Product-led marketing flips the growth playbook. Your product drives adoption and scale, redefining the modern business landscape.

Notion struggled to convert users, barely making any impression in the market in 2015.

It didn’t come as a surprise. Amidst the world of technological startups, few gain the kind of recognition Microsoft and Apple have come to afford.

But Notion’s rise to popularity is one for the books.

Beginning humbly as a single workspace for accessible and intelligent information management, the founder held a single vision: to consolidate tasks, notes, and databases in one place.

The frustration stemmed from the fragmented state of digital tools, irrespective of their advanced functionalities.

However, like every startup, Notion faced its simmering challenges – lack of funding and shortcomings in meeting user requirements.

The company knew it had to pivot.

And by 2021, Notion had come to be valued at $10 billion.

Its valuation skyrocketed, with it being used by 50% of Fortune 500 companies to refine modern workflows.

From merely a simple note-taking application, it has become a multi-functional and proactive workspace used by individuals and businesses alike – an indispensable tool to enhance productivity and optimize workflows.

All of this is due to its product-led marketing strategy.

What Exactly is Product-Led Marketing?

In simple terms, Salesforce defines product-led marketing as:

Product-led growth is based on the concept that customers who enjoy a product will become loyal users and share it with others, resulting in lower customer acquisition costs and a self-sustaining growth loop.

Product-led marketing centers your product as the narrative.

Narrative that sells on its own through the experience it affords users. Here, it’s not just about the alignment between marketing and sales, but the heart of it all lies in design and engineering.

Product-led marketing drives innovation And builds your narrative as you polish your products.

Becoming the go-to means for customer acquisition, PLG marketing has become a cornerstone for SaaS providers, with over 95% currently leveraging this approach, from Zoom to Slack.

And ever since, PLG has been established as a treasure trove to garner above-average returns. The product is at the nexus, and your customers have power over it from the get-go.

Traditional marketing playbooks react to this delusive loss of control by engineering desire and need, such as creating FOMO, grasping attention, or converting quickly. For them, channeling buyers means using retargeting loops and aggressive lead scoring — a method that can feel overtly manipulative and cold. Our approach to lead generation focuses on smart, human-centered strategies that build real trust.

But buyers aren’t giving in. They are self-educating and impulsive as ever.

So, what product-led marketing does is not promote this system. It helps marketers relinquish control, instilling mutual trust over coercion.

PLG strategies consider customers smarter than marketing gives them credit for. There’s no need to convince them; just demonstrate the value of your solutions.

So, instead of persuasive messaging, your brand must give them access – let them discover value on their own terms.

Marketing’s Role in PLG

What’s the role of marketing here, you may ask? It’s subtle.

You have to ensure that it’s not the marketing’s capabilities that are augmented. They shouldn’t be the ones dominating the conversations with buyers.

But orchestrate an environment where buyers progress from curiosity to a decision.

Marketing must engineer a journey without it seeming too sales-y. This is the actual tightrope of PLG marketing: avoid triggering a buyer’s anti-sell defense mechanism.

Buyers can rarely be persuaded through overbearing messages. They must feel like it’s they who hold the power to take the succeeding steps.

The product is the playground, while your marketing team is the architect. PLG strategies serve as curtains for marketing’s behind-the-scenes operations, such as designing touchpoints and triggers to embed content into the product’s user experience.

The traditional playbooks asserted the vendor power, but PLG dissolved it. It amplifies buyers’ autonomy and moves away from conventional power dynamics.

And businesses end up gaining more influence, not less, by letting users be in control.

How Can Product-led Marketing Help Grow Your Business?

Self-sustaining growth loop.

That’s your basic answer. We aren’t talking about virality or word-of-mouth marketing.

We are talking about changing the game through a self-reinforcing system that PLG marketing embraces.

1. Reduces CAC

This marketing model seeks active community engagement where users contribute towards your business’s growth, retention rates, and product improvement.

All without any substantial increase in your marketing spend.

This is quite a unique way product-led marketing helps you grow. It adds instead of chipping away.

This way, it cuts down on CAC because every new user becomes your marketing channel; the more, the merrier.

Source: Zendesk

In traditional marketing, every customer is accompanied by a price tag – ads, sales commissions, and outbound efforts. But product-led marketing pivots.

Here, sharing is marketing.

It leverages the onboarding process of each user as a micro-marketing event where the product becomes the funnel and the user is the channel. And acquiring customers doesn’t incur additional costs.

Over time, this could deflate or reverse your CAC curve, especially as the business scales.

2. Accelerated TTV (Time-To-Value)

Product-led marketing doesn’t let customer experiences marinate.

Traditional marketing persuades users to imagine the value of a product or service. And it has always leaned towards siloed comms, disjointed from actual customer interaction.

PLG leverages an omniscient approach, engineering the next best experiences in real-time. This marketing model helps users experience the value rather than feel it. This accelerates the path to activation.

Source: Command AI

Active customers are the essence of business growth. When brands offer customers personalized and relevant experiences, they are rewarded with activity.

It’s a give-and-take situation. And a predictive marker of customer retention and expansion.

The underlying logic: Consistently providing resonating experiences to active customers can compel them to become natural brand advocates.

Your marketing and sales teams don’t have to rely on external onboarding teams and excruciatingly long sales cycles. Users self-dive into finding the product’s value. And they feel the victory of this discovery.

The sweet spot? Your design and marketing teams can reiterate this. They can leverage product science to test the flows regularly, not just a messaging function.

3. Elevated Customer Retention

Source: HubSpot

In traditional marketing funnels, any leaks can be patched up through additional top-of-the-funnel spending. But PLM doesn’t endorse this.

Because users are onboarded through the product, they only stick around and purchase if it delivers. Any inefficiencies can only lead to drop-offs, i.e., higher churn rates.

In PLG marketing, marketing gets a tighter hold on the feedback loops. If users drop off, they know where and why.

This forces a much-needed alignment between marketing, product, and business growth.

The growth isn’t fragile or overly dependent on paid channels but on product usage.

And this creates a community of contributors, not users.

From user-made tutorials on Notion to design templates on Figma, each contribution is an asset. Ones that even marketing cannot create at scale.

It feeds back into the growth loop.

Flywheel of discovery to activation to product usage to evangelism to new user onboarding.

So, it’s no longer about marketing to your target audience but creating a network.

This strategy has helped businesses grow and compound, and Notion is a quality example of this.

Product-led Marketing Example: What Did Notion Do Differently?

In this age of impulse and ever-growing curiosity, buyers don’t want to be told what to buy; they want to explore.

PLG affords them this control. The product sells because the user is in control. They aren’t being sold to, but gauging the product’s value for themselves. But this isn’t accurate.

Customers feel that they are cruising this journey on their own. But it’s all owing to the intuitive design that you engineer. Ultimately, your marketing team is the invisible force that designs the experience users go through.

But their involvement is subtle. They are enablers, not manipulators.

Most SaaS innovators have come to recognize this holy grail.

Let’s take a look at Notion, a company that pioneered PLG marketing, not just adopt it.

Source: https://youtu.be/y-kM5kD2nm0

Notion excels at an invariable number of tasks, from project management to storing marketing materials.

At the nucleus of its success is not just its capabilities but its versatility.

