What good is content marketing if you don’t know what topics or content types are driving conversions and ultimately sales pipeline for your business?  Content attribution platform provider TrenDemon gives you that info and more. 

In this segment of the Martech Minute, Colin White speaks with Avishai Sharon, the CEO of TrenDemon. The TrenDemon platform helps marketers and brands better understand the ROI of their content assets.

Q: TrenDemon offers a content attribution platform. Tell about what that is, and how you came to found the company?

Avishai Sharon: I used to have a marketing agency a few years back, and we used to do a lot of marketing technology implementations, as well as content marketing. And one of the biggest challenges that I had working with my customers at that time was actually proving the value of content marketing activities and assets, up to a point that one of our customers literally said, look, if you can’t prove the value of all that work we’re not going to continue on working together. And when we couldn’t really have a clear solution to prove and connect content marketing to actual business goals, we set out on the TrenDemon journey, really trying to figure out how we can build a solution that’s easy to use and gives a clear understanding of how content is impacting the company’s bottom line.

Q: So content attribution. How do you differentiate that from just normal campaign attribution that most marketing automation systems will help you figure out?

Avishai Sharon: So we look at content as made up of three major pillars. One is of course the open on gated content that you have on your site your blogs we have the events that happen so downloading a white paper for example or watching a video that’s another type of content-related event. And we have the traffic sources, a big challenge with measuring content is that it doesn’t behave like a normal campaign that you do, like an advertising campaign or sales campaign. Or you have a very clear funnel and you’re very interested on the last punch – what happened just before a person purchased. Content affects a much longer period and with many more touch points along that journey.

And the big challenge is how do you find and divide the weights between all those different touch points to give you actionable insights and to know what to do next which content to write where to promote it how well it’s how well it’s affecting.

And we discovered that traditional analytics just don’t give you those answers very clearly because they’re not designed to. It’s also very fuzzy in the sense that you’d have people that may be going through a page but not reading it. So you’re also interested about behavioral attribution, behavioral metrics. For example read ratio – how many of the people who visited a page actually read it, what have they done, did they later on continue to achieve some sort of goal. So all of these kind of small annoying questions combined together to the fact that you need to address them holistically in order to be able to really say how content is affecting my business.

Q: Right. And so I want to make clear to the audience here that the TrenDemon platform, I’ve taken a look at it in the past and it’s not just back-end analytics of your existing content on your website, you actually have some very nice UI tools for the user on your site as well. Can you describe how the platform actually presents itself to users and how it how it helps them find more content that might be relevant to their journey?

Avishai Sharon: Sure, so once the system has mapped out the most effective pieces of content for specific stage of the journey, we have automated content recommendation units that help engage the users in real time to help show the right content at the right time for each of them. We’ve seen that only about 15 percent of your content is actually effective at getting people to achieve those goals. So we help people find those 15 percent, but also present them at the right time automatically. So that’s not something that you need to continuously manage.

Another set of personalization features is the ability to target specific individuals based on for example marketing automation attributes – what a person who is an MQL should see, or a person coming in from a specific country, you can see a different message. So that kind of hyper targeting on your site also helps drive up conversion rates. But I think it all starts out with understanding why your content works. It’s not just about pop-ups, it’s not just about getting more noise there. It’s about having the right action and the right messages and the right content in front of the person at the right time.

Q: So – right content in front of the right person at the right time – that’s classic account based marketing language. Do you find that your clients are using your platform for account based marketing?

Avishai Sharon: They are. We’re not targeting specifically the account based marketing user. We think that its ubiquitous – anytime that you want to engage people with content – so we see that even across B2B companies, see that even with consumer brands and performance as well as B2B and I think that specifically with account based marketing there are different sets of data points that you are trying to collect about the engagement of not just a single individual, but of the entire company, how they’re engaging. But we’re not we’re not an ABM solution per se, we’re for anybody who’s doing content marketing and looking to better understand how it’s impacting. That’s what we try to be.

Q: Right – let’s talk a bit about the implementation process for getting your system up and running – there are obviously some components that you would install in your website CMS and then there are some back-end analytics. Tell me a little bit about the implementation process?

Avishai Sharon: Implementation is pretty straightforward. You install our script on your website, and you can you can connect us to your marketing automation. We integrate with Marketo, HubSpot, Pardot, Salesforce and the like, and it’s pretty much a 10-minute process. The thing is, that it’s really important to define your objectives. And there we have our customer success team working with our customers to really understand, why you are creating content, what are the real objectives, what are the different touch points that you are looking to measure your content’s influence on. From lead, from opportunity, MQL and SQL down to a deal. And that helps really set the context for how your content is performing. We always ask the question – performing in relation to what you have. A great content piece, it could be great for getting people to become leads, but they’re not great to get any SQLs to follow on down to become a closed deal. And besides the implementation process, the thing that we’re really focusing on is having clear recommendations on what to do next.

I think we believe that there is a lot of data going around. You don’t need more data. Your big problem is not knowing more about what your user’s doing. But asking the questions in the right context and getting answers as to what should be done next to really improve my ROI from content.

So besides giving the analytics that they ask for, you know all the graphs, the nice charts, we’re actually telling our users what are the best pieces of content that they should write that they should promote and for every stage internally so their content teams have a much better guidance system for their for their content.

Q: Can you talk a little bit about the improvements your customers can expect to see in terms of conversion rates or number of quality leads?

Avishai Sharon: We’re seeing that we’re affecting three major parts of the marketing team. I think the first and foremost is of course increasing conversions – a clear uplift. We have the numbers and they’re ranging from 40% more to even 270% more at the upper scales. So significant uplift and conversions just by placing the blocks in a better way instead of just sending a person to your blog and hoping that they would do something meaningful. So the first thing is uplifting conversions. And within about 50-60 days we’re seeing that improvement.

The second part is getting more engagement with your content, and that is a result of your content creation team being able to know, what the topics are, and which types of content should be created. So we’re seeing an increase in read ratio, which is our metric of measuring the level of engagement of content.

The third part is reducing the time that you’re spending on trying to sift through the data and connecting those dots. So we can save time up to a factor of ten. So getting answers much more quickly. So converging uplift, increased engaging with content, and reducing the time for analysis for getting those actual insights, these are the three main places where were looking to improve.

Q: What’s the best way to get a better look at the TrenDemon platform?

Avishai Sharon: You can find us at www.trendemon.com, drop us a line, we’d love to show you a live demo and some examples.

Q: Once again Avishai Sharon, he’s the CEO of TrenDemon, thanks very much for joining us today!

And thank you for joining us for another Martech Minute. If you’d like a complimentary consultation about how to optimize your demand gen and marketing automation systems and processes, please contact us today.