Content Marketing Innovators

John Balla, SAS Institute — Content Marketing Innovators

“What we’ve learned has informed our broader approach to content and the role of content in our campaigns, making us more responsive and more agile in our marketing overall.”

SAS

John Balla

SAS Institute

Digital Marketing Principal

What is your approach to content marketing?

In my view, content marketing is quickly becoming foundational because it keeps the focus on the customer experience. Today’s marketing reality, in which a sizable portion of the customer’s journey to purchase happens well before the first sales call (succinctly articulated in Google’s “Zero Moment of Truth”), makes content marketing more and more important every day. So what’s my approach? It’s a methodical process of planning, evaluation, and curation of digital content that aims to convey intended messages that move customers smoothly and willingly along a path to purchase. The approach I and my colleagues take envisions a non-linear path to purchase that crosses multiple media, so it requires identifying the strongest content and then rendering it in multiple formats.

What content advice would you give to other marketers?

Always start and end with the customer. It’s their perspective that matters, and it’s their experiences with your brand that you’ll need to orchestrate with content that will ideally represent a series of steps along a path to purchasing your product. What does that mean? Really look at your content and read it or watch it with a critical eye—constantly looking for cues and memorable sound bites, the feelings you get, the connections you make in your head, and the overall impression you’re left with as you consume the content. Is it true to your brand? Does it answer your questions? Does it make it easy to learn more or take the next step? Does it work in different media—and if not, are there equivalents you could share instead? Perhaps most importantly, always consider your content with two important questions in mind:

  1. Is it searchable? 
Is it tagged appropriately? Does the title match the narrative? Is there a fair amount of keyword density so the title and tagging work well with the actual words used?
  2. Is it shareable? 
Does it have a unique URL that can be posted, emailed or texted? If it’s an image, is it a standard format, such as JPG or PNG?

Why did you incorporate interactive content into your program?

We incorporated interactive content as a means to provide different experiences for our customers. We wanted to give them more control over which content they consumed and the order with which they consumed it. We delved into it to see how our customers would react and to watch their behavior so we could become better at planning and curating new content.

 

What business need did interactive content, and ion, help solve for SAS? First and foremost, it provided us with an interesting test ground for discovering ways that our customers find and consume content. What we’ve learned has informed our broader approach to content and the role of content in our campaigns, making us more responsive and more agile in our marketing overall.

What do you think is the most exciting thing happening in content marketing right now?

I think content marketing is coming of age at just the right point in time where marketing needs an answer to the digitization of everything and the evolution of customer expectations to have relevant engagements in real-time across multiple channels. Multiple technology trends are converging to complicate marketing’s mission to own the customer relationship in the enterprise. Big data is no longer a “thing”—it’s definitely here to stay, and it’s only getting bigger with plummeting costs of data storage, transmission, and processing, as well as the Internet of Things turning even the most mundane objects into connected devices. Those same technologies are also delivering capabilities for marketers to apply analytics to the big data and turn their raw data into meaningful strategies that serve customers in ways that build trust and loyalty. It enables marketers to become smart and agile about their content so that it’s relevant, so that it can be found easily, and so it can be shared just as easily.

What’s in store for the future of content marketing?

I still find myself today having to explain content marketing, and I think that will change sooner than we expect. Digital natives seem to understand the reason for content marketing inherently, and we are still at a stage where many decision-makers began their careers before the era of digital natives. Also, there seems to be a dual-track evolution of marketing going on—one’s a quantitative track and the other is an equally important qualitative track.

  • On the quantitative side, we’re seeing analytics come of age to seize the opportunities presented by big data, and artificial intelligence is finally taking off to make analytics more productive and efficient.
  • On the qualitative side, we’re seeing content marketing become the necessary creator of the digital customer experience that serves to connect the brand’s value propositions with what the customer needs and wants.

With those two tracks in mind, what we’ll see is that organizations will not be able to reap the rewards of data-driven efficiency without also aligning around the customer journey, deftly guided by content marketing.

SAS

John Balla

SAS Institute

Digital Marketing Principal, Senior Marketing Strategist

Meet John
GE Power

Jason Forget

GE Power

 Senior Commercial Manager

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Frontline Education

Allison Wert

Frontline Education

Content Marketing Manager

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FedEx

Drew Bailey

FedEx

Manager, Content Strategy

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Aberdeen Group

Jessie Coan

Aberdeen Group

Vice President of Marketing

Meet Jessie
SAS

John Balla

SAS Institute

Digital Marketing Principal, Senior Marketing Strategist

Meet John
GE Power

Jason Forget

GE Power

 Senior Commercial Manager

Meet Jason
Frontline Education

Allison Wert

Frontline Education

Content Marketing Manager

Meet Allison
FedEx

Drew Bailey

FedEx

Manager, Content Strategy

Meet Drew
Aberdeen Group

Jessie Coan

Aberdeen Group

Vice President of Marketing

Meet Jessie
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