TrenDemon calls itself a “content marketing attribution and personalization platform,” a kind of companion to marketing automation systems that helps marketers understand, align and automatically improve the impact of their efforts on sales. We sat through a demo of the product and found a lot to like at first glance.
Content Attribution: A Picture of Your Actual Buyer’s Journey
TrenDemon works by putting a script on your web pages that will track all visitor behavior until visitors reach a defined goal. Goals are typically bottom-of-the-funnel indicators like a demo request, quote request, consultation request or purchase. They can be pulled from lifecycle stages in a CRM such as Marketing Qualified Leads, Sales Qualified Leads, Opportunities, and Customers.
In other words, you get a clear picture of your real buyer’s journey based on data, which can be extremely powerful. Once you know how your buyers make the journey from visitor to sales qualified lead, opportunity, or customer, you can improve, optimize and personalize the user experience on your website.
First, TrenDemon evaluates your web pages and identifies the top performers whether they are blog posts or site pages, ranking them based on their role in converting anonymous visitors to known leads and, more importantly, which pages contribute most to reaching your most important goals. This gives you valuable insight into what’s working and what isn’t working and allows you to measure the impact of improvements or optimization efforts.
Not only does TrenDemon track page views, it also tracks page engagement by calculating how much of a page is scrolled through and generates a “read ratio” for each page for deeper insight into content’s role in the conversion process.
Content Personalization: Knowledge is Power
Once you know what content is most effective in reaching your most important goals, you can use TrenDemon to recommend content to visitors as they engage with your website. The platform allows you to create and deliver content offers based on individual visitors’ behavior, directing them to content that is most likely to best move them to the next phase in the buyer’s journey.
Think about it. Most of us create content based on how we think an ideal customer would search for solutions to a problem. We research keywords, create web pages and blogs posts, make content offers, place ads, and work social media with content that we think will attract, close, convert and delight. But it would really be great to know what the buyer’s journey really is–and it is possible that the actual journey is different than our idealized version. An ideal buyer’s journey usually looks something like this.
Your visitors’ actual journey through your content marketing efforts might look more like this. And TrenDemon gives you the tools to track and rank the real buyer’s journey.
Knowing the actual journey customers make from visitor to purchase, and identifying the highest-impact content in that journey, gives you the power to direct visitors to the content that will best help them make a decision.
The attribution features of TrenDemon give you a buyer’s actual journey through the goals that are most important. That’s powerful data. Then you can optimize the content that works best. The personalization features of TrenDemon allow you to put more visitors on that path by leading them to the most valuable content on your site.
Integrations Add Convenience
TrenDemon integrates with most marketing automation platforms including HubSpot, Marketo, Pardot, Act-On and SilverPop. It is possible to glean some buyer journey data from these platforms alone–you can see what pages a visitor viewed before reaching one of your goals, for example. But that doesn’t tell you what was most influential in that journey. And the ability to optimize conversion and drive more visitors into the most productive conversion paths has the potential to make marketing automation much more efficient and effective.
We Bought It!
We were sold on the value that we could bring to our own marketing efforts and to those of our clients. Every business that is investing in digital marketing needs more data and less speculation to be effective. TrenDemon is a giant step forward in providing actionable data that can improve conversions and, ultimately, improve customer satisfaction as your customers want to find the most valuable information on your website as much as you want to give it to them!
Stay tuned for a more in-depth review once we have a few months of running TrenDemon under our belt. If you’re a current user and have comments, join the conversation!