Behavioral Marketing: Delivering Personalized Experiences At Scale

6Upping Your Content GameEducating Customers Throughout the Entire Cycle

If there's one topic that I speak with marketers about most often other than responsive design, it's the rise of content strategy as a marketing tactic. There are lots of blogs and books on this singular topic alone, but I want to cover this subject here as a now-required tactic among the most behavioral-oriented marketers. Content serves all kinds of critical roles within our traditional marketing effort, and to think it doesn't apply even more so to digital is downright false.

Depending on whose data you believe, customers make between 50 percent and 70 percent of their buying decision before ever interacting with a brand. (The Corporate Executive Board put this number at 57 percent as long ago as 2012, so one can only imagine how that number has grown since then.) This means that web-based research, social media recommendations, product reviews, and dozens of other content touch points all inform an opinion about our product or services before a prospect ever even talks to us. This also means we're likely to be asked very end-game questions when the call or email actually shows up. Getting customer requests like best price, custom configurations, or determining whether the item is in stock are the symptoms of failing to focus more effectively on content earlier in the buyer's journey.

I think back to the last new vehicle I bought. In general, I almost always buy directly from manufacturers' certified ...