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It’s true. You’d never take a trip without a roadmap, so why tackle content without one? In their study of B2B Content Marketing, the Content Marketing Institute proved something we’ve known all along: a documented content strategy is non-negotiable.
While this might seem obvious, only 44% of B2B marketers report having one. It might be possible to scrape by without a documented strategy, but we wouldn’t recommend it. Companies without this kind of roadmap are not experiencing the true impact of quality content. A documented strategy keeps content marketing effective in the midst of busy days and deadlines. According to this study, an overwhelming 84% of marketers who consider themselves ineffective at content marketing have no strategic roadmap of their own.
Here are three reasons your company needs content strategy:
1. New ideas are never a challenge.
No surprise here, the biggest content marketing challenge reported was lack of time. 69% percent of those surveyed said they don’t have time to generate great content on a regular basis. With a content strategy, creating material under deadlines is much easier; you have an arsenal of topics at your disposal. Those touch points were formed with specific outcomes in mind, tailored to your target and best of all, you’ll never feel pressed to start from scratch on a day that doesn’t go as planned.
2. It keeps your team organized and focused.
B2B content marketing is on the rise. 58% percent of marketers plan to increase their content budgets in 2014, and 73% of marketers say they are producing more content than last year – with more growth expected in coming months. Having a roadmap in hand leaves you prepared. Your entire team will know the why and how behind every piece of content produced. A documented strategy will keep the quality of daily content high, leaving you free to manage higher level things like increasing volume and budget.
3. Social media stays in check.
This study proves that while B2B marketers are still increasing social media usage each year, they are not convinced of its impact on the bottom line. A content strategy helps your team cope with pressure to spend seemingly endless amounts of time on social channels. It outlines which social channels to utilize, what to post and how often to do it — keeping efficiency up and effectiveness high.
Does your company have a documented content strategy?
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Every marketer knows that quality content is necessary for success, but that doesn’t make it easy. Content marketing and content strategy are frequently discussed – but how often are they understood?
Consistent, valuable content is hard to maintain, and it poses lots of questions.
How much is too much? Is content curation acceptable? How do I create enough? Do I need a strategy? Who at my company should be involved? How do I build a content team? Does mobile affect content? How do I cut through the noise? How do I keep up with the demands social media?
These questions have crossed the minds of every marketer at some point.
In the digital age, there’s no shortage of content. With so much of it being thrown at us daily, it is more important than ever to make sure yours provides value. It should create meaning and stimulate your community.
In the eyes of potential customers, you’re only as good as the content you create.
Content marketing is no walk in the park. When it’s done well, it has the power to grow clients’ businesses and directly impact their bottom line. This month, we’re going to teach you to do it yourself.
Stop by next week for more insight into our content marketing creation process. We’ll start with the most critical piece: the roadmap.
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If you’re considering an integrated sales-marketing team, there are many hoops to jump through before you arrive. Unless you’re a startup, you’ll probably have to work with what you have. Not every leader has the freedom to build from the bottom up. Though change might not happen overnight, there are things you can do to encourage a future of sales-marketing alignment.
Here are three ways to lead your company there:
Develop joint action points
First things first, determine where your sales and marketing teams already overlap, and use that information to streamline existing practice. If both teams are touching leads at similar points in the sales cycle, allow one to take charge and interact with buyers on a deeper level. Really examine your customers’ habits and needs as you make a plan to move forward, and document everything – careful records and prioritizing accurate data really helps.
Share the data
Transparent metrics reporting is one of the fastest ways to encourage sales-marketing alignment. Develop a joint data system that tracks handoffs, conversion and revenue, and share it widely among your employees. Both sides will better understand each other, and slowly the departments will begin to work in a more integrated way.
Onboard for the future
If you’re working with existing employees, be sure you’re prepared for the moment you do get to hire a new team member. Go ahead and develop an onboarding system that will arm new hires with a joint mindset from the start. Beginner employees should be trained in both sales and marketing and equipped with strategies for how the two work side-by-side.
We hope these tips make sales-marketing alignment more attainable for even the most established sales and marketing teams. Today’s customer demands dynamic understanding and service, and the new, integrated sales team is ready to provide exactly that.
What steps have you taken towards sales-marketing alignment? Has it paid off?
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Today’s guest post comes to you from Dave Cannon, Vice President of Interactive Services at Movéo.
Sales