Why are we still pounding rocks together?
As long as marketing has existed, we have struggled to answer a fundamental question: how do I know what’s working? Teams generate seemingly endless amounts of content and send it out into the world, hoping that it will tell a compelling story and convince customers to buy their products. But which marketing investments are actually yielding results? Until recently, answering that question has been mostly a matter of anecdote and intuition.
The revolution of digital marketing was a breakthrough. For the first time, companies can measure marketing results and base their decisions on hard data. By using closed-loop marketing, they are able to analyse the real results of every program, and do it in real time… but only at the top of the funnel, where marketers reach out and directly connect with their prospects. The bottom of the funnel remains a content black hole, where the business impact of marketing is as difficult to measure as it has always been.
If closed loop marketing has been so successful at the top of the funnel, why don’t marketers apply it to the rest of the sales cycle?
What’s held them back was the absence of software designed specifically as an end-to-end sales enablement solution. Digital marketing became standard practice when tools emerged to support it – marketing automation systems like Eloqua and Marketo. To apply similar techniques to the last mile of the buyer’s journey, a new set of tools has emerged. These modern sales enablement platforms track and optimise the way that content is used throughout the sales cycle.
But there is a major challenge that stands in the way. Content is constantly changing and evolving as it moves from marketing to sales to the customer, making it difficult to assess its performance and business impact. Content Genomics is an essential technology that cuts through this confusion. It analyses the DNA of the sales content across the organisation, tracking how it has evolved and making it possible to accurately measure its performance.
