Repackaging content marketing: the next thing

Creating quality content marketing is one thing, but personalising it is something else altogether. One company that managed to do this – and more – is Dell with its Nurture campaign.

Designed to draw in potential customers who were reluctant to speak to a sales advisor, Nurture used content marketing combined with analytics. It ran in 10 countries and resulted in 500,000 new contacts.

To achieve this, it served up around 18,000 pieces of content. The twist was that the customer’s behaviour dictated the type of communications they received. In achieving this, Dell did some interesting things.

For example, content was broken down according to the stage the customer had reached in the journey. That could be exploring the range, understanding the technology or simply planning to buy. This content could be linked via an ad to syndicated material covering the same topic.

If the customer stopped interacting with the content, they would be offered different subjects.

It says a lot about the focus of the campaign that it left content until last in its ‘confidential’ documentation. But at least it shows that the company has gone to the trouble of understanding its market.

The article and email templates are designed to work in a modular way. This means that different pieces of content can be taken and stitched together to form something that manages to be both unique and derivative. Dell says that this sort of repackaging allows it to create hundreds of different messages.

In Dell’s own words: “Modularity breaks content into headlines, images and copy blocks to create versions of content such as emails, landing pages or online advertising. It uses these modules to build many different messaging from one library of content.”

This encompasses a range of elements including articles, video, infographics and images.

The question is whether this sort of behaviour is the future in terms of article repackaging. Moreover, is it a way to personalise content?

It is notable that repackaging content marketing is in the minds of marketers. Yesterday’s piece on B2B technology brands found that it was one of their chief concerns. If it is the future, then that poses another question. If content marketing is traditionally about providing an editorially-robust product, does slicing and dicing hamper that aim?

Repackaging content marketing: the next thing is part of Content24, the blog for London content marketing agency FirstWord.