It’s no secret that, over the last few weeks, everyone’s content consumption habits have skyrocketed. What else do we have to keep us busy when we aren’t allowed to leave the house? Either bingeing through episodes of a new show on Netflix or, if you are like my parents, finding new crime drama series through on-demand cable, the goal is the same: entertain (and distract) yourself with interesting content until we can get back to normal life.

Everyone is searching for more information to educate themselves and prepare for this new way of life. Businesses are also creating more content around how they can help companies survive in the ever-changing world we are living in, and their prospects and customers are eating it up. These people are looking for answers to problems that have never existed before.

We have seen across our customer base that leading enterprise and mid-market brands are creating content on topics that satisfy this need for their customers, including crisis management, how to work remotely, how to adapt, and the list goes on. There is no question that it’s relevant for today. The bigger question is, are you creating the right content for your audience to build trust with them in this time of uncertainty? And are they actually consuming it?

We’ve noticed that many of our customers are building that trust with their customers, with content consumption increasing 15% in March over last year alone. And not only that, those viewers are coming back for more and more content each week, and engaging longer than in previous months.

This increase in engagement isn’t just with crisis subject matter content. It’s with all content. Content that drives relationships with prospects and customers alike, not only educating them on how to survive today, but how to flourish thereafter. Are you being that trusted source for your customers?

PathFactory can help you better understand the trending topics of your content, as noted above the highest trending topics since the pandemic started have been related to that very theme. Such insights can help direct what content you are surfacing to your audience when they are taking the time to engage with your content.

How Allocadia used PathFactory to measure real-time results

Caitlin Ridge, Director of Corporate Marketing at marketing performance management software company Allocadia, recognized that marketers needed help understanding how they could rapidly shift marketing investments to adjust to the shifting economic climate caused by COVID-19. Her team started creating useful, tactical content to support customers and then tweaked it for broader marketing audiences who were facing the same challenges.

Using Path Analytics, she identified that there was a 3.5X increase in time spent reading Allocadia’s COVID-19 related content compared to other topics, and a 2X increase in the number of people viewing content overall from early-to-mid March.

A new blog post titled Best Practices for Marketing Budget Agility During Crisis & Disruption had already become one of their most popular pieces of content, despite the fact that it had been published less than two weeks prior. In fact, people were spending an average of an average of 4 minutes and 29 seconds (!) reading it. This data gave her the confidence to know that their content was actually helping marketers, and informed future content plans.

Don’t miss Caitlin’s case study session at Forrester SiriusDecisions Summit next week: How Allocadia uses engagement data to build a better buyer’s journey

Across PathFactory’s customer base, content is more important than ever – for each visitor who’s just trying to figure out how to do their job in this new reality, as well as for businesses. Luckily, they can understand that engagement better than ever before thanks to PathFactory’s content consumption data. Time spent on that content was up nearly 10% in March and we expect that may continue climbing through April and May.

In an all-digital world, encouraging your prospects and customers to engage with content is more important than ever, and being a trusted source of information through this challenging time will no doubt help your business not just survive but thrive.

P.S. Do you think Carole Baskin killed her husband?! Leave your theories in the comments below. I NEED to know what you think.