It’s the scourge of effective marketing: content that caters to everyone and thus caters to no one. It’s plain old vanilla – ubiquitous, bland, and the default choice when you don’t really know what people want or care about and can’t be bothered to find out.

When you follow a storytelling approach informed by data, it’s possible to be much more specific, and thus relevant, to your customers’ needs and interests. Instead of plain old vanilla, it’s goat cheese marionberry habañero. Instead of just a chocolate bar, it’s Tony’s Chocolonely Dark Pecan Coconut. Or, instead of yet another white paper about the virtues of a hybrid cloud environment, it’s a personalized video or peer-to-peer roundtable hosted by CIOs for CIOs.

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Like other large, global B2B companies, BMC Software faces some gnarly content challenges, from the need to tell a consistent brand story across multiple business units to the need to deliver information customers need to help them evaluate, buy, and use BMC’s products.

In 2014, BMC worked with digital experience agency Connective DX on a global website relaunch with the goal of increasing pipeline revenue that could be attributed to marketing via BMC.com. Instead of jumping into design using lorem ipsum text and placeholder graphics, the team put content first, focusing on the information customers needed to engage and move toward purchase. Continue Reading