Engaging new audiences with PathFactory
August 27, 2019
Engaging new audiences with PathFactory
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with PathFactory
Nokia needed a new approach for a new campaign to reach a new target market and personas who were not familiar with Nokia, its solutions, or its relevance to them. This target market and the personas are very different from the traditional Nokia audience, and our campaign needed to adopt new approaches, tactics, and methods to reach this new audience. As part of the campaign, we are using PathFactory as the content hub, using social outreach, email nurture, targeted events, and other tactics to reach this new audience and invite them to consume and binge on relevant content that is of interest to them.
Currently, PathFactory is being used as a pilot for a single campaign in one business group in Nokia.
- PathFactory allows us to present specific content to our target audience in curated content tracks. These content tracks give the audience the opportunity to consume and binge on content that is relevant to them at their own pace. Content tracks allow us to create content based on topic, personas, stage in a buyer's journey, etc. We can also create tracks based on campaign tactics (e.g. event content track to support a webinar).
- PathFactory provides very detailed analytics about who visited the content tracks (both known and unknown visitors), the accounts that visited (based on IP address), what content they consumed (how many pieces of content) and how long they engaged with the content (time per asset, average time, total time, etc). By monitoring PathFactory analytics and cross-referencing with other analytics/reports (e.g from Marketo, Salesforce), we are able to track individual visitors, build up a picture of their content consumption and therefore their interests, their engaged intent, and hand over more meaningful prospects to sales.
- PathFactory also allows us to understand what type of content visitors prefer to consume, what type of content works best for different personas and stages of the buyer's journey, and how effective the content is in terms of ROI. When content is added to PathFactory, we can specify content source, type, topic, funnel stage, cost, etc. This helps us set up relevant content tracks, understand the way that content performs and determine the best types of content to develop for different stages of the campaign.
- PathFactory can be integrated with martech platforms such as Marketo, which helps to ensure acceptance by the wider marketing team but does require some effort to ensure proper integration and reporting.
- Path Analytics provides a highly visual and easy to understand aggregated view of visitors, accounts and content views. Much more detailed but less visual views are provided per content track and across content tracks, requiring significant manual analysis to obtain useful results. It would be good to have some of the snapshot visuals provided by Path Analytics for individual tracks and across multiple tracks.
- Visitor account identification is based on the IP address of the visitor. This provides a good indication of account engagement at a high level but sometimes is subject to error and could be more accurate.
- Although this is not due to PathFactory alone as it requires careful setup and consistency across the different platforms, visitor attribution based on UTM source reporting is not as accurate as it could be and does not always align well between PathFactory and other martech platforms.
- PathFactory has helped us reach a new target audience with analytics that demonstrates meaningful target account/audience engagement.
- It has helped us to better understand content consumption preferences of our target audience so that we can adjust our content development plans accordingly and within budget.
- It has helped us to agree on qualification criteria with sales and so deliver better-qualified prospects/leads. The engagement data on the topics consumed and time spent by prospects/leads on our content gives inside sales/sales a much better indication of how to open discussions.
Setting up PathFactory is relatively easy but does require a methodical approach to content tagging, engagement scores, setting up content tracks, setting up track IDs, etc. to ensure consistency across content and across the campaign. This is best done by defining objectives and guidelines from the outset. Launching PathFactory so that it is fully integrated with marketing and sales automation tools used by the organization requires buy-in from and significant effort by the martech team and should not be undertaken lightly! However, the results obtained have been well worth the effort expended.
We have been using PathFactroy actively for 6 months, and sales cycles are typically longer than this. Although it is a bit too soon to tell whether it is impacting target buyers (decision makers), we know that we have been successful in reaching our target technical audience (influencers) from the analytics we have seen for our technical content. Our technical content is very specific and aimed at a specific audience, yet we have achieved higher than expected average/total engagement times for both content and accounts. We have also seen an increasing number of repeat visitors and new visitors from target accounts.
I can't comment on this as I was not involved in selecting PathFactory. However, I understand that we looked and evaluated several other similar solutions before selecting PathFactory.