As a demand generation marketer, you likely spend the bulk of your time coming up with really creative campaigns to break through the noise and capture people's attention. Are you spending the same level of energy to retain your prospects' attention once you've captured them? In this video, VP of Marketing, Mike Waldron shares why demand marketers should care about content and tips for accelerating the buyer journey. 

Capturing a lead's attention is just the beginning of the buyer's journey. According to Gartner Research, it takes 11.4 pieces of content for a B2B buyer to make a decision on a software purchase.

"The more content that someone consumes, the quicker they build trust and credibility with your brand," Mike says. If you share Mike's philosophy, then you should focus your efforts on getting as much content consumed as possible because that will ultimately lead to pipeline revenue and retention. 

Here are Mike's tips to help you improve content consumption and accelerate the B2B buyer's journey. 

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Tip #1: Embed your PDFs

Although there should always be an option to download your ebook, you can also allow prospects to read the PDF within the browser using iFrames. This reduces the likelihood of someone downloading it and abandoning it. 

Tip #2: Offer additional relevant content

When you entice a prospect to click on your content, extend their stay by offering additional content related to the topics that drove them to your site in the first place. Remember Mike's golden rule: the more content consumed, the quicker the relationship builds. Remove dead ends in your content journey that will put a hard stop on consumption. 

Tip #3: Personalize your page 

You've already gone through the effort of segmenting your audience and personalizing the offer, so why not personalize the content destination, too? Check out Mike's tips for personalizing content at different stages of the buyer journey to ensure you're sharing the most relevant and valuable content with your lead.

Tip #4: Gate content wisely

There was a time in the not-so-distant past when as much as 80% of B2B content was gated. although content gating can be valuable in collecting information for the sales team, gating too soon can create a barrier at the top if the funnel and leave a bad first impression. Letting your buyers enjoy a few pieces of content before you start asking for their information strengthens your credibility and trust, and this tends to accelerate the buyer's journey. 

Tip #5: Make your sales team accessible

As your prospects consume your content, they will start to have questions, or may want to see use cases specific to their pain points, and when that happens, you want them to be able to access your team right away. Utililze technology such as a chat bot, which you can use to share even more content. 

Tip #6: Track the performance of your content 

You're spending a lot of time creating customized experiences for your leads, make sure you have the analytics to help you understand what content and campaigns are driving value for your business, and optimize accordingly.