The creation of a piece of content is really just the end of the beginning of its life.
Marketing teams work to create compelling content that will attract potential customers or generate awareness and buzz. More recently, this content has been the fuel for the marketing automation rocket designed to automatically engage prospects identified to be most interested and prioritize them for sales engagement.
Marketing automation platforms do a great job of removing manual and repetitive tasks as well as creating a new level of visibility into the actions that take place through the buyer journey (website visits, email campaign engagement, and collateral downloads), all with the goal of more efficient sales engagement and prioritized leads.
Sales automation is designed to make a sales team’s life easier by focusing on making the tasks that consume a salesperson’s day easier, more effective, or fully automated including contact management, forecasting, and deal status updates to name a few. All of this is focused on the promise of better performance, improved visibility, and more time to just “sell.”
But what about content?
More specifically, the business content used to drive prospect interest at the top of the funnel, facilitate the buyer journey through the middle and end of the funnel and, more importantly, that actually helps win deals? Companies spend huge amounts of time, effort, and money developing whitepapers, case studies, customer testimonials, data sheets, ROI calculators, and product demonstrations all designed to enable the funnel and drive revenue. How do you know it is working? Mostly you don’t. Anecdotally you will see what the sales team uses and it has often been modified from what marketing produced. This can produce cringe worthy moments of old messaging, the wrong logo, or errors due to “field enhancements.” Marketing can track downloads, web traffic, and social sharing, but these are activities related to consumption vs. results related to customer wins.
Closing the content loop between marketing, sales, and the customer is an essential part of a high performance company and lets you see just how effective all that created content is for your business. Contact us if you’d like us to tell you more or schedule a demo.
