Back in March 2023, I published The Future Of B2B Content, a report that I reflected upon in recent weeks when my colleague Jessie Johnson and I published a new report, In The Age Of AI, Marketers Need To Rethink Content Intelligence. In the first report, I proposed that marketers must take a fresh look at the nature of content, pointing out that, instead of thinking of content as a container of information that’s pushed to an audience, marketers must leverage content as data in an information exchange with customers and other stakeholders. In that report, I quoted Bence Gazdag, vice president, global marketing technology, at Oracle, which remains prescient: “Today, companies predict a customer journey; in the future, we’ll simply read their actual journey in the data — that’s the nirvana.” We may not have reached that nirvana, but with AI, it’s perhaps a whole lot closer!
In the new report, we define content intelligence as:
The capture, correlation, and analysis of data about content and its consumption to inform buyer and customer insights, drive activation, and deliver more meaningful performance measurement.
Content intelligence provides a data-based framework for marketers to harness predictive and generative AI to uncover buying signals and exchange value with buyers and customers through the differentiated experiences they demand. By doing so, marketers can transition from an often vicious cycle of ineffective content production to a virtuous cycle of continuously improving the customer experience with more personalized engagement. Andrew Bolton, chief customer officer at Knotch, put it this way: “Content measurement provides a metric, but content intelligence reveals the ‘why’ behind it — and, more importantly, guides and supports the actions to take based on that insight.”
Forrester’s Marketing Survey, 2024, shows that two-thirds of B2B marketing decision-makers said they would increase their marketing tech spending on AI content creation. Doing so will open a world of content intelligence opportunity. Generative AI helps B2B marketers leverage content as data by creating asset and interaction metadata that helps them detect, classify, and extract buying signals from buyer and customer interactions. Because AI features in content technologies can auto-tag content attributes, content intelligence is codified into asset creation and activation. Then, by effectively analyzing audience and interaction intent and scenarios, marketers can use content intelligence to activate and tailor content, adapt and optimize it, and deliver increasingly frictionless, personalized interactions.
We recommend that all marketers with B2B content responsibilities start putting the essential building blocks for content intelligence in place. Evaluate the current technology that is supporting the content lifecycle for content intelligence capabilities and include your digital engagement systems, revenue marketing platforms, and conversation automation systems. This will help solidify your genAI and overall content technologies roadmap to plot where such capabilities may be built into the solutions you plan to adopt.
Make 2025 the year you get smart on content intelligence!
Forrester Decisions clients: Access the report to learn more about harnessing content intelligence and reach out to your account manager to schedule guidance or inquiry sessions. Also, consider attending our Content Intelligence Workshop at Forrester’s B2B Summit North America 2025 this March 31–April 3 in Phoenix.
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