Audience Intent: The one thing missing from your content strategy

Janice is the Head of Digital of a well-known tech company based out of Silicon Valley. The company sells hardware (phones, laptops, servers) to largely premium B2C and B2B consumers. When it comes to marketing, the brand has given Janice one objective - drive leads to the sales teams, via content.

For Janice, the number and quality of leads coming in from all her digital channels is paramount to the success of her marketing team and future content marketing efforts. And so she instructs her team to create content that talks about the products she wants consumers to buy. These include beautiful shots of laptops and mobile phones; long form content on the product specs and even some 'thought leadership' on how the hardware increases the productivity of the consumer.

As the campaigns go live, one thing becomes clear, the lead conversion opportunities are coming but they are a trickle - not enough to reach her quota. On LinkedIn, it’s a minuscule 2.5% click through rate; form completions of just 0.7% from the total traffic attracted from the marketing collateral. Now, if Janice was any other digital marketer going through the motions she wouldn't question the crumbs that digital in general delivers. But Janice is not just another marketer. She recognizes something is off in these results. She ponders why so few people converting from the content.

Is the problem the creative or the channel? Perhaps is it the time or frequency that she is publishing? She thinks.... Perhaps the issue is bigger than the tactics. Perhaps the issue is more strategic. Has her team done their due diligence in understanding their audience? More importantly, has the team taken into consideration the intent of the audience? How they engage with the content and whether or not the goals that her marketing team have attached to the content are reflective of that intent?

In other words, are the marketing team's expectations on how the content should perform, misaligned to how audiences really engage and use content on the different digital platforms?

You many recognize this scenario. Janice’s team, like many marketers today, have aligned the content’s performance and their marketing goals around their expectation on what they want the audience to do after consuming the content rather than what the audience will realistically do after consuming the content.

Here's an example. There is a pervading misnomer going around in both marketing and sales that every person who downloads the whitepaper is a 'lead'. Whole campaigns are built and run on this premise. Of course, every download could be a lead, but in reality, they are not. What tends to happen is the brand creates the whitepaper and gates it behind a lead gen form. The audience must give up something of themselves (i.e. their contact details) in order to get access to the content. Rarely is this seen as a fair trade-off in the eyes of the audience, perhaps they’ve been burned before by whitepapers that are not valuable to them or whitepapers that are deceivingly dressed up as glorified product brochures. This skepticism of value underpins why the audience sometimes gives fake details, or worse yet, bounce when presented with the gate.

When they do give over their details, the audience expects the content to be invaluable. At least valuable enough to warrant the surrender of their phone number.

But these trusting members are in for a nasty surprise. Not only is the whitepaper nothing more than a list of the brand’s products but Janice's marketers tally the list without properly scoring them and forwarded them onto the sales team. The sales team hits the phone, calling the list. Out of 500 'leads' contacted, only four were genuine.

Four.

In other-words, all the leads from that particular whitepaper were crap.

And of course they were.... because they were never leads to begin with. Most of those people did not download the whitepaper because they wanted a call from the sales team. They downloaded the whitepaper because they wanted valuable content. The content was the product they 'bought' with their phone number.

The content was the product they 'bought' with their phone number.

They had no intention of buying Janice’s laptops, they just wanted information. So the intent behind their action was INFORMATIONAL, not TRANSACTIONAL. If they wanted to speak to sales, it would be more logical for them to execute an action with transactional intent, such as making a sales inquiry, rather than going through a whitepaper download where the original promise was valuable information.

What is missing from this scenario is a marketer's recognition of what the audience's intent was when they clicked to download the whitepaper. And here is where marketers need to rethink how content really works in the real world. Not everything we produce will drive leads and an audience-oriented marketing team should be completely at peace with that.

So if most content isn't going to drive leads, what value is it for the brand? For this answer, it is worth us deep diving into the two types of audience intent around content.

Understanding Audience Intent

Over the last ten years, two marketers - Les Binet and Peter Field - have been publishing research on brand building and the benefits on long-term thinking over short-term campaigns. One of their more iconic slides, featured in every presentation is the one below:

Essentially, the slide shows that long-term Brand Building (orange steps) trumps the short-term Sales Activation (yellow spikes). In someways, this is directly reflective of how audience intent also impacts the brand.

There are only two types of audience intent around the content they consume online:

1. Informational intent: the audience is consuming content as part of their research or simply as part of something that interests them. You could bucket this at the orange Brand Building from the graph above.
2. Transactional intent: the audience is taking specific actions that drive towards an outcome the brand desires. This includes completing a lead gen form, writing a review or making a transaction. This could be seen as the yellow Sales Activation spikes in the graph above.

The graphic above suggest how the two intents work when placed within a funnel.