With an all-hands-on-deck strategy, Notion:

1. Expanded internationally by localizing its platform in several languages to cater to a global audience.
2. Launched a freemium model to let the users experience the full value before they pay the full premium price.
3. Leveraged viral product loops through their subreddit community and UGC, fostering internal referrals and word-of-mouth marketing.

Notion’s subreddit community of 280,000 users and user-generated templates reflect robust brand loyalty. This has fostered hefty team collaboration, and viral loops have also led to explosive user growth.

This leap to product-led marketing didn’t merely make a remarkable dent in its ARR, but it also expanded its user base to over 30 million people globally.

Notion capitalized on a significant leap towards remote work as the world recovered from COVID-19, driving community-driven organic growth without any heavy investments in traditional marketing.

It demonstrates the power of a well-thought-out product-led growth strategy.

What did Notion actually do?

Primarily, it polished its customers’ experiences with the platform and then strategically leveraged this experience as a marketing tool – the essence of PLG marketing.

Notion capitalized on remote work.

However, to build a sustainable and compounding marketing engine, it recognized the prowess of the user community and product loops.

And the power of user experience itself.

But Notion could only become what it is today from a scrappy startup through a well-thought-out PLG marketing strategy.

Outlining A Robust Product-led Marketing Model: The Base

Going PLG isn’t about doing rush work. And it isn’t plug-and-play.

There are specificities to be met beneath the surface.

Just having a product isn’t enough. You need a product that can communicate its story and value without the need for additional drivers.

And a framework to translate user behavior into actual business growth.

1. Short and obvious TTV

Users don’t convert on potential but on experience. If your product requires external human explanation and takes a week to reflect its value, no amount of sweet marketing messages can undo this.

The first impression has been made. And in PLG, making a good one is non-negotiable. Your product must be the pitch, demo, and closer – all in real-time.

2. Precise tracking

Vanity metrics matter. But they don’t hold actual weight, especially when it comes to offering a 360-degree view of users. This is why tracking in-product behavior is crucial.

Or else, how do you know what the user is doing and what they aren’t? It will help you segment active and passive users.

With vanity metrics, you’re just flying blind. But actionable ones, such as drop-off points and activation moments, will define successive steps.

PLG requires a self-tuning funnel. And without marketing locking in with product and growth, there are no segmented user lists or streamlined flows.

3. Embedded narrative

In product-led marketing, marketing’s job doesn’t end with acquisition. It takes place internally, within the product, from nudges to upgrades to onboarding flows.

Here, the product isn’t the product in the traditional sense of the word. And neither is the content embedded in it.

The content is the storytelling embedded into the UX. It cannot just follow any flow but must be subtle and instructive. And delivered at just the right moment.

4. Organizational alignment

PLG marketing isn’t a marketing campaign. It’s a supportive hybrid system.

Marketing, product, and growth are locked in.

So, if your departments are siloed, your product’s performance endures a blow. Every team has a fundamental role to play:

1. Marketing sets the narrative and voice.
2. Product engineers design to bridge the experience and expectations.
3. Growth focuses on the loop.

A single unit is necessary because PLG marketing is an all-hands-on-deck approach. If any one of them misses, the whole system free-falls.

5. Shareability

Every marketing message must engage and compel, and your products must entail a shareable hook. This marketing model doesn’t just work for all products.

You need something that is inherently you and also follows the trends. It must be conversational, personalized, intuitive, and collaborative, with the ability to go viral.

Users share only when they look good doing it.

These surfaces should be acknowledged and tweaked regularly; value cannot be shared through closed doors.

Product-led Marketing is Your Compounding Engine.

In traditional marketing and sales, businesses gated the demo and controlled product information.

Through marketing’s subtle architecture, your product speaks for itself.

With PLG, you aren’t just designing a product.

You’re curating an entire system where your product speaks the relevant language to the right audience at the right time.

And you are turning your users into the next channel.

They aren’t just buyers through it all. They begin a journey, test value on their own terms, and influence purchasing decisions from the get-go.

Buyers are skeptical today. But the right product-led marketing strategies cruise through and invert the traditional funnel. Decisions are driven by user experience, not the sales pitch.

Appointment-setting isn’t about reciting scripts but orchestrating connections. How can SDRs build trust and momentum from the very first touchpoint?

The law of averages is often used as a driving force behind appointment setting, especially when the focus leans towards volume rather than value.

On the surface, it makes sense- more volume means more opportunities. By booking more appointments, SDRs create a pipeline of prospective leads for their AEs. And amidst this pool of qualified leads, some will eventually convert.

This has been the norm for several businesses. The logic is simple: SDR numbers influence revenue forecasting and business growth; they are the pipeline builders.

But there’s a catch.

The law of averages can prove to be a double-edged sword.

More appointments may indeed lead to higher conversions. But this approach creates a false sense of confidence. Merely focusing on volume can produce complacency within sales teams. In a rush to hit the numbers, the quality of meetings is forsaken.

This is where outsourcing appointment setting services becomes crucial. You aren’t offloading tasks but gaining a strategic edge.

The right appointment-setting service providers aren’t merely filling your calendars; they integrate into your sales strategy.

What Do We Mean by Appointment-Setting Companies?

Appointment-setting companies function as your sales team’s extension; it doesn’t replace them. With their expertise and knowledge base, they help polish your sales pipeline and build direct access to the right decision-makers.

But on the off-chance, choosing the incorrect appointment-setting company can also pad your pipeline with noise: volume that holds no quality.

There’s a drastic lack of strategic alignment with your in-house SDRs and marketing teams.

So, outsourcing them and how they influence your pipeline depends on two factors: how you leverage them and how they align with your GTM strategies.

Top Risks of Choosing the Wrong Appointment Setting Company

1. The primary and most significant one is the illusion of progress.

In 2024, 84% of SDRs didn’t meet their appointment quotas, while 67% weren’t expecting it to happen the following year.

What does this say?

SDRs missing their quotas might not always be detrimental. It’s crucial to meet their set targets, but it’s better than presenting inflated appointment metrics.

Booking numerous appointments isn’t synonymous with momentum, nor does it demonstrate a healthy pipeline. SDRs meeting their appointment quotas could easily elevate the possibility that the majority of meetings turn out to be ill-fitting prospects.

In reality, the dissonance becomes quite evident. Even though SDRs meet their appointment quotas, AEs later on notice high no-show rates, deal stalling, and weak engagement from these accounts.

What’s the point of it all?

SDRs waste their time, slowing down pipeline velocity. Meanwhile, when the burden of closing shifts to AEs, they burn their time in unproductive meetings.

Your AEs end up over-casting on these inflated numbers.

So, missed targets don’t always equate to poor closing skills, but poor lead quality, eroding trust in your lead-gen strategy.

2. Think of the B2B landscape: the total addressable market is finite.

It’s the underlying logic that not all set appointments will translate into closed deals and contribute to the revenue stream. Owing to this, organizations begin to notice diminishing returns on volume-centric appointment settings after a point.

You can’t use brute force or invasive outreach tactics to set appointments. Rather than contributing to your pipeline’s health, it could easily saturate your buyers and damage your brand reputation.

This is the second pain point.

3. Poor outsourcing appointment setting services drains budget and value.

Not only does a lack of strategic outsourcing efforts detrimentally affect your market positioning, but it also empties your pockets, with no value created.

