Written by Trip Kucera, VP & CMO-in-Residence, Harte Hanks Content & Data Solutions/Aberdeen Group

Monty Python fans will remember the iconic Bridge of Death scene from “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” in which the old man from scene 24, the Keeper of the Bridge of Death, asks the grail seekers three questions to acquire passage across the bridge. After the first knight easily gets past, two more are dispensed into the Gorge of Eternal Peril until Arthur, King of the Britons, beats the keeper at his own game by asking him a question back (“African or European swallow?”).

This scene is a fitting model for thinking about modern content marketing-based lead generation. As marketers, we often think about asking the prospect questions to qualify them, but it’s really the questions of the prospects, not our own, that we should be thinking most about. Get these wrong, and your buyer will cast hurl you into the Gorge of Eternal Indifference.

The focus on lead stages (i.e. marketing-qualified, sales-accepted, etc.) has driven many content marketing strategies, as content is developed specifically to support these stages, particularly among high-performing companies in  Aberdeen Group’s content marketing research.

Figure: Best-in-Class Align Content to Buyer’s Journey

For many marketers, the question of content alignment often centers on asset types and whether a piece of marketing content is registration-gated or not. This is a helpful place to start, but probably too often based on marketers’ perceptions of value, rather than those of their buyers. A better way to think about this alignment is to think in terms of information value, and the implicit “transaction” that occurs at the gate stages of the buyer’s decision journey. The analogy of a toll gate (or should we say “troll gate”) along a road to value (or a road to revenue, from the marketer’s perspective) is effective here. At each toll gate, the buyer is exchanging value (in the form of information, implied or explicit) for value (in the form of information, generally contained in content). Each gate stage or toll gate represents a buyer’s critical question; one that must be answered successfully (by content) in order to progress.

What are these questions?  The exact questions are likely to differ somewhat, based on the buyer’s role, the product or service in question, and their industry or market. However, we’ve developed a general framework that I’ll expand on during my upcoming Content2Conversion talk.

I’m looking forward to expanding on this model, as well as sharing results from our recent research on content marketing and demand generation at this year’s Content2Conversion conference next week in New York City. Hope to see you there!

In the meantime, check out our latest infographic mapping the mind of the CMO  across the demands of content and data. No questions required!

Trip Kucera (@tripkucera) is VP & CMO-in-Residence, Harte Hanks Content & Data Solutions/Aberdeen Group. He will present The Content Continuum: Winning The Hidden Sales Cycle With The Right Answer on May 6 at 11 a.m.