Informational Intent

Content that caters to audiences with informational intent simply is content that's designed to help, educate, inform, teach and entertain. While it can contain your product, informational intent content works better when you create it through the lens of audience, not the brand. It is content that convinces; not content that converts, yet. It is content that should not have conversion goals, nor conversion expectations attached to its performance.

On LinkedIn, we know that about 89% of our members use our platform as a research tool before they make a purchasing decision. I believe this is reflective of all social media and most of digital, which means about 89% of all content a marketer produces for digital should be aimed at satisfying the audience's informational intent. This type of content is what really drives the best customer experiences with your brand and should be designed to assist the audience in increasing their understanding of a topic, your brand or an industry.

Types on content that works best for informational intent include:

• Internally-sourced industry research and reports
• Entertaining or emotionally driven content
• Paradigm shifting content - making the audience think differently about a subject or topic
• "Thought leadership" - opinions, mentorship, demonstrated expertise from either the brand, employee or 'influencer'
• "Clickbait" - How to's, listicles, trivia, trends
• Corporate Comms - Content that establishes brand values and corporate social responsibility as well as PR and Communications related materials
• Events coverage

What format these content types are created should depend on what you know about your audience and the channel you are planning to distribute the content on. This includes considering whether it should be a blog post, a video, a webinar or whitepaper, an infographic or a display ad.

As mentioned earlier, there should not be an expectation here that this type of content will convert into leads. That is not its purpose. It is meant to help the audience be more informed, so that they make a more informed purchasing decision when they are ready to convert. Attaching lead gen objectives and goals to content catered to an audience with informational intent will likely result in failure of your campaign (as we saw in the whitepaper example above).

Instead, the business objectives to attach to informational intent content should be higher funnel focused. These include helping you increase brand awareness, owning a topic or dominating a conversation, establish your brand as a 'thought leader' with demonstrated expertise, research and knowledge, build a community of 'content subscribers' or improving the brand's sentiment within a community. The calls to action here include sign-ups, subscribes, video plays and completes and any metrics that help you articulate a growth in engagement, followership, awareness and sentiment.

Transactional Intent

Content with transactional intent works best when the audience has been convinced and is now ready to convert. The content you create here is more advertorial. It is all about how great you are and should showcase product and services at its core. You want to ensure that you do your best to encourage the audience to take a transactional-related action after consuming the content. It is content that reinforces what you are selling is the solution they are looking for.

All that said, it is important to understand that only about 10% of your addressable audience is this low in the funnel and are ready to convert. This is the Pareto Principle at work - 10% of your audience drives 90% of the results on digital. Note also that increasing your transactional intent content does not mean you will increase the ratio of audiences on the web in this phase of the journey. Only they decide when the time is right for them to convert, your content cannot largely change the intent of the audience (we will talk more about this in the next section).

The content types for transactional intent include:

• Case studies
• Partner success stories
• Promoted events
• Product demonstrations
• Classic advertorial such as product brochures
• Product reviews and competitor comparisons

When it comes to measuring the effectiveness of content with transactional intent, this is where you attach hard business goals and calls to actions. These include lead generation forms, event registrations, eCommerce "buy now" objectives. It is with this content that you should be calculating a Return-On-Investment (ROI) as this content is directly tasked with creating customer opportunities and are largely a conduit for the convinced to convert.

Converting a potential lead into a customer

So if the ratio is 90% informational intent / 10% transactional intent, how can you change the audience’s intent from informational to transactional?

The truth is, you largely can’t. They decide when the time is right for them to convert. The journey is different for everyone and often contains forces beyond the control of the average marketing campaign. This is especially prevalent in B2B and premium B2C audiences. When we think, for example, what needs to be done in order to convince Steve, the Head of IT at a financial services firm, to adopt Janice's laptop solutions, marketers like to tell themselves (and their stakeholders) that content will be a huge, if not deciding, factor in Steve's decision making process. Truth is, the offline considerations Steve needs to overcome have more of an impact on his decision making process than anything Janice can produce online.

Some of those considerations include:

• The IT department's budget windfalls and allocations.
• If the IT department needs a fleet of laptops right now?
• Steve's state of mind - is he fearful of making the wrong laptop decision for the business?
• Steve's need to convince the buying committee and fellow stakeholders within the business of this laptop solution.
• Does the IT department rely on seasonality and timing around hiring in order to use the laptops?
• Does Steve have a strategy to implement the use of these laptops across the business?
• Are Janice's laptops compatible with Steve's current IT infrastructure?
• Does Steve trust Janice's brand to be the right partner to the success of his business?

In most of these circumstances, what you create in the form of content will not directly move Steve from an informational to transactional intent mindset. A case in point, it is entirely plausible that Steve was convinced six months ago that Janice's laptops were the solution he needed (largely convinced by the content the brand produced), however he didn't have the budget nor the stakeholder buy-in to make the purchase. He's just sitting there waiting for the ducks to align offline before he can convert online. What should Janice do?