One incorrect tactic can also fabricate a hole in your brand narrative, the third and quite significant pain point.

Most appointment setting services are assessed on a single metric: the total number of appointments booked. The entire focus is attributed to this one aspect.

What about the rest of the factors that truly drive conversion?

The understanding of the brand or customer pain points that the internal team is educated on isn’t delivered to the outsourced team. They are distanced and disconnected from the brand’s messaging and USP, resulting in a lack of personalized efforts.

They can’t qualify leads based on practical cases that mirror the brand voice. It becomes challenging for marketing to position its demand-gen strategies with outsourced efforts. All of which results in wasted budget and fragmented messaging.

There’s one thing to understand here:

Appointment setting isn’t about the short-term incentives, such as getting accounts on the calendars. When focused primarily on this, the long-term nurturing opportunities are overlooked.

Some term campaign targets can offer you momentary wins, but they also drive away a majority of your market who aren’t ready to purchase just yet.

How to Choose the Right Outsourced Appointment Setting Service

Most appointment-setting service providers sell “appointment volume” as the end goal. But that’s not the end requirement; a healthy pipeline is.

The best appointment-setting companies recognize this need. They aren’t just providers, they are outcome-oriented partners:

1. They understand your ICP beyond obvious firmographics.
2. Study and leverage your brand’s voice to function with value.
3. Align efforts with marketing and sales to create feedback loops.

If your vendor doesn’t help you understand why the lead booked a meeting or which pain point to solve, they’re here for a very different purpose than yours.

You want your appointment setters to drive the sales pipeline, not fill calendars. They must nurture intent and create the right opportunities.

This is what you should prioritize while choosing the right appointment-setting services. You must differentiate the best appointment setting services from the mediocre ones.

5 fundamental factors to single out the best appointment setting services provider for your business.

1. Hyper-personalization through advanced data intelligence.

The best appointment setting services vendors don’t just make calls and hope for the best. They take a more granular approach – reading the room by leveraging deep insights.

They wish to enhance the quality of the meeting itself.

Hence, the primary aspect is customizing their outreach and communications process. Providers must address specific lead challenges and needs within their industry. Insights drawn from surface-level criteria, such as job titles and industrial domain, prove ineffective.

It’s the actual buying signals that matter. And this is only possible through advanced analytics, past engagement patterns, and intent signals gauged by the tech infrastructure they leverage.

A provider cannot expect you to believe that generalized scripts and ICP-based commonplace insights are the essence of their “unique” strategies.

The quality of the approach must transform for the meeting.

2. Integrating seamlessly with your CRM and overall sales cycle.

Your appointment provider cannot operate siloes. They must integrate into your sales ecosystem, one that deeply integrates with your CRM systems, sales enablement tools, and marketing automation.

This way, there’s synergy between the internal departments and the outsourced team. It’s vital because, without any alignment, you’re just outsourcing a task, not building a trustworthy relationship. At its nucleus, the chosen appointment setting services provider must develop a professional and value-driven relationship with your brand.

With this, AEs and marketing teams can offer feedback to the external vendor, helping them adjust their strategies even in mid-campaign.

It fosters smooth handoffs between SDRs and AEs while tracking how leads proceed through the final stages in real time. This plays an integral role in optimizing the pipeline. And the possibility of closing more deals.

3. Agile and adaptive strategies that scale with the business.

Appointment-setting is more than the traditional “making a call” and blocking calendar dates.

With the transformations taking root in marketing and sales, SDRs must revamp their strategies. The best providers already understand that what worked in the past might not work today. There’s a vital disconnect in how sales were operated in the past.

To give your business the best of what they offer, appointment-setting providers must do things differently now. They must engineer strategies that are agile enough and adaptable, especially for the ever-shifting industry trends and buyer behavior.

These vendors should also be well-versed in executing strategies with advanced technology. And help you update the existing infrastructure, especially if it lacks significance in the current landscape.

4. Transparent reports with actionable and meaningful insights.

There are numerous providers out there that, in the name of transparent reporting, offer data dumps. These numbers are significant, but they are passive. They leave the entire interpretative work to the AEs in your team.

This illustrates the wrong dynamic in this partnership.

Transparency in reporting isn’t highlighting what is happening but why it is happening and what the next steps are.

For this, the appointment-setting providers must offer reports that don’t just mimic your existing dashboards. It must be a strategic conversation that spotlights the main friction points:

1. Why are the conversion rates dipping?
2. Why are the appointments in EMEA falling through compared to North America?

The questions that the reports urge should spark decisions, not merely represent what’s already happening. Truly insightful reports can elevate the alignment between the vendor and your internal teams, fostering consistent optimization.

Without making continuous tweaks, it’s tasking to gauge the long-term feasibility of your existing strategies. Your vendor should help map a solution – highlight the cracks and how to cement them.

The appointment setting services they offer shouldn’t mimic a call center. Their insights must be descriptive and interpretative. This signifies that the appointment-setting company has attention to detail, expertise, and infrastructure to go beyond just booking appointments.

5. Customer-first communications strategy.

Delivering customer-first communication isn’t just about elevating politeness or avoiding spammy tactics.

It means meeting the buyer halfway, especially when the power in this conversation has shifted to them. Leveraging meaningless persuasion techniques is ineffective on its own; you must establish relevance. That’s what truly matters to potential clients.

The best in the game know that it’s not really about numbers. It’s about resonance and relevancy, which is built gradually through tone and personalized communication delivered at the right time. Templated conversations are disconnected from the brand narrative.

And this isn’t the kind of impression you’re looking to make in the first place. Those who fall into this falsity often follow a single agenda. These appointment-setting companies overlook how they can leverage their domain knowledge and circle it around the prospects’ context.

Most often, companies are inclined toward a single agenda: booking appointments. But acting like cold callers doesn’t do the job today. They must pose as early consultants and:

1. Understand the prospect’s challenges
2. Ask the appropriate questions
3. Know when to move further or back off

In the initial stages, appointment volume might make your SDRs better aware of the possibility of conversions. But in the long run, fit and intent secure the driving wheel of your sales pipeline.

Remember, every outreach is a touchpoint; whether it’s accepted or ignored isn’t the primary issue. But if the communication is off from the nib, the damage is done even before the lead talks to your SDRs.

These facets aren’t best practices in choosing the right appointment-setting services, but filters. The right ones not only make a difference in lead quality but also in how the market perceives your brand.

Ciente’s Solutions: Designing Better Buyer Interactions

At Ciente, these aren’t just strategies for us. They are our operating principles.

Our appointment setting services don’t merely include blocking dates but building a positive brand perception.

To build a sustainable appointment-setting engine, we recognize that a one-size-fits-all script isn’t the gleaming solution that sales reps have thought it to be. So, we work closely with our clients to curate outreach that feels personal, not automated.

We abandon all templated playbooks to build insightful reports on accurate and actionable data, helping you ascertain when to double down and when to pivot.

At Ciente, we book appointments but also orchestrate conversations that help you guide your leads through the pipeline with confidence and purpose.

If you’re rethinking your cookie-clutter approach, reach out to our experts to vamp up your existing comms strategy.

The first impression sets the tone, and it should feel like you.

While the old marketing KPIs give way, a new way is emerging in the AI-age. And here’s all you need to catch up.

