Martech Interview with Ian Dix, Chief Marketing Officer, Contentgine

Content marketing and demand generation marketing are two different entities for most businesses. They need a new type of demand generation that relies entirely on buyer intent.

Your ABM platform data might tell you what account is interested, but not specifically who is interested.

1. What does a typical workday look like for you at Contentgine?
There are two major factors that make our workdays a 24 by 7 environment, and those things are, first and foremost, we are a truly global company with major operations in Asia and the US and a worldwide customer base. Secondly, we are experiencing explosive growth, the likes of which I’ve never seen in such a relatively young company. That growth is precise because we’ve built a better mousetrap, as they say. We figured out how to generate high-quality first-person leads from folks who are consuming relevant content, and on a scale that works for the multinational and growth companies we serve.

2. How can marketers attribute content to revenue?
That connection traditionally has been uneven, at best. In most marketing organizations, content marketers and demand generation marketers live in two worlds: content marketers want to provide brand authenticity and solution proofs through their content, and demand marketers want to drive interested parties using that content, or other means of audience generation. Demand marketers have traditionally syndicated content on various networks, most of which in my experience are mediocre in their returns or try to drive inbound traffic to the content itself.
What we did was create a new type of demand generation that relies entirely on what we believe is the best indicator of buyer intent: someone reading your or your competitors’ content. That sounds like content syndication, and it is, but our difference is that we have the world’s largest library of content – over 500,000 pieces produced by over 21,000 companies. That scale means we have an audience that is both large and indicates intent in high numbers. We supply that information about who, what company, what title, and what content they’re reading, to our clients. So, we’ve finally delivered on the promise of content syndication.

3. Why should first-party engagement be the top priority for marketers?
Because getting 100% of the first-party leads from folks consuming content has not been widely available until our company was formed. Most ABM platforms utilize account-level intent data, driven by a complex combination of cookies and downloads, all at the account – and not the first person – level.

Your ABM platform data might tell you what account is interested, but not specifically who is interested.

Is it one person doing a lot of research? A lot of folks? Prior to our solution, you never knew, and your job was to guess at the job titles in that company and try to market to them directly.
With Contentgine, we can supplement and improve that account-level data by telling you who in the company is consuming your or your competitors’ content. We supply all the first-party data – the name, contact information, title, department, what constitutes their activity, etc. Now, you know that not only what accounts are surging, but who’s driving that surge.

4. How are content category leads different from other MQLs?
We provide 100% accurate first-person leads. We not only provide you leads from your content syndication, but we also provide leads of professionals downloading your competitors’ content. Our leads come in two types:
Content Attributed Leads (CALs): Insights from parties downloading your specific content
Content category Leads (CCLs): Insights for professionals downloading your competitors’ content in your segment space
Our offering goes beyond a first-person qualified lead to provide the intent driving content consumption. For example, if I know that Bob Smith, Director of IT at ACME company has consumed two or more competitive pieces of content about managed security services, I have a high amount of confidence that ACME company is looking at purchasing this offering, and Bob is part of the purchasing committee. As a result, I can tailor my message more specifically to better engage with Bob and his purchasing committee in a more meaningful way.

5. Could you tell us more about Contentgine’s Content Indication Platform?
We recently unveiled our Content Indication Platform, also known as “CIP,” for use by business-to-business (B2B) marketing and sales teams across 120 major product categories. The online SaaS platform provides access to Contentgine’s proprietary and 100% first-party account intent and categorical content insights that allow for expansion and prioritization of target account lists and content consumption intelligence.
CIP mines one billion engagement signals quarterly from content interactions with the world’s largest B2B library of more than 500,000 case studies, white papers, and eBooks to deliver advanced market intelligence. The platform identifies personalized content consumption patterns of tens of millions of professionals to create smarter target account lists, higher-performing content, and better prospect engagement.
The CIP platform captures these engagements to determine 360-degree intent—with complete contact, company, and content consumption visibility. In addition, because CIP knows the exact asset consumed, it provides industry-leading content intelligence, comparing performance within product categories to give organizations more insights into how their content compares to competitors.

6. What are the best content intelligence tools and strategies?
Contentgine has the most thorough and advanced methodology that generates deep insights into the data we’ve been discussing. The platform, comprises our vast content library, our AI-powered Perpetual Engine, and our Content Indication Platform, as I described before. That creates a corpus of data previously not available to marketers. What titles are reading our content? What are the Top 5 most-read pieces of content in my product category? What are the hot topics in my product category? How does my content consumption rank against my competitors? All this is available from our CIP platform.

7. The B2B purchase process has shifted. What role do intent insights play now in marketing?
Intent-based marketing is undergoing upheaval with Google announcing the end of third-party cookies as trackers of browser activity. That leaves the older companies that relied on those in a pinch for coming up with new indicators of intent that are sufficiently accurate.
We make intent-based marketing simple: If you believe – as we do – that someone reading your or your competitors’ content is the best indication that they are down the funnel in their buying journey, we can supply you not only the “who” but the “what and why” information that lets you create successful outreach campaigns. Our new CIP platform lets you look at content consumption in your product category, and we say that is the best way to know what is trending, how you are doing, what your competitors are doing, and what you might do to improve engagement.
As a long time marketer, that is the holy grail.

8. What’s one tip you’ll give to content marketers for B2B lead generation?
This will sound unusual, but – believe it or not – we have data that says what you name your content piece might influence who opens and reads it.
Our Chief Data Scientist, Ben Luck, did an amazing study on content engagement, and he found that content titles that are too specific, or contain too many of the company’s internal buzzwords, etc, don’t get read as often as those with more generic terms.
So, we suggest that content marketers first read that study – available ungated on our website under the Articles section and then pay close attention to how they promote and title their content.
As a longtime marketer, I found that one fact fascinating.

9. What do you enjoy the most about working at Contentgine?
With all due respect to my other teams that I’ve worked with and for, the Contentgine team is the person for person, the smartest and most hard-working team I’ve ever been associated with. Our success speaks for itself, but what’s cool is that everyone has their role – there is little to no overlap in responsibilities and everyone leads their discipline, but everyone also chips in wherever they are needed. The team reminds me of the Rebel Alliance from Star Wars – we are a diverse bunch who all know their weapons systems and must work together to defeat the Death Star. And the Death Star, in our business, is the old, traditional way of doing content syndication and intent-based marketing.

The Force – as well as The Future – is with us, we believe.

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