Content2Conversion Conversations: Creating Powerful Content That Buyers Can’t Resist

Published: April 2, 2014

By gaining a greater understanding of what triggers the brain to buy, marketers can create an almost irresistible impulse to purchase.

In his presentation at the upcoming B2B Content2Conversion Conference, David Lewis, Founder and CEO of DemandGen International, will discuss how that can be accomplished through neuromarketing. This new field of marketing research, which studies how consumers’ brains respond to marketing stimuli, is shaping the future of content marketing.

Demand Gen Report recently caught up with Lewis to discuss his upcoming presentation and some of the trends he’s seeing in content marketing.

Demand Gen Report: This year’s B2B Content2Conversion is focused on the impact content can make in terms of engagement and campaign results. Are you seeing this as a greater focus area for your clients?

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David Lewis: What I’ve experienced over the past several years is marketing really re-thinking on how they’re creating content. Since we focus a lot in technology and financial services and health care, those types of industries that are very strong considered purchase segments and a lot of our clients previously were working very close to a product marketing teams. The content that they were producing around the product and capabilities was coming from that “how” and “what.”

What we’re seeing as an emerging trend and a very important new direction for marketing, is to start off with the “why.” Why would somebody want this product or service? Instead of looking internally for the answers, marketers are shifting their focus externally to the minds of clients and prospects. They are examining the pains and needs of their prospects and then providing content to satisfy those pains.

The second thing that we’re seeing is a move from creating collateral to being more journalistic. They’re thinking not just in terms of product information, but about all the different pains and challenges of their clients. The result is content that works through a considered purchase process.

DGR: There are several sessions during this year’s event about measuring the impact of content. Are you seeing greater attention paid to reporting and engagement metrics?

Lewis: For the past two years we’ve seen a tremendous focus by the marketing operations team to quantify things like never before. Because content plays such a critical role in the considered purchase process, having greater insights into what content is being consumed by the audiences that they are targeting is very helpful for marketers.

They are using tools such as dashboards to create a kind of “greatest hits” in terms of content. While this provides marketers with tremendous insights and are a good approach to start when it comes to reporting and engagement metrics, you also have to look at things such as your campaign volumes for various types of content as well as where the content is being used.

What we’re seeing is that marketers want to take metrics to the next level and look at cause and effect. They want to look at the people who have moved all the way down the funnel and become customers and see what pieces of content they consumed.

DGR: Can you give us a preview of your presentation and some background on the topic of neuromarketing?

Lewis: Over the past decade, a field of the study called neuroscience has become increasing popular. Ever since we have been able to study the human brain, we have had a desire to understand how humans make decisions. This field of study has grown quite a bit where marketing experts are now applying neuroscience to the field of marketing called neuromarketing.

So what I’m going to do in my session is — since the whole conference is around content — is educate people on how to make content that, what I call, pushes the mental buy button of the prospect. What if you could create content that was so powerful that the prospect had almost no choice but to make a buying decision? Imagine the power you would have as a marketer if you could do that.

I look forward to bringing my presentation to New York and to the B2B Content2Conversion Conference. There’s been some breakthrough research that we can now apply to marketing to make us more effective marketers. By applying this research to real-world examples, marketers can see why a subject line, tweet, landing page or other piece of content was more effective.

DGR: For marketing executives, what is the value in attending conferences like B2B Content2Conversion?

Lewis: Attending conferences like B2B Content2Conversion is critical for marketers for a number of reasons, Lewis said. “One reason to attend is that you’re going to spend a day with like-minded individuals who have the same challenges. The second benefit to attending is that the Demand Gen Report group has assembled some of the best speakers on content. The third reason to attend is to have experts and your peers weigh in and help you solve your challenges and problems.

Click here to view the conference agenda.

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