Creating High-Converting Content Experiences That Drive Sales

There’s nothing my marketing team loves more than hearing our sales team ringing the bell signifying that they just closed a deal. Because at the end of the day, marketing and sales are all pulling for the same thing: more pipeline and more revenue.

But as marketers, sometimes that eagerness can do more harm than good. I’m talking about how 61% of B2B marketers send all of their leads to sales, even though only 27% are actually qualified. They get excited and pull the trigger too fast, hoping that someone who registered for a webinar or downloaded an E-book is all of a sudden ready to buy. In a world where buyers consume an average of 11.4 pieces of content before making a purchase decision, that’s simply not realistic.

Building Out A High-Converting Demand Experience

Research from Forrester has shown that marketers see a 20% increase in sales opportunities from nurtured leads — and the No.1 ingredient of successful nurture is relevant content. In a traditional nurture program, you send prospects a piece of content at regular intervals — usually weekly. But what if you could speed up the buyer journey by empowering your buyers to consume more pieces of content at once? Independent research is the No. 1 driver to buyers picking up the phone and speaking with sales — and it’s our job as marketers to help them get there as quickly as possible.

That all starts with creating a nurture experience. Nurture destinations allow people to binge content, enabling their content consumption with personalized recommendations (powered by AI if you have the tech), all contained in a contextual experience.

There are four key areas to consider when it comes to building a nurture destination:

1. Multi-channel cadence: When we drop someone into a nurture, we typically send them a weekly email and leave it at that. Instead, we should be taking our outreach beyond the inbox with retargeting ads, dynamic website content, prompted chatbots, content recommendations and direct mail. While someone may miss an email in their inbox, it’s unlikely that they’ll miss all your other marketing efforts to capture their attention.
2. Personalized content: Though it may be easier to send everyone on your list the same flow, what will actually drive engagement and conversions is segmenting your database by persona, funnel stage and technography so the message and content resonate with their interests.
3. Focus on the experience: Think through the actual experience you’re creating with your nurture destination. Look at the content recommendations you’re providing, the calls-to-action you’re placing and the next steps throughout the buyer journey. You don’t want your buyer to ever hit a dead end!
4. What success looks like: Lastly, it’s important to build your nurture destination based on what your goals are. If the ultimate objective of your post-event nurture is to have people request a demo with your sales team, optimize your content experience for it. In the example below, see how Uberflip has leveraged a show-beside CTA next to each piece of nurture content so prospects can easily request a demo.

Now, if you’re wondering how much better this is than a traditional nurture sequence, I’ll show you an example from Uberflip. The experience pictured below resulted in an average of 6.74 pages consumed per session from our audience. When you think about how it takes an average of 11.4 pieces of content for a buyer to make a purchase decision, I’d say that’s pretty impressive. 

Deliver An Optimized Buying Experience

There’s no doubt that capturing a buyer’s attention is harder than ever before, so once we have it, why not lock them into a bingeable experience where they can consume more content faster, ultimately accelerating their buyer journey? Gone are the days of one-off nurture emails. If you really want to engage your buyers, send them to a nurture experience.

RandyFrisch is the CMO and Co-Founder of Uberflip, a content experience platform that empowers marketers to create content experiences at every stage of the buyer’s journey. He has defined and led this movement, prompting marketers to think beyond content creation and truly put their customers first by focusing on the experience.

This movement has fuelled an annual conference, Conex: The Content Experience, that brings together 750+ passionate marketers, and a North American-wide Conex Tour. Randy is also the host of The Marketer’s Journey podcast, was named one of the Top 50 Fearless Marketers in the world by Marketo, and is the best-selling author of F#ck Content Marketing: Focus on Content Experience (yeah, he swears sometimes).