5 Ways to Transform Your Content From Adequate to Awesome

A 2017 study by Heinz and Highspot revealed a 15% gap between what marketing teams rated as the importance of content accessibility and their own team’s performance. Even more, an 11% gap was present between marketer’s expectations and delivery of producing content for sales. That means that while execs acknowledge the impact of making sure their sales reps can find the content they need, they’re falling short. 1) Align Sales and Marketing Sales and marketing teams don’t always play nice – especially when it comes to content. Sales reps demand marketing content as it relates to customer needs, but marketing is often one step away from the insights they need to truly deliver what works. Communication should always be open, and teams should always be sharing metrics into which sales pitches are working, how customers receive different types of content, and which content challenges each team faces every day. Once you have your plan set in place, take a step back and find out what’s currently working (and what’s not). Utilizing a tool that allows reps to find, share, and report on their individual successes can really go the extra mile for the whole team. More time for them means more time for deals. This statistic should be absolutely unacceptable in your business because it undoes all of the hard work implemented by each team and instead creates rework where your content really matters: When pitching it to customers.

Author: Rachel Davidson / Source: Marketing Insider Group

We’re overloaded with the message that “Content Is King,” but teams are still struggling with where to even start.

Some latch onto sales trends that only guide a short-term strategy, while others rely on new technologies to do the work for them. We’re constantly inundated with endless choices as to the way we create, pitch, and share content with today’s changing sales landscape. At the same time, many sales and marketing teams are quickly learning that more content options often mean more content problems.

The latest data says that marketing leaders recognize a huge need for content control. A 2017 study by Heinz and Highspot revealed a 15% gap between what marketing teams rated as the importance of content accessibility and their own team’s performance. Even more, an 11% gap was present between marketer’s expectations and delivery of producing content for sales.

That means that while execs acknowledge the impact of making sure their sales reps can find the content they need, they’re falling short. The bottom line is:

No matter how technology changes the type of content we’re producing, and how our customers engage with it, the value of that content shouldn’t be compromised.

To address these problems, I’m going to walk you through 5 steps to transform your content from adequate to awesome.

1) Align Sales and Marketing

Sales and marketing teams don’t always play nice – especially when it comes to content. Sales reps demand marketing content as it relates to customer needs, but marketing is often one step away from the insights they need to truly deliver what works. Whether or not their involvement and interest truly evaporate once they hand off content to sales, or whether sales doesn’t offer sufficient feedback from customers, marketing teams oftentimes lose the visibility they need to produce customized, compelling content.

Here are three ways you can begin to bridge the gap between sales and marketing and set your business up for success:

Define accountabilities and set goals. Decide what optimum outcome both teams are expecting from this alignment, as well as ownership in regards to roles and responsibilities. For example, sales could commit to quantifying customer engagement and using a modern content analytics tool to drive the strategy forward. Marketing can then focus on using those measurements to develop customer-centric content.