growth.

A practical example

It stands to reason that a buyer who spends 15 minutes reading your whitepaper on cloud security is more likely to be interested in your security offering versus the buyer who spent 1 minute skimming through security, but 10 minutes on your systems architecture brochure. The conversations your sales team has with these two different buyers will be a lot stronger when armed with this insight. You also know which kind of case study you might want to send to their respective inboxes to nudge them closer to that conversation with sales.

More interactions = more insights

Interactive content presents more ways to collect insight and information about contacts, such as their answer to polls, their interactions with data sets and who they might be sharing content with (helping you to identify the wider buying unit).

Establishing a content machine that provides this kind of information for the business requires the use of a content marketing platform that can track known contact behavior within the content and integrate with customer relationship management systems (CRMs) and customer data platforms (CDPs) to build a shared source of truth about the buyer.

Strengthening marketing's position

Forrester's study found that 87% of the tech companies surveyed had implemented and 57% were planning to expand or upgrade their implementation.

The perceived benefits include improved ability to demonstrate ROI and business impact by connecting content to high-quality leads and business outcomes. Almost half (45%) said insights gained from content interaction have or are expected to elevate marketing's role in closing businesses and 42% that it would raise marketing's profile.