San Francisco (PRWEB) May 19, 2015 -- Akoonu, Inc.™ today announced the general availability of its cloud-based content marketing platform, the industry’s first solution empowering B2B marketers to drive an integrated, data-driven content marketing strategy. Akoonu’s built-in best practices and customizable frameworks enable marketers to develop and integrate rich buyer personas and journey maps that yield truly in-depth knowledge of their buyers and their buying process. Armed with these insights, marketers gain clear direction for more efficiently strategizing and creating high quality content that inspires their buyers into action, is valued organizationally, and drives conversions.
In a world where content drives buying decisions and multiple people with varying roles are involved in the purchasing process, creating high quality content that fuels buyer engagement is complex. It requires a strategy that begins with a deep understanding of your audience. This is why comprehensive buyer personas and journey maps are the necessary foundation to a successful content marketing strategy.
“Knowing your buyers inside and out is the cornerstone to relevant content and effective marketing,” says Jeff Freund, CEO and Founder, Akoonu. “But while many solutions exist for creating, managing, and distributing content, no solutions have existed for that crucial first step – creating and documenting an effective content marketing strategy that informs and improves the entire content lifecycle. And as a result, content marketing isn’t as effective as it can be. As marketing practitioners and technologists ourselves, we saw the need to address this gap and help companies realize the power of high quality content.”
Akoonu’s technology-enabled approach transforms buyer personas and journey maps into actionable insights that everyone across Sales and Marketing can access and collaborate on in real-time, thereby activating personas and maps organizationally. Benefits include:
- Create better content faster: More rapidly plan and create high quality content leveraging deep buyer insights.
- Boost brand authority and convert more leads: Create targeted, buyer-centric content that strengthens brand credibility and leverage it at the moment in the buying journey it has the most impact.
- Align Sales and Marketing: Collaborate and unite around a common understanding of the target audience and how they buy.
- Fuel Organizational Maturity: Self-sufficiently develop and perpetuate a content marketing strategy using built-in best practices and document, retain, and protect invaluable data, research, and insights about your buyers.
Akoonu features include:
Research: Gather the rich insights you need to successfully build comprehensive, actionable buyer personas and journey maps.
- Data Analysis: Connect with CRM and MA data to validate the accuracy of your personas. Via data visualizations, see who are converting to leads, involved in active sales opportunities, and within your customer base.
- Interview Scripts: Leverage customizable customer and internal interview scripts aimed at gathering in-depth information to build your buyer personas and journey maps.
- Research Library: Upload, organize, and access industry research relevant to your markets and buyers to build a library that lets you more quickly track trends, build personas, and write content.
Content Marketing Strategy Development: Create and manage the foundational components to not just your content marketing strategy, but to all your marketing initiatives.
- Market Segments and Lines of Business: Clearly define your target market segments and align your high level Sales and Marketing initiatives to products, product lines, or business units.
- Buyer Persona Development: Leverage a customizable framework with key buyer persona attributes – like goals, challenges, and buying criteria – and quickly build a persona by instantly accessing research and interview responses mapped to the persona.
- Journey Maps Library: Select from a library of customizable buyer’s journey frameworks that span the entire customer lifecycle, and map buying roles, needs, actions, preferences, and other core dimensions for each persona at each stage.
Integrate and Collaborate: Connect personas and journey maps to ongoing business data and integrate them with the everyday tools Sales and Marketing are currently using.
- Collaborate in Real-Time: Exchange insights and feedback across Marketing, Sales, and Product to improve the quality and accuracy of your buyer personas.
- Share Organizationally: Share personas and journey maps online and in real-time to ensure they drive impact organizationally. Also share usage reports to reveal how a persona or map was effectively used.
- Integration and APIs: Connect to any system using Akoonu’s open REST APIs, and easily plug into content creation, content management, MA, and CRM solutions to embed personas and journey maps everywhere Sales and Marketing work.
“Content marketing is continuing a trend of dramatic growth, yet according to our research, the top challenge marketers continually face is producing engaging content on a consistent basis,” says Joe Pulizzi, Founder, Content Marketing Institute. “A simple yet critical step to successfully tackling this challenge is to not just create but actually document a content marketing strategy. Organizations with a documented strategy and a better understanding of their audience are more effective and less challenged with every aspect of content marketing.”
“Creating amazing content is an investment. It takes time, resources, and money. We want to maximize that investment and know that the content we create helps close deals and elevate our brand. This is the value we see in Akoonu,” notes Todd Miner, Product Manager, Apptivo. “Akoonu gives us the tools we need to gain incredibly meaningful insights into our buyers and their buying process. So we can remove the guesswork and create content we know will resonate and connect.” (Read more from Apptivo)
About Akoonu
Akoonu, Inc. ™ is the first content marketing platform empowering B2B marketers to develop an integrated, data-driven content marketing strategy that unites Marketing, powers buyer-centricity, and inspires your brand authority. Akoonu’s built-in best practices, customizable frameworks, systems integrations, and collaboration features give marketers a smarter, more efficient way to develop robust buyer personas and buyer’s journey maps and to put them into the hands of everyone across Marketing and Sales. Armed with a truly in-depth understanding of their buyers and their buying process, marketers gain clear direction for creating high quality content that motivates their buyers, and that is loved, valued, and used organizationally to advance their brand, drive conversions, and fuel long-term business success. For more information, visit http://www.akoonu.com.
Media Contact
Heather Miller
heather(at)akoonu(dot)com
+1.415.689.5722 x102
Heather Miller, Akoonu, http://www.akoonu.com, +1 415.689.5722 Ext: 102, [email protected]
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