Sample: The Evolution of Content Marketing

Why CMO’s are Rethinking Content Generation in the World of Inbound 2.0

Today’s marketing leaders are constantly looking to expand the toolsets of their teams. In the early days of inbound marketing this meant building teams of content writers, developers, graphic designers and, if you are edgy, possibly a user experience tester and a search optimizer. Today's marketing teams are quickly changing with the advent of Inbound 2.0 and the wide availability of tools that facilitate design thinking and data driven marketing. Content creation tools are the future of web marketing, because as they say, content is king.

For Inbound 1.0, the key objective was the manual generation of keyword targeted content. However, for Inbound 2.0, the focus is to create automatic, personalized and data driven content. So what does it mean to create great content in the world of Inbound 2.0? To answer this question I am going to examine outgrow.co, one exciting tool currently being unveiled in the space.

The focus of Outgrow.co, is as it’s name suggests, to outgrow your competition. It promises to achieve this by delivering targeted, personalized and data driven content. The content delivered is calculated by Outgrow’s tool that lets website visitors estimate the cost of a product or service by answering a few simple questions.

Put simply it’s an easily customizable recommendation engine for providing complex calculations as answers to questions people have.

Billed as a way to generate more leads, Outgrow.co helps webmasters provide interactivity and personalisation to website visitors. The tool collects information from a potential customer and provides them with instant value with no upfront investment. For example, an insurance company could provide a coverage estimate based on a visitor’s custom variables (i.e. type of vehicle, driver history, level of coverage). Since users can get immediate answers to questions, the use of outgrow results in higher conversion rates and traffic on websites. Sites using the tool have seen as much as 2-4x increase in conversion rate.

Tools like this have let small marketing teams produce web solutions that would typically cost tens of thousands of dollars and months of work to develop and deploy. Applications include:

• Insurance & Health Care
• Dieting and Weight Loss
• Finances and Mortgage Rates
• Program Costs and Expenses
• Custom Invoicing and Billing

Companies and institutions, both public and private, are increasingly turning to solutions like Outgrow to make their content better connect with their audience. Lets face it, traffic as a barometer for online success is dead. Today marketers demand clear and defined results and achieving this means turning traffic into leads.

What is disruptive about technology like this is that it undercuts the need for what traditionally would require teams of people to achieve. It puts the ability to present personalized solutions into the hands of growth-oriented businesses in a way previously impossible.

Welcome to Inbound 2.0 - content and concept testing just got a whole lot more interesting!

David Bussell