At a bird’s-eye view, you can achieve 4 things with data, each more sophisticated than the last:
- Describe something.
- Diagnose an issue.
- Predict an outcome.
- Prescribe a solution.
Concentric’s enterprise analytics platform can do all of this across an entire Fortune 500 company. But before they create solutions at scale, they usually dip a toe in by solving a single business problem. Then they expand on that success, rippling outward across departments until they’ve built something truly far-reaching and extraordinary within the enterprise.
Incidentally, we took a similar approach to Concentric’s digital marketing strategy. They started with a kernel in the form of a target audience, and we provided the resources to develop a content marketing program with nearly limitless potential to scale.
Here’s how it all unfolded:
The problem: Random acts of marketing = no results
“There was no marketing strategy to speak of. It was very much about throwing something up against a wall and seeing if it stuck.”
That was the state of things when Kevin Jaquith, Director of Demand Generation, joined Concentric in 2018. Freelancers and people within the company sporadically created content, sometimes going months without publishing anything new. The most consistent digital marketing effort was LinkedIn advertising, and it wasn’t generating returns.
“Ads just don’t work for our audience,” Kevin said. “Our product is too complex and typically the people we’re going after just don’t have the time to be surfing LinkedIn.”
The solution: A well-defined audience, great content and Brafton’s content marketing platform
Concentric adopted 3 initial content marketing goals after Kevin came on:
Goal No. 1: Define the target audience.
Goal No. 2: Consistently create SEO-fueled content this audience would engage with.
Goal No. 3: Identify a way to scale initial successes and target other audiences.
Kevin took the lead by defining Concentric’s ideal target audiences, a colossal undertaking in its own right.
The second phase, which began March 2020, required close collaboration with Brafton. Concentric’s target audience is mostly Analytics Process Leads who are highly skeptical of marketing.
“They immediately recognize fluff and will call it out as meaningless content,” Kevin said. “But: If we’re taking ideas that are drawn from anecdotal evidence, models we’ve built or challenges we’ve incurred with customers, they can sense that’s legitimate and real and can map back to some of their pain points.”
All content marketing starts with an audience and expands outward from there.
Today, we produce 4 blog posts per month for Concentric. Two of those are purely SEO-focused and developed with our proprietary Search Performance Briefs. The other 2 are thought-leadership blog posts with ideas taken straight from Concentric’s experts. Our writers interview Concentric’s experts and create an outline before penning these posts.
As Concentric has become more comfortable with our level of SME and our ability to nail brand voice, we’ve branched into new content types such as custom illustrations and eBooks.
Concentric also started using Brafton’s new Content Marketing Platform (CMP) to help manage content creation and delivery, which Kevin sees as a potential avenue to eventually scale up their content marketing program.
“We went from emails to the platform, and I love it. Before, I’d have to find a blog post in an email that the project manager sent me, and now I just log into the platform and see where everything is in the queue.”
“We went from emails to the platform, and I love it,” Kevin said. “Before, I’d have to find a blog post in an email that the project manager sent me, and now I just log into the platform and see where everything is in the queue—this is what’s outstanding, this is what needs approval, this is what needs revisions.”
The outcome: Scalable content for the right audience
YoY improvements in engagement:
- Time on site: Up by 102%.
- Bounce rate: Down by 11%.
- Pages per session: Up by 25%.
Reduced customer acquisition cost:
- 80% lower, to be precise.
A metric-defying eBook:
- 1,000-plus downloads.
- 47% conversion rate.
Opportunities for exploring new content mediums down the road:
- Infographics.
- One-pagers.
- Video content.
The confidence to branch into new audience personas:
- Brafton’s CMP can help keep content efforts organized as Concentric begins creating new messaging for its business-user audience.
Sales enablement:
- Concentric’s sales team is actively sharing blog content with prospects.
Increased thought leadership:
- The consistent exercise in content creation has inspired Concentric’s experts to ideate more often and get their interesting ideas in front of an audience that appreciates them.
Content marketing is only worthwhile if it works. And it clearly has for Concentric. Brafton had a hand in that success through its content creation efforts and its CMP.
“I’ve worked with a lot of other content marketing companies and have had mixed success,” Kevin said. “With Brafton it’s been really good because it just continues to get better over time.”
An excerpt from Concentric’s highly successful eBook about prescriptive analytics.
But the partnership works because Kevin and the Concentric team believe in and understand the power of organic digital marketing, particularly in complex B2B markets.
“I’ve always been a huge believer in inbound and not interrupting people and not relying on ads,” Kevin said. “You’ve really got to create content that aligns with the audience’s challenges and we do that.”
It’s this belief in inbound, combined with a strategic, audience-centric approach to content marketing, that has helped Concentric achieve early successes.
Now it’s just a matter of helping those successes ripple into something truly far-reaching and extraordinary.
And we’re up to the task.
