When bad things happen to good marketers

You've probably seen the stats:

Content marketing gets three times more leads than paid search advertising, according to the Content Marketing Institute Yet, more than 90% of content receives no traffic from Google, according to Ahrefs. 

At a high level, content marketing can fail to drive sales and growth for a variety of reasons. Two most important reasons are:

- No documented content marketing strategy 

- Misalignment between marketing and sales

From the dawn of marketing, we've been taught that the holy grail is to put the right content in front of the right people at the right time. That was simpler back in the days of mass media, when most marketing happened in radio, TV, magazines and newspapers. Today's customer journey looks more like this:

And in B2B marketing in particular, the number of people involved in purchase decisions keeps growing. Thats why it's more important than ever that sales and marketing work together to create an effective content strategy. Although the customer journey above looks nothing like a funnel, the funnel stages are still helpful to put the right content in the right buyer stage.

What content works best at what stage? There's no easy answer for that. Depends on your organization's audience, goals, resources and more. But when sales and marketing teams collaborate on content, magic can happen.

When there's no agreed-upon definition of the strategy, mission, or outcomes between marketing and sales, there are missed opportunities. Another big-time strategy fail occurs when content is focused on products and sales, rather than customer needs. 

When Content Marketing Meets Sales Enablement: Download the eBook here.

Creating sales-aligned marketing messages

The bottom line is the sales and marketing working together can go faster, farther. When content is relevant to the audience, demonstrates clear value, and positions your solution in positively in the current market, traction starts to happen. Sales and marketing can optimize content and brand messaging much faster working together than separately.

70% of the buyer’s journey is completed prior to any contact with sales, according to Salesforce Pardot. That stat alone should be enough to bring sales and marketing leaders together for a candid discussion about current processes and future potential in optimizing the customer journey.

Another point of marketing-sales agreement should be to acknowledge that early-stage prospects don’t care much about our products or services. They care about their own challenges and getting their questions answered quickly and easily.

So, what content goes where?

“Your top of the funnel content must be intellectually divorced from your product but emotionally wed to it.” – Joe Chernov, Pendo.io

Awareness stage

This audience is aware of their pain points, and actively seeking solutions. Some sales leaders call this audience “problem-aware” because they may not know what solutions are available, but the problems they face are significant enough to move them to action. Awareness-stage audiences may be simply trying to better understand their issues before evaluating solutions, so it’s too soon to push features and benefits. Popular awareness stage content assets include:

·        Blog posts eBooks

·        White papers

·        Quizzes and assessments

·        Explainer videos

·        Thought leadership articles by industry or sector

Pam Didner, a B2B strategist who has authored books on both content marketing and sales enablement, points out that content assets don’t always fit neatly in funnel stages. Blog posts can be appropriate for awareness, evaluation, and decision stages, depending on their content.

For example, posts that feature informative infographics or case studies may be helpful to new visitors as well as those in the decision stage. And with today’s larger decision-making units, shareable blog posts can help build consensus among buyers.

These assets should be syndicated or shared online, wherever your audience hangs out. Many times, the most visible and popular content that shows up on page one of Google search results can win over comparable or even higher-quality content. At this point, decisions must be made about content access. Gated content, accessible via a form fill, can help us gain insights about our audience, their preferences, and capture contact information.

Research from Demand Gen Report / ON24 showed that B2B buyers feel that vendors can improve content by:

• Limiting sales messages, 96%
• Supporting content with more data and research, 66%
• Adding more insights from industry leaders / analysts,
• 60% Making content easier to access with fewer form fills,
• 59% Not overloading content with too much copy, 51%

Clearly, there’s a risk of introducing sales messaging too early in the buyer’s journey, especially before a degree of trust is established. Another clear signal is that B2B buyers feel they have limited time to devote to reading and research, and whatever content we provide should be easily found, easily accessible, and easily consumed.

That means adding more content with strong visuals, infographics and video to the marketing mix when appropriate.

Evaluation stage

This audience is actively identifying and evaluating alternative solutions to their challenges. Unlike a simplistic sales funnel description, prospects often cycle back and forth from research to evaluation stages to identify solutions that might work and rule out those that do not seem to fit their needs.

In the evaluation stage, sales and marketing teams can begin to identify what kinds of content prospects find valuable, and which prospects show stronger buying intent. Content that’s high-value, relevant, and actionable is the core of every successful digital marketing program. Popular evaluation stage content marketing assets include:

• Case studies    
• Reviews and testimonials
• Product webinars
• ROI calculators
• Demo videos
• Data Sheets
• FAQs

Again, marketers should make sure sales teams are aware of what content supports the evaluation stage. Your marketing automation platform (MAP) should be set up to sync with your customer relationship management system (CRM) to provide lead scores that help to show which individual accounts and contacts are showing purchase intent.

While the lead scoring process used to be rather subjective and time-consuming, today’s predictive lead-scoring models are often powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and can make lead prioritization much faster and more accurate.

Decision stage

The beginning of this stage varies from company to company – and prospect to prospect. The decision stage continues the process of moving the focus from marketing to sales. Of course, your buyer journey should be flexible enough for prospects to progress at their own pace and decide when they have enough information to make an informed purchase decision. In more sophisticated organizations, this handoff is carefully executed and designed to create a great customer experience as well as successful deal. As the focus moves from marketing to sales, assets might include:

• Live demos and consultations     
• Free trials or low-cost introductory offers
• Cost estimates and projections ROI or cost-saving projections
• Data or spec sheets
• Demo videos
• Competitor analysis
• Onboarding and packages
• Comparison websites and research firms (Forrester, McKinsey, Gartner)

Content at this stage should help prospects feel comfortable that your solution is the one that best meets their needs, overcome objections, and set the stage for a smooth closing. In today’s SaaSand-platform world, the decision stage is really the beginning of a new journey towards ongoing customer success, engagement, and growth.

Your goal here is to make it easy to choose you. Decision-stage content should shift smoothly from educating prospects to highlighting the value of your solution to solve their problems and help them achieve their goals.  

This post contains content from When Content Marketing Meets Sales Enablement by By Charles Warnock and Bryan Ehrenfreund.