Content marketing is an ever-shifting maze. A labyrinth of people’s sentiments, business goals, and creativity. Some navigate this maze almost without effort, and many fall short. They create pieces with their heart, soul, and logic, only for them to underperform and not affect the business in any meaningful way.

It’s crushing, to say the least.

But teams can navigate the maze to the best of their capabilities using a simple solution: content marketing KPIs.

While marketing KPIs are often frowned upon for not providing a clear picture, the fault is not with the metrics or how they’re tracked. It’s how they are used in the context of your campaigns- whether these metrics align with your campaigns or are used because they are a market standard is the crux of the matter here.

Let’s start with the basics and move down to the nitty-gritty of the KPIs.

What are Content Marketing KPIs?

Content is abstract. Without directly looking at the person or their behavior after interacting with the content, teams cannot gauge what the audience feels. Marketing teams and designers need to understand what’s working and what isn’t. To capture this feedback, the teams had to create milestones, metrics, and “flags” based on user behavior data and business needs.

In short, content marketing KPIs are quantifiable metrics that measure how effectively your content drives business objectives and audience engagement.

Business Impact of Tracking the Content Marketing KPIs

KPIs provide clarity to teams, especially if the impact they want to track is intangible. This could range from customer satisfaction to brand messaging, with various means of tracing them.

A simple example would be YouTube’s comment and like functions, which provide a clear indicator of audience sentiment and behavior. However, many businesses don’t rely on YouTube for their content.

They use various touchpoints and channels to reach their desired buyer. To meet them where they want to be met and influence them on their terms. To gauge if your buyers are influenced, content marketing KPIs are employed and used to nurture relationships and close deals.

Businesses do this by:

1. Gathering relevant data on the buyers.
2. Allocating budgets and resources towards channels with better performance
3. Justifying cost and proving ROI.

But, honestly, this is easier said than done. Many organizations track the same KPIs as their competition and use them the exact way with little to no variations.

And that’s because they miss the larger context to view the KPIs with. If businesses really want to drive businesses with content, it’s about time they stop using these metrics like it’s 2020.

The complex buyers’ journey demands something more from you- the context in which they are buying and your intended message towards them.

Following hype and trends will only have you chasing vanity metrics- not business deals.

The Framework for Content Marketing KPIs

Caption: Content Marketing KPIs: Fighting for Relevancy

A framework is often considered a plan. A series of steps to reach where you want to go. That’s a very one-dimensional way of looking at it.

A framework is a reference point for you to create a strategy. As Michael C Porter, the father of strategy, says, “Strategy is the creation of a unique and valuable position, involving a different set of activities.”

And any framework should empower you to do just that.

While the KPIs you track won’t change much, let’s think of new ways of questioning them.

Awareness-Stage KPIs (TOFU)

In the TOFU stage, the KPIs can seem very surface-level. They are: –

Impressions and CTR

• We’ve decided to club impressions and CTR together for a few reasons.
• While many impressions are good for reach, are they translating to clicks?
• Of the clicks you are receiving, are they from your intended demographic?
• Based on your campaign, where are these impressions and clicks coming from? E.g., organic or referrals or paid
• In terms of email marketing, instead of impressions, you should track open rates and the CTR for the intended action they’re taking.
• Did the numbers reach your campaign goal? If not, what should have worked and what did not?
• Can you identify the missing piece of the puzzle and retry it?

Share of Voice

• Have conversations around your brand increased?
• Did the impressions, open rates, and CTRs affect the conversations you want to have with your leads/buyers?
• Do you see a positive growth in engagement and perceptions, even by 5-6%?
• Have these positive interactions increased activity on your website and other content formats?

Branded Searches
a) Have your branded searches increased?
b) What percent of those is your intended audience?

Engagement-Stage KPIs (TOFU+MOFU)

While the above KPIs have some semblance of engagement, it’s at this stage that a brand truly starts coming into its own.

Here are a few: –

1. Time on page/Avg Duration or Dwell Time

• Whether your content makes sense or not to the reader depends on the average time.
• However, if you want your page to rank for snippets or AI snippets, users may not read everything but only the answer to their query.
• But if your content wants to educate, inform, and entertain, having a longer dwell time is crucial.
• If not, is it the content that is losing them, or is it not reaching your leads through the correct channels?
• What can you optimize here?

2. Pages per Session

• Internal linking is fascinating. It connects your pages together but also gives your audience more content to consume related to their query. The opportunity is to push them inward.
• It shows if your audience is engaging with multiple pages at once.
• Pages per session let you observe this engagement- is your audience interested in more?
• Based on their searches and navigation, what can you make of their behavior and intent?
• If your average page per session is not satisfactory, can you identify the drop-off point?
• Are the sessions desktop or mobile-based?

3. Social Media Engagement

• Has your engagement in the SERPs affected your social media presence?
• Is your campaign goal to increase social media engagement, or is it a by-product of your positive interactions?
• Conversely, have your social media efforts boosted engagement to your website and other offers?
• Have conversations around your brand increased? And what content has facilitated it?
• A bonus point- can your sales team identify if there are any warm leads in your social engagement? (There should be)

Conversion-Stage KPIS (MOFU+BOFU)

For content marketers eager to prove ROI, this stage has to be the most exciting one. It shows the direct impact of content on sales.

1. Lead Generation

• Lead gen is one of the best KPIs in content marketing– it proves direct ROI.
• However, has your content converted your intended audience, and have they been deemed as leads?
• Are they ready to have conversations with sales, or do they need nurturing?
• What type of content is bringing the most amount of leads, and what is the relevancy of both the content and the leads it’s bringing in?
• What is the ratio of relevant vs irrelevant leads?
• What channel did they come from?

2. Sales and Cost

• Are the sales teams having satisfactory conversations with the leads that are coming in?
• Which channel is proving its ROI, and are there channels whose CAC: ROI ratio is disharmonious?
• Are there sales objections that directly stem from your content? (An excellent sign of engagement. And an opportunity to stand out)
• What percent of leads are coming from the content, and how many of them are converting into paying customers?
• What is the opinion of your sales teams on the lead quality?

3. Advocacy and Propagation

• Is your content creating a community around it, no matter how small?
• Is your audience sharing the content around, and which ones gain traction more than the others?
• Are they referring you and sharing particular content pieces with others?
• Are your pieces where they’re having personal conversations?

Advanced Content Marketing KPIs

Caption: Prometheus Gifts Fire

Content marketing is nothing short of magic- words and visuals on paper that affect readers’ emotions and logic. And these KPIs give you a glimpse into the inner world of the people consuming the content. However, the AI game is changing what content is. If people can have conversations with an encyclopedia that is personalized for them, they will prefer it.

But, human beings are notorious for our ability to do unexpected things- and many have turned to only human written content and information.

Why is that?

It’s our love for exploration.

And future content and its KPIs must account for this innate desire. It’s a desire that compels people to buy- B2B or otherwise.

The good news is you can track these innate desires. There are KPIs that have started to account for this behavioral change in buyers. Here are a few you can build on.

