In this Research NXT interview, the Chief Revenue Officer at RateGain, Apurva Chamaria, talks with Santosh about how content marketing efforts and the use of technology have evolved over the years. He also gives us a sneak peek into RateGain's current content marketing strategy and the techniques used by his team to measure and tackle content ops obstacles.
Additionally, Apurva shares his take on AI in content marketing and discusses the crux of his book, Master Growth Hacking.
Key highlights
What this conversation covers
- The evolution of content marketing and the inherent challenges with it.
- The content marketing tech stack used by his team to improve efficiency.
- What is new in the content marketing space.
Consumers do not watch ads or read branded content, they watch and read stories, and at times the best ones can be branded content.
Content marketing is seen as an integral part of the marketing mix and complements the overall marketing strategy. During your 18 years of industry experience, how have the efforts and budget for content marketing evolved?
Content is the heart of any marketing strategy. In fact, the quality of content defines the success and failure of a marketing campaign. In my 16 years of experience, I have seen a consistent increase in the efforts, budget, and professionalism in content marketing. In my view, a fantastic design coupled with great content itself has a viral and engaging capability. We must never forget that consumers do not watch ads or read branded content, they watch and read stories, and at times the best ones can be branded content or ads.
What are your top content marketing challenges? How do you tackle them?
Some of the top content marketing challenges that I have witnessed are:
- Lack of good resources who can write high-quality business-centric content without making it boring. We occasionally outsource content development to industry experts, freelancers and agencies.
- Speed. Most of the time it is required to deliver high-quality content on short notice. We have created templates for various content types to shorten delivery time.
How would you rate your current organisation's proficiency with the use of content marketing technology? Which are the key tools that assist your content marketing efforts?
We extensively use and leverage some of the best content marketing tools:
- Google Alerts for listening around topics, brand, and influencers.
- Hootsuite for social media content scheduling.
- Grammarly for checking grammar mistakes.
- Pardot for email communication as a part of content dissemination.
- WhatsApp and SharePoint for internal communication.
- Google Analytics, including utm_content and utm_term, to track content performance.
How has the use of social media for content marketing changed in RateGain, in the last couple of years?
It has increased tremendously. The number of posts, followers and the engagement rate have improved significantly over the last two years. We will be focusing more on including diverse content types this year, and on strategies to improve the number of followers. Video content is a huge focus for us.
What metrics do you use to measure content marketing success?
Engagement on social media, unique visitors to the website, average time on page, bounce rate, number of downloads, leads, pipeline and revenue mapped with the content asset.
How do you think AI will shape content marketing in the coming years?
It is going to only increase, especially because there is a need to get more attention from prospects, and learning and predicting user interest so that more meaningful content can be served to them is the only way to get user attention and potential business. Chatbots are used extensively these days to provide generic automated responses, but whether the bot predicts or anticipates user response, or for that matter even the need, and then serves the right response, is the key.
In your latest book, Master Growth Hacking, you have stressed the importance of the combination of coding, data intelligence, and marketing. Could you explain it further for our subscribers who are yet to read the book?
Data intelligence will help you discover the insight, coding will allow you to build the right platforms based on those insights, and marketing will enable distribution of the platform and the content. Anyone without the other two will find it hard to get traction. All three of them are going to be critical elements to work on for a compelling growth plan in the future.
