Content Performance Turns Visitors into Leads

Written by Hippo CMS

Content “Management” is not enough
Let’s declare it: the era of the content management system that simply “manages” content is over. In the old days, when businesses maintained a relatively static website-- and maybe had their sights set on a mobile site, “managing” content was sufficient.

That era is over.

These days, a modern successful enterprise isn’t managing “pages” or “sites” at all. Instead they’re maintaining and curating holistic, integrated and bespoke experiences that transcend channels, leveraging mobile, social and web to deliver a mutually reinforcing, relevant and resonating message. In delivering this message, they need to equally balance brand integrity and consistency with personalization.

To serve business goals, they need to do more than “manage”--they need their content to perform, and deliver on business goals.

Content Marketing needs to deliver on ROI
A few years ago, when “Content Marketing” was still an unknown term, marketers could get away with content creation being a shot in the dark. Volume was sufficient (“it’ll increase SEO!”) and ‘gut feeling’ about the client base was enough to experiment with budgets. But it’s 2015 now, and content marketing needs to be held accountable.

When forecasting for the coming year, the Content Marketing Institute found that “58% of B2B marketers plan to increase their content marketing budgets over the coming year, and of this group, 10% plan to increase it significantly.” As it dominates brands’ inbound marketing strategies, and provides a backbone for everything from eCommerce to customer service, content needs to start pulling its weight, and demonstrating its value in tangible metrics.

Don’t blame the content marketers
Content marketing as a discipline needs metrics to guide strategy. And a modern web content management system should provide these metrics.

It should do so in two ways:

1. Integration with other marketing technology: by hooking into a comprehensive martech landscape, a web content management system positions itself firmly as part of the greater marketing-to-sales effort, and contribute to a cohesive set of data on the enterprise’s online business process. Open standards, and a best of breed approach are crucial here.

2. Taking its place in the martech landscape: As content becomes increasingly crucial to online business, the CMS must evolve without losing sight of itself. The web content management system must adapt to customer demands, while still remaining “best of breed". Rather than simply “managing” and publishing content, the CMS must become an intelligent tool, offering actionable insights on content performance across contexts, personas and devices.


Content Performance
Metrics are becoming increasingly important for content marketing. Simply measuring visitors or users, and displaying the results in colored graphics is no longer sufficient. A CMS solves this by going to the source: the content. Beyond just shares or pageviews, content performance recognizes content’s role as a differentiator for business, and measures its effectiveness accordingly. Hippo personalizes the digital experience using insights on real-time engagement combined with contextual data to deliver valuable content to every visitor, in any context and on any device.

Content performance enables the enterprise to measure which content brings value, which doesn’t perform, and respond accordingly. By adding metadata corresponding to (among others) marketing persona, user journey stage, and goals-- content performance metrics map content to business goals, add accountability to content creation through insights on ROI,  editorial effectiveness and persona trends, thus enabling the enterprise to continuously refine its strategy by responding quickly to those content performance metrics.
Visitor to Lead Management
Going beyond the Lead to Revenue Management processes that begin with Marketing Automation, Content Performance places the CMS in its rightful place in the martech ecosystem: at the top of the marketing funnel.

Relevant experiences don’t have to start with Marketing Automation. 74% of the buying decision is made in advance of the first sales call, 50% before an email address is captured. So why wait until marketing automation or CRM to tailor the digital experience?

Understanding Content Performance helps you personalize the digital experience even at the anonymous visitor. Measuring and understanding which content is being consumed in real time, in combination with contextual data, helps you resonate with your visitor before the email address is captured, earlier in the funnel-- before marketing automation plays a role.

A content management system with powerful targeting and personalization combined with strong content performance analytics can start tailoring the digital experience for even unknown, anonymous, first time visitors.
Make content perform
Managing content is not enough. Hippo is on a mission to make the digital experience more personable for every visitor. We’re redefining the CMS space by engineering the world’s most advanced content performance platform, designed to help businesses understand their visitors – whether they are known or anonymous – and deliver the content they value in any context and on any device.