1. User Journey Flow Analysis

• Mapping the macro journey of the user is the easier part. But almost always, a lot of nuance is lost in this view.
• The user journey flow analysis KPI lets you break down the journey and identify molecular changes in the buyers’ journey with your products and offers.
• From identifying drop-off points to discovering common points of interest, this KPI is a mix of many small identification factors.
• With this, you can track whether your buyers are taking the intended action you want at every touchpoint and change your strategy if they aren’t.
• Free analytics tools like GA and Clarity offer exceptional functionality in this case. Similarly, Hotjar is one of the best tools to view and optimize user interactions and flow analysis.

2. User Engagement Pathways

• Similar to journey flow analysis, this KPI tracks and measures a granular approach to engagement
• They track pathways like – discovery, conversion, onboarding, exploration, etc.
• It answers questions like: what users are engaging in and why are they doing it?
• Are there any pathways that need optimization?
• What conversations are your users having about your tools/services while interacting with them? (These conversations can also be behavioral instead of verbal)

3. Content Discovery

• This deals with the question of AI and search.
• Are your content pieces visible to the users where they are searching? E.g., ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google’s snippets.
• Is your content being discovered in the first place?
• Is your organic traffic sufficient for your specific campaign needs?
• Is outreach helping content discovery and business needs, and can you use it to boost discovery?

3. Intent Drift Tracking

• Intent drift tracking is a cornerstone of modern content marketing. It isn’t an ordinary KPI but a marker of interest.
• Intent tracking observes changes in buying behavior, whether their intent is changing while they are interacting with content online.
• Are they becoming more or less interested in the solutions you offer, and how can you track this change?
• What do you think they have become aware of between now and then?
• What does this mean for your service- is it positive or negative?
• What are the opportunities for you to influence this intent?
• Can you segment a chunk of this audience?

These advanced KPIs are designed to uncover behaviors of your buyers that you can leverage, and they can be tracked in real time.

However, don’t jump in to change your strategy. There are a lot of moving parts that require you to be patient. As important as data is, it is there to validate your intuition, not overhaul it. To track the behavioral change you knew was coming.

Zero-click searches are perhaps the most crucial content KPIs of the AI age.

Content marketing teams have seen a drop in organic traffic.

The reason for this is simple: SERPs and social media websites want users to be on their services for longer durations. And that AI is answering their questions- satisfying a need and providing a relevant answer.

And the statistics are staggering. Let’s look at two stats from SparkToro:
1. In the US, 58.5% of people don’t click on their query. Out of those, 37.1 click on nothing, and 21.4% move on to another query.
2. For the EU, 59.7% end in no clicks. Of which 37.4% do nothing and 22.3% move on to another search.
This shows an important factor- zero-clicks must be accounted for. They will be vital to track and complex to identify.

While tools play catch-up, you will need to actively optimize for AI and search and check whether you’re appearing for queries on these LLMs. On the other hand, LinkedIn, X, and other socials are also trying new things, and that’s killing reach for linked content and company pages.

They want people to stay on the website longer and gain knowledge from native players or thought leaders- individual contributors seem to be lucrative to platforms for some reason.

What are Zero-Clicks and AI searches saying- how do you track them?

People want quick answers in a crowded space. People are really good at one thing- pattern recognition.

And the crowded space has jaded them quickly. Many users are tired of looking at similar content that barely solves their pain points- AI is a quick fix here.

But human beings take time to articulate an idea and come to a conclusion. Let’s look at an example and then break it down to explore how we can track these searches and optimize them.

To research this blog, we did a few things:

• Gain resources by reading blogs and Google Scholar.
• Searching on AI for available data to back things up and summarizing scholarly findings.
• Asking AI for similar sources, which gave us a few links to blogs, websites, and data-study papers.
• However, some of those searches ended as dead links and low-quality content on referenced websites.
• Took a specific approach and used queries like SparkToro research for zero-clicks in LLMs- got results as well as a summary of what it means. Clicked on the article to gain a comprehensive understanding and view.
• Depth created more avenues for creation: asked LLM to pull up a report on how brands rank on LLMs to strengthen understanding and thesis.

This method shows a clear loop for brands. If they want to survive in the zero-click-AI era- they need to provide value for their audience, and this value must be tangible.

To track this, you will need to: –

• Create value-based content
• Check whether you’re ranking for that query, which has to be niche or solve the problem quickly.
• Check various AI search engines and see what you’re ranking for.
• Through GSC, understand if some queries are getting more impressions than clicks yet driving conversations. High impressions and low clicks might not be bad here, especially if you see an increase in abstract concepts like mindshare.

While many organizations observe a dip in traffic, they must understand that value is the driving force behind content marketing and that it is also a KPI.

Valueless and generic content, while effective at ranking in traditional ways, is losing relevancy. AI systems pull value- although some reference to outdated data is still the norm for LLMs- they will be weeded out by audiences who are inquisitive and want hard proof.

The KPIs work only when content provides value.

Without a value-based strategy, the KPIs above will not work. They might drive business on the surface, but sales objections will quickly thwart any hopes of making a business.

Content Marketing and its metrics exist to track if your customer finds you effective and what they want. Those businesses- especially ones in tech and marketing– who don’t want to be replaced by AI have to learn to provide what the user wants in a very unique way.

Fortunately, buyers are more self-aware, and they can be influenced to experiment.

What you need to do is create content that empowers them to do more with less.

Brands must meet customer demands. Unfortunately, more than half are failing even though the answer is right there.

The modern marketing landscape is flooded with buzzwords such as ‘customer-first’ and ‘experience-led’ by agencies attempting to gain a competitive edge.

But when it comes to practicing what you preach, the promises ring hollow.

84% of decision-makers believe that they meet or exceed customer expectations. But the reality differs – only 45% of customers actually agree that brands meet their needs to this point.

Truthfully, there’s a huge disconnect between the promise and how customers truly feel.

Here’s the truth behind it: modern buyers aren’t playing along. They are conducting research and making crucial decisions even before they talk to your SDRs.

What’s really causing the missteps?

It doesn’t always boil down to the execution.

When it comes to intricate marketing functions, the molecular details matter. And marketers, in a desperate attempt to meet their modern buyers halfway, cling to their traditional textbooks.

And the loop continues with marketers perceiving new problems through old definitions. Even though digital innovation has afforded marketing teams resources, most are stuck following tech trends instead of rethinking the system.

This, however, wouldn’t serve the purpose.

Modern marketers must pivot to a new playbook where the buzzwords don’t just ring hollow but can be proactively acted upon.

Revisiting and Refining Old Playbooks

The first play would be to outline a different perspective on developing customer relationships, i.e., integrating customer experience (CX) into your lead-nurturing strategies.

It’s easy to think of customer experience and nurturing as distinct functions handled by separate teams. CX is responsible for keeping clients engaged post-purchase, whereas lead nurturing is a pre-purchase tactic.

But they are really two sides of the same coin and deeply interlinked.

Lead nurturing isn’t merely about engaging leads through drip campaigns or guiding leads down the funnel. It’s an ongoing experience that influences how prospects perceive and engage with your brand.

In simple words, lead nurturing is a moment in a customer’s experience across the sales journey. And, the quality of this experience fundamentally determines whether the customer will convert and how they remember your business in the long term.

To actively turn prospects into advocates, there’s a fundamental need for continuity in the customers’ sales journey. And across the modern buying landscape, your efforts to do so would only fall flat if lead nurturing and CX were considered isolated silos.

The Customer Perspective: Rethinking Traditional Lead Nurturing

Engaging with a customer in this copy-paste market is demanding. They want to feel that they aren’t just another name in your database.

