In today’s marketing world, content is the first step of customer engagement. However, obtaining contact information is a common pain point for many marketers, as more web site visitors wish to remain anonymous or resist filling out lengthy forms.
In a recent webinar, Scott Whitright, Senior Solution Marketing Manager at Rackspace, discussed how his company’s data collection efforts have benefitted from using social login through PaperShare.
According to Whitright, the IT hosting company had little tracking capabilities once content was published and no tracking across partner channels.
“By the time a sales team engages a prospect, the prospect is already 70% of the way through their buying process,” said Whitright during his presentation. “From a marketing perspective, we had to look at different ways to see who is engaging with our content and try to explore further.”
To address these challenges, Rackspace called upon PaperShare to help share content efficiently with their audience, while also having data collected that would be beneficial to the company and help make effective marketing decisions.
“We have a couple of tabs that show different topics viewers are interested in, each having a download available for particular content,” said Whitright.“Anonymous visitors can take a look at our content available on the website, but if they engage on any of them, I’m going to capture who that is and what they do from a marketing perspective.”
By strategically using social log in, Rackspace offers a convenient login process to provide easy access to content. PaperShare also provides Rackspace with social profiles of the once ‘anonymous’ visitors, offering worthwhile data and increasing sales engagement.
“The data is a lot cleaner, and when we capture the information [via social login], it automatically goes into our Salesforce.com system and matches data up with email addresses,” said Whitright.“By doing that, I don’t have to ask for a lot of information and still collect valuable data.”
Marketers need to be able to be on top of their content and understand where those people are engaging in order to identify patterns.
“Prospects, customers and partners are doing the research on their own,” said Whitright.“It’s going to grow more and more important as people become constantly connected with your brand via mobile and social channels. Content is the first step in the customer’s research process, so we as a marketing team need to be on top of that.”