She can only do two things: Give Steve valuable informational-intent content that helps him build his business case for stakeholder buy-in; and keep him convinced to buy her laptops with transactional-intent content until the end of the quarter when he will get the budget to buy. The catch: Janice is still shooting in the dark with her marketing as she can never know exactly what Steve is thinking and doing.

The reality is you cannot predict when and how a customer makes the transition from informational intent to transactional intent. All you can do is be there with relevant transactional-intent content when this shift occurs. In content marketing we call this tactic being 'Always On'. The idea that you are always there when the customer themselves decides to convert.

You cannot predict when a customer makes the transition from informational intent to transactional intent. All you can do is be there with relevant content when this shift occurs.

So how can a marketer cater to both informational and transactional intent and be always-on? Below is generic distribution plan of how a brand could approach being always-on with informational intent and transactional intent. The trick here is to run the two campaigns simultaneously. One always-on campaign for those who need to be convinced or kept warm with more information or whose circumstances are not aligned to convert right now; and one always-on campaign for those who are ready to convert. Remember though, the transactional-intent content, while it converts, is just a conduit to the transaction. A mere doorway. It is rarely a driver. The convincing should take place with all the always-on, informational-intent content you served throughout the customer journey.

In the green is the always-on, informational-intent content nurturing, informing and keeping potential leads warm. In the purple is the always on, transactional-intent content converting and promoting those whose circumstances are aligned to now make a transactional action. One builds momentum for future conversion opportunities, the other captures immediate opportunities as they come to light.

In terms of how to split the budget, I am suggesting 60% informational (upper and middle funnel) content and 40% transactional (bottom funnel). You could play with this ratio but it is weighted to spending higher up the funnel for three reasons:

1. Most of a buyer journey (particularly in B2B and high end B2C) is spent building trust and convincing, rather than converting
2. Informational intent takes up around 2/3 thirds of the average buyer journey in the funnel
3. Informational intent is what most people have when they consume most content

A creative approach to audience intent

Audience intent should be one of the first considerations to include when building a strategic approach. In general, the order of creation should flow like this:

1. Consider the target audience and their intent - are we building content around informational or transactional intent?
2. Then consider the objective. If it is informational intent, are we wanting to see the needle move of brand awareness or topic ownership or sentiment? And what are the metrics that are going to help us correlate the intent to the objective?
3. Thirdly, consider the content type. If transactional intent, does the audience convert better with a case study or a product demonstration.
4. Finally, consider the content format. If we are distributing on LinkedIn, will a whitepaper or a video be more engaging for the target audience?

Never start with the format or channel. A $20K budget for Video or Facebook is ludicrous. You don't know if your audience converts on Facebook or best through video, so why are you blindly committing budget to it? Instead, it should be a $20K budget to grow awareness of the brand around a topic with content designed to be relevant to the audience’s informational-intent. How you will execute that depends on where and how the audience chooses to engage.

What content to create in a strategy that targets intent

A couple of months ago I wrote an article introducing the concept of the 4 Content Archetypes - the idea that every piece of content that exists in digital can be bucketed into one of these four archetypes:

These archetypes line up nicely when we think about the how audiences consume them.

Informational intent: Poet, Professor & Preacher

Transactional intent: Promoter (and at times some Preacher).

Realistically, only one of the archetypes (Promoter) caters to transactional intent and it would make sense that you should be weighting your content creation in the same way. Make just one quarter of your content bottom funnel, demand gen and therefore accountable to direct lead generation and an ROI accountability.

This is clearly a scary proposition, especially for marketers whose department and performance metrics are oriented toward product or sales and not towards the customer, but it is important to be realistic about how many people are really there to buy from digital channels like social media and display.

Conclusion

Ask yourself, when was the last time you bought something on Twitter or Instagram? If the answer is never, then welcome to the majority. Information consumption is the normal behaviour on digital; not purchasing. It is not because you cannot or won't buy on such digital channels, it is simply because your intent on those channels is not transactional, but informational. You wanted content, not product.

Unfortunately audiences on digital are bombarded by last-click, transactional intent content no matter where they are on in the funnel and this is largely because the brand and the marketing department has not understood properly how their target audience uses digital; nor have they aligned their performance metrics to the normal engagement actions the audience completes online. Understanding intent helps you create more relevant content and more realistic performance expectations.

With this understanding of intent on digital, imagine if you geared your marketing towards the intent of your audience. You stopped shouting at the audience to buy your products. You stopped asking for a conversion on every video. You stopped gating your whitepapers with the intent to send an army of sales people after them. You stopped turning your social media feed into a glorified product catalogue. You stopped interrupting the information they want with pre-roll and mid-roll ads they don't want.

What if you understood their intent and gave them the value and the information they needed, no questions asked. What if you became the brand with just the answers; not the brand with just the pitches. Wouldn't that be a better digital experience for everyone?