This is why savvy marketers developed personalized communications and tailored offerings.

So, why are marketers still feeling the brunt of engaging customers?

There’s a knowledge gap – customer experience isn’t only fundamental to post-sale activity. It’s synonymous with prospect experience. And this starts way before the sale has closed. Even before they purchase, the tone of your emails, follow-up gaps, and the services you suggest influence how leads perceive your brand.

So, if your nurturing communication feels mechanized or templated, you might lose the potential client.

Because customer experience is your brand’s emotional blueprint, lead nurturing is how these emotions are delivered or instilled, click by click.

Any technical drawbacks can lead to poor CX early on. It doesn’t wait to deliver a blow until a sale is closed, but silently erodes trust.

From unsubscribes to drop-offs to ‘Not Now’ clicks, leads will rarely tell you why.

But the silent answer is often a poor experience.

And even the most effective lead-nurturing efforts lead to this. Why?

1. Silos between marketing, sales, and CX.

Silos between customer-centric departments instill a fragmented journey. Each team is speaking its own language – they track distinct goals, resulting in a partial view of customers.

Additionally, communication is an integral component of businesses. It’s the driving wheel for consistent revenue flow. However, inconsistent messaging can lead to a fragmented brand experience.

Inconsistency equates to a lack of synergy between departments, which raises questions for potential buyers.

There’s a marketing team on one side making specific promises during lead nurturing, but sales start pitching a whole new set of priorities. And a CX team that doesn’t meet service-related expectations.

It makes the customers feel misled and confused, reducing trust and leaving them dissatisfied.

Similarly, siloed tech stacks can limit the view of the customers’ journey through the funnel. With limited background knowledge, CX teams have little to no space for personalizing the onboarding process.

The result is a templated experience that leaves customers displeased.

The solution?

Cross-team collaborations.

Departments must understand each other’s goals and strategies to avoid falling short or clashing in their efforts – no excessive outreach or mixed signals.

To avoid this, communication and integrated systems are imperative.

2. Misaligned messaging or irrelevant content.

Content is the single most efficient channel for effective marketing communications. With the right strategy and execution, it can afford tangible outcomes for small businesses and large enterprises.

All it requires is patience and consistency.

Consistency is the foundation for manifesting and earning brand trust.

And when it comes to content, irrelevance and inconsistency can prove detrimental.  While some messaging might align with the brand guidelines, others may digress, harming the brand identity because inconsistency doesn’t reflect what the brand stands for.

Often, it relays that you’re merely following trends and don’t care for a connection; it’s all about business, resulting in misinformed promises and confusion among prospects.

The solution?

Your brand must stand by a core message highlighted through distinct content formats and channels. But the crux remains the same, and each piece is another fragment of a unified whole.

When your content reflects the same values across multiple platforms and touchpoints, it demonstrates the trust you hold in your own brand.

Uniformity is crucial to align with the overarching business objective and what the audience truly wants.

This way, the overall content delivery becomes more impactful.

3. An overreliance on automation without a human touch.

A customer’s viewpoint signifies strategically employing personalization, empathy, and contextual understanding of customer pain points.

Even with all its capabilities, machines can’t match the insights only humans can instill.

With the advent of AI and automation, marketers are heavily relying on tech, from automated emails to onboarding. There’s a crucial lack that even technology cannot fill: finesse and nuance.

Think: Your automated system sends a customer an email regarding a product update while they are waiting for a response on a support issue, making your brand appear tone-deaf and disconnected.

Without at least some human oversight, these systems can’t always track real-time behavior signals. This could result in delays when customers require an urgent response to another issue.

The simple impact: prospects feel like just another number, hampering any emotional loyalty or the possibility of building one.

The solution?

Technology would possibly replace human workers. But here’s the truth: AI and automation should enhance human efforts, not replace them.

After the monotonous and generic content churned out, the marketplace has realized the need for a human touch. Without empathy or context, customers are witness to a cold and disconnected journey.

It even alienates them at key moments, such as being stuck in a bot loop to fix a critical issue.

Savvy marketers must pivot to a hybrid model of automation for scaling and efficiency, and a human touch for high-intent moments.

For the future of the business, this model could help elevate trust and long-term value.

4. The “perception gap.”

Have you ever heard of Mazagran? There’s a good reason why not.

Starbucks and Pepsi conducted market research to understand customers’ wants. The unanimous answer to the survey was simple: They wanted a sweet, cold, and bottled coffee beverage.

As an answer, Starbucks developed Mazagran.

Source: Starbucks

The customers were polarized. Some loved it, others didn’t. And the product didn’t meet their expectations, resulting in little to no sales.

And Mazagran was deemed a failure. It now sits in the Starbucks archives as a failed experiment caused by a perception gap.

Customers have become clever with every technological innovation. They know precisely what they want from you, and it should align with what they are looking for.

But it’s complex to pinpoint what they want. This leads to a significant gap between service performance and customer expectations.

And in this current landscape, where every task is completed with a click, they want their needs addressed as quickly as possible. Any slip-ups lead to a negative customer experience.

The thread binding customers and businesses has become weak. And only a tiny portion of decision-makers are aware of it.

So, the perception gap has only widened – 91% of customers drop off due to failed expectations. This results in a tide of negative reviews, which drives potential customers away.

It’s become a market-wide conundrum.

The solution?

Marketing’s awareness of this gap has fundamentally transformed the approach to their customer-first marketing strategies.

The focus must now be on:

1. Market research to fill the knowledge gap and outline customer motivations. Customer expectations matter at the end of the journey and at every touchpoint.
2. Delivering on promises on time to ensure brand standards. This is only possible through departmental collaborations to help gauge priority tasks and align goals.
3. An effective multichannel communications strategy that delivers. The spotlight should be on solutions that actually identify and resolve customer pain points.
4. Regular surveys and feedback loops that can help marketers highlight:
   1. Customer expectations
   2. What’s promised
   3. What got delivered
   4. The impact

In short, lead nurturing shouldn’t just be a strategy your old playbooks have made mandatory. It should be considered a channel that influences customer emotions positively.

Consistent CX Across Multiple Touchpoints: The New Way

Without a customer standpoint, most lead-nurturing tactics are unidirectional and lack nuance.

The underlying logic is the predictable nature of the traditional sales funnel – the prospect moves from interest to awareness and the decision to purchase.

Meanwhile, modern customer journeys are complex to outline.

Digitization of marketing has introduced newer channels and touchpoints for the modern buyer. Customers can now switch between multiple channels, further complicating the once-linear journey.

Even intent across a buying period might change – a blog might influence a purchase decision a month after reading it, while a demo request mightn’t guarantee readiness.

The modern customer journey is a tangled web.

To simplify this chaos, lead nurturing becomes a critical touchpoint in optimizing their overall experience. It offers clarity and consistency throughout the non-linear path, mirroring the actual journey and not the imagined funnel.

This is when CX and your lead nurturing efforts sync – it’s not about the conversion but shaping how your customers feel while interacting with your brand.

Content marketing fuses art and business, a herculean task. But its impact is still measured against old standards. It’s not a plateau— it’s neglect.

Day in and day out, content marketing teams— the writers, designers, strategists, and managers sit down together and create.

