Thanks for taking the time to respond to my comment. I appreciate it. I also appreciate the example link you posted. That puts some context around the possibilities.

I also don’t know one company that can say they’re not challenged to create compelling content continuously.

I can see how the information TechValidate generates would be extremely useful as additional components to both marketing and sales activities, especially given the different formats possible.

Ardath

I appreciate the candor of your comment. I totally understand that in just seeing a standalone short-form case study with no other context, the real impact of what we have here might create a bit of a question mark… “That’s nice, but so what?”

First, I do want to reiterate what that Howard is correct: our goal at TechValidate is not to replace the creation of ALL marketing content, but only to bring the direct experiences of real customers into the vendor’s outbound activities in an efficient and scalable manner. The tech vendors who use us commonly report that we unearth targeted customer data that they would never have discovered on their own and therefore wouldn’t have been able to use to educate their new prospects.

The example Howard has in his post is an intentionally short-format document. Many of our customers use these successfully in the context of a portfolio of similarly targeted assets to demonstrate quick “proof points” for industry-specific specific questions that their prospective customers often ask (e.g., “do you have any other small health care companies like us using your product?”)

Please note that the app generates many, many more kinds of data and deliverables — including statistics, charts, and testimonials — all of which are auto-generated and can be provided to the public. For example, here is a link to an actual live page that one of our customers, 3PAR, currently has running as the offer in a nurturing campaign: http://www.techvalidate.com/site/product-research/3par-utility-storage

In addition, our assets often reside in widgets on vendor websites, sales presentations, outbound emails, partner sites, or get linked to off of social media applications.

All of that said, I’m the first to admit that we’re not for everybody. If a company does not have real pains around the time and costs associated with generating sufficient depth or quantities of marketing assets to support their sales or demand generation activities, we’re simply not a good fit.

Brad O’Neill
CEO, TechValidate Software

Thanks for your response. I agree with your points, my basic concern was that people not think that this is the “answer” to content development. I think it could be a great way to augment related content – per your examples.

I also agree that the information is hard to get and time intensive to collect, and even more so to use, given some customer’s approval process. Using unnamed customers not only helps to solve that problem, but contribute great intelligence that will help marketers become even more relevant in their communications with prospects.

Ardath

I agree with you that this type of content is in no way equivalent to a more extensive white paper or research report. (In fairness to TechValidate, the sample content included in the post is not the only format they offer.)

However, I also believe quite strongly that there is absolutely a role for this type of content in demand generation and lead nurturing. Not every offer, after all, has to be the complete story, or the one piece of information a prospect would need in order to decide whether or not to invest in a particular solution. Additionally, this kind of real-world customer data is extremely hard to come by, for the reasons stated in the post. Granted, I write this without having much experience to date with the TechValidate content, but for me, the applications that jump most quickly to mind are:

* enabling vertical segmentation in lead nurturing tracks
* enabling more effective vertical campaigns in general
* “beefing up” demand generation offers by complementing white papers, Webinars, and other self-authored content with real-world, third party data
* providing the foundation for other, more informational content (for example, taking the data and wrapping it in analysis and commentary to create a white paper)

Does this mean you’ll never have to write a piece of marketing content again? No, not by a long stretch. But to your last point, for some companies it could help streamline the content creation process considerably, and more importantly, increase the effectiveness of demand generation and lead nurturing initiatives.

Howard

This said, I think the service could contribute the background around which “compelling” content is developed.

The problem I see is that there’s no way for a prospect to equate this information to their situation. There’s no “how,” no real world situation that helps a prospect visualize themselves accomplishing the outcomes stated below. And, without that supporting information, those benefits look a bit too good to believe because an 80% improvement means nothing without a benchmark to compare it to, for example.

But it’s an interesting idea that could streamline the content creation process, reducing the time and effort it takes to do so.