These are curated experiences designed to evoke an emotional response in the audience and inspire them to take action. However, this endeavor is nothing short of exhausting. That’s why marketing folks are addicted to caffeine— we need that boost to survive and thrive.

But content marketing is not easy. Who can guess what a human being wants to see and experience? The constant consumption culture makes it difficult for any guesswork.

Bandwagons and trends make it easier for brands to capitalize on content, but that fades away once the trend dies. Brands, especially the ones that thrive on content marketing, cannot afford to make such flippant decisions.

They need to be original enough to stand out and measure the impact a creative has had on their goals and objectives. And this is the trickiest of all plays in marketing: understanding the effect.

But lucky enough, teams can track Content marketing Metrics to understand if these goals are being met. But unfortunately, most content marketing KPIs are fragmented.

KPIs in content marketing are vital. But why are they so rigid?

Before we dive into the heat of the battle, let’s take an overview to understand the basics.

What are content marketing metrics?

Content marketing metrics in content marketing are metrics or milestones that provide a clear and tangible way of measuring impact.

Usually, in the context of content marketing, these KPIs are: –

1. Brand awareness
2. Click-through rates
3. Open rates
4. Bounce Rate
5. Dwell time/Scroll time
6. SEO ranking
7. Impressions
8. ROAS
9. ROI (lead gen)
10. Engagement (Likes, Clicks, Shares, Comments, and your subscribers)

Well, you may think this is such a comprehensive list. And by no doubt, it is exhaustive and has depth. But it lacks something crucial— there is a missing piece that hasn’t yet connected and makes this list of KPIs close to irrelevant.

The Rigid Structure

While these Content marketing metrics are effective on paper- they are often rigid and don’t paint the whole picture. Think of it this way, it’s like watching a 3-D movie without the glasses— you know you’re watching a cohesive whole, but it’s still not the exact picture.

These metrics, while terrific at what they do, are incomplete without their 3-D glasses. Without them, these KPIs are rigid, regulatory, and messy.

They become the end rather than a means to the larger objective.

But ask yourself

1. When has a creative moved you?
2. Did it always make you click on it?
3. Did you see it on the internet? Or maybe it was an OOH?
4. Did you revisit it?

These questions, by virtue of the KPIs’ rigidity, are always left unanswered, and the main point is lost in the noise of data.

And yet here we are, talking about the KPIs and what they’re missing without addressing it.

The answer is quite simple, really.

What the KPIs lack is their relation to the market. While that is a simple answer, it is nothing short of revelatory.

The KPIs are devoid of the market they are serving and bear almost no relation to it.

They miss the main KPI: market share.

None of the metrics and indicators describe if you’re influencing behaviors in your favor or looking at data that is wildly disconnected from each other.

Let’s take a simple example, imagine you were running email campaigns. The open rates and clicks were impressive across the board.

But in the European region, you find the CTR is way too high- 100%. Anyone running an email marketing campaign knows that 100% is a bit fishy, and this excludes Apple MPP opens.

At first, the excitement of this successful campaigns must be palatable. But, after the third sequence, you realize that these European opens are dubious— maybe not all of them, but for sure most of them.

The solution is to have conversations rather than drive opens and CTRs.

The response to it will be wildly different— change the copy to reflect your commitment to understanding their problem rather than just solving it. The result? Organic inquires to solve very market-specific queries. (Based on an actual email campaign)

This is what we mean when we say that KPIs don’t reflect market share.

Because they lack the dimensions to uncover your market’s needs. There’s a reason why tech tools track these KPIs. But overreliance on them is why your campaigns are disconnected.

Let’s get something out of the way. All the metrics the industry is using right now aren’t useless. But the habit of looking at it in isolation has lessened its impact.

These metrics have disconnected the campaigns. And, of course, they provide indicators and help marketers make sense of uncertainty.

But, if the pandemic has taught everyone something, it is that uncertainty will plague market conditions, and no amount of KPIs can reflect that.

Or wait, can it? Is there any content marketing metrics out there that can make sense of uncertainty?

Spoilers: There is, and your teams use it quite often. Actually, everyone uses this KPI on a daily basis.

It’s called a conversation.

All these metrics that the tech tools use are to measure conversations in their various forms.

Why do tech stacks track these metrics?

Google Analytics is one of the best marketing tools ever created. The molecular approach it takes is unparalleled.

And that’s not where it stops; anyone proficient with GA will tell you they don’t know enough about it. There’s always more to explore and do.

But they’ll also tell you that the tool is limited. It will give you a full-funnel view of your audience, but it will never tell you the why— that’s something for you to uncover.

So why do these KPIs and metrics exist in the first place?

Because they make tracking the customer easy and are mathematically sound, they fit into relational databases and give you tangibility in lieu of ambiguity. They give you metrics that you can show in meetings with the CFO and CEO.

Now, let’s get into the meat of things.

If you’re paying attention, the content marketing metrics are right there for your taking.

Creative work is difficult, especially when you want it to hit specific beats and drive campaign-specific goals.

So why shouldn’t the KPIs reflect that? We’ve uncovered two crucial ones that influence each other:

1. Market Share
2. Conversations

Though this is not a rule of thumb, market share is proportional to the conversations your prospects are having about you. Anyone buying from you is going to talk to people in the market.

There are going to be many more Content marketing metrics, especially those that are specific to the campaign goal. The questions are: How do we find and track them?

The Content-Marketing KPI Framework

In 1984, Apple released the infamous ad for the Macintosh. It aired in the Super Bowl and never again did it air.

But it was such a historic marketing piece, directed by Ridley Scott, no less. People were abuzz with conversations— it made Apple a global face if it hadn’t been before.

And the end result? The Macintosh was a commercial failure, and Steve Jobs quit (fired?) Apple.

In this case, the content did everything right. It ran conversations and got millions in free press. But that did not translate to market share. What did Jobs miss?

This visionary of art and technology did not see one thing: the product.

It was too expensive for the market and, while revolutionary, underperformed for the cost it was going for. Well, it’s easy to pass judgment in hindsight and dissect his decisions— but it’s difficult to learn from them.

And that’s why it’s necessary. As you can see, each industry has unique content-marketing KPIs, and you can uncover them, hopefully, to drive actual value— not just buzz.

Here’s how you can do it:

1. Can your actual problems be solved by the preset KPIs, and are they meeting your needs for the campaign you’re running?
2. What specific action do you want your buyers to take at this moment? And what can you do to make that happen?
3. In terms of tangibility, what do your industry and its buyers find valuable? What is the way to leverage this in your content?
4. What conversations have your pieces generated, or have they gone unnoticed?
5. What is the common point that comes up on your sales calls? Does your content meet it?
6. What are you saying through the creative, and does it relate to the market? In simpler terms, what is the purpose of the creative piece?
7. What gaps has your research identified, and has your audience caught up to it? — This one comes directly from Paul Graham’s essay on great work.

Here’s a codified version: The Market-Conscious Content Framework (MCCF)

Where impact = Creative Resonance × Market Alignment

And KPIs are derived from:

1. Observed Conversations (qualitative)
2. Market Movement (quantitative, e.g., share of voice, market share)
3. Strategic Fit (how well the content hits market truths).

It matters more if your buyers are actually talking about you. Not just visiting your digital footprint and forgetting you exist.

The KPIs you’re tracking are by no means wrong or bad— they are there for a reason. But understand that this is to track your audience, not understand them.

As long as the industry continues with this trend of not evolving with buyer sentimentalities, it’s going to be crushed and downsized.

Marketing is a science and an art, yes? Then, it would be a crime to stop interrogating and looking for better ways to do things.

And as people in charge of the art that drives value and sales, content marketing metrics should reflect that— not get bogged down by it.

Email marketing has been getting a bad rep lately. Of course, why wouldn’t it? Think of all the marketing communications you receive from people or organizations you barely know.

It feels like spam and a complete waste of time. Your buyers are thinking the same. They don’t know what you offer or don’t even need what you’re selling. All they want is whatever fancies them at that moment. It could be an article that helps them understand their industry better or a moment in their life they’re reflecting on.

What role does your email play in this scenario?

If you catch them at the wrong time, best case scenario, it stays in their inbox forever, but in the worst case scenario, they unsubscribe from all future communications.

However, email is still a powerful channel to connect with your prospects. Novice marketers are quick to jump on bandwagons and propagate misinformation- they echo what they have heard – email marketing is dead.

No, that is not the case. Contrary to belief, email marketing is thriving.

It’s the impersonal and thoughtless email marketing practices that are losing their grip on buyers. The buyer is smart- why should this channel lag?

Email Marketing is not dead.

Marigold, in their 2024 Consumer Trends Index, reports that among all marketing channels, email stands #1.

Is that surprising? For marketing teams that don’t have the proper strategies in place, this could be. However, email marketing is not dead. And it’s not going to die anytime soon.

But emails that look, sound, and feel like spam will end up in the bin, and that’s not going to go away either. Bad emails will make your business lose reputation and opportunities.

This powerful tool needs the reverence it deserves. It cannot be treated like other channels where value and information don’t go hand in hand.

Yes, you can talk about your company and what you can do for your buyers. But buyers don’t care about what you offer. They care about what you can do for them and their organization’s goals and pain points.

Self-serving messages no longer work.

Strategy #1: Understand the buyer

Let’s start with the basics, understanding the buyer.

But is this a strategy? Well, if you go by the definition set forth by Michael E. Porter- “Competitive strategy is about being different. It means deliberately choosing a different set of activities to deliver a unique mix of value”

Then no.

It’s not a strategy. But marketing teams have overlooked this crucial step. Now, it has become a unique activity done by a few marketing teams.

What do we mean by this?

Marketing teams may check all the points- firmographic, demographic, etc. But they will not dive into the nuances of the buyer.

This includes understanding the buyer committee and the context of why they want to buy.

But this is easier said than done. Not many teams have access to real-time data of the buyer, nor do they have the budget to buy every tool under the sun. For such teams, understanding the buyer means creating their pool of data through email.

The greatest advantage in-house marketing has is its understanding of the product.

You know what you sell and why. You know the pain points your tool is solving— the only thing standing between you and your buyer is communication.

In our experience, at this stage, you should be thorough with the industry your buyer is in and your tool’s role in helping them break the competition.

Then, it’s about crafting the message and gathering data.

A Framework to Understand the Buyer: –

1. Gathering industry insights through reports
2. Finding common pain points in your niche through social listening like Reddit or the b2b forum
3. Creating messages that showcase how your tool, product, or service serves the buyer and how- this is going to be a field trip for your writers!
4. Playing with the subject lines— surprisingly, direct subject lines work well. However, we cannot stress enough the importance of trying different subject lines with varying segments.
5. Understanding the interactions.

The intention behind this framework is to gauge the buyers’ interaction with your offers and whether your market position and marketing messages are making sense to them.

Then, iterate and create a feedback loop that gives you buyer data.

Strategy #2: Segmentation

Once you have enough data and begin understanding what your buyer wants, you’ll notice behavioral clusters.

Honestly, they are fascinating to watch. Every potential buyer interacting with your brand will exhibit unique behaviors but will also have some shared characteristics.

You must target these behavioral clusters called segments to craft personalized messages.

Understanding Behavioral Clusters

Two tools will be helpful here: –

1. A marketer who understands underlying behavioral patterns
2. Automated email tasks.

We could give you a list of possible segmentation- the basic ones like demographics, geographic, and the like. But you must aim for real-time behavior from your prospects if you want to succeed.

1. These could be buyers who demonstrate similar pain points.
2. They could be showing similar levels of engagement
3. Some would prefer one content over the other or prefer the same type of messaging
4. Some would be in different stages of the funnel (which requires unique content to nurture)
5. Some clusters may exhibit behavior unique to your brand (And don’t let anyone tell you otherwise)

These clusters will reveal something about your buyer, and it is up to you to find out what.

Once you find it, use these to craft personalized messages. And automate their delivery based on their behavior.

Let’s illustrate this.

Real-World Illustration

We had a cluster of prospects who would visit our website but did not book calls. It was puzzling. Some of them browsed our service pages and read our blogs. But they did not book any calls.

The question was: Why not?

Was it a regional thing, or was it just window shopping? We wanted answers.

The solution we came up with? If the prospect has been on our blogs and service pages, we send them an automated yet personalized message.

It differed from industry to industry, but the core message remained: You’re looking for a solution. We can help. Here’s why we’re the right fit for you.

The automated workflow had a few conditions:-

1. We had to know their industry
2. The user must have visited at least once before and checked both our services and blogs.
3. If the email was opened but they did not click book a call, we would send a follow-up email.

But even here, we faced troubles. Some of our assumptions were not correct.

Maybe in some segments, pricing was not the issue- it was timing. They didn’t want our services at that time but wanted to compare services in the industry.

We had to resegment and realized it’s not about booking calls- we need to nurture and build a relationship with the buyer.

Strategy #3: Nurturing

Nurturing is the holy grail of email marketing. Understanding the buyer and segmentation culminates in the process known as nurturing.

Why Nurturing Matters

Well, first, buyers are self-directed. They no longer need sales reps to guide them through any process. They know what they want. Buyers usually have a list of vendors they would like to buy from.

Even buying committees have a shared list. Partners they have worked with or brands with strong mindshare.

The question is: Are you on that list?

Knowing the fierce competition, especially in the SaaS industry, the chances are slim.

These three strategies, especially nurturing, will help you build that trust. Companies often make the mistake of targeting companies in-market, but they forget that everyone is after them, too.

But the companies that are out-market are equally important, especially for long-term growth. That’s why newsletters are so popular because they provide value to your potential buyers without the expectation of an immediate buy.

Nurturing also requires automated processes. And you will have to set them up.

The advice? Play around with the workflows.

Through segmentation and understanding your buyers, you will come to understand how to nurture them in ways unique to specific segments.

Email marketing: With great power comes great responsibility

You must have noticed a theme with the strategies. It’s understanding the buyer and delivering value.

But why? Because brand’s today are shaped by two things, according to Allyson Havener of TrustRadius:

1. Trust
2. And acquiring mindshare by sharing content with something interesting to say.

And no tool can do this better than email marketing. Craft thoughtful messages and let your offers speak for themselves.

Final Thought

Think of the buyers and what they would want to hear from you. Give your perspective and make things interesting.

After all, there’s a lot of uninspired marketing campaigns out there. Giving yourself that chance to stand out. Trust us, your buyers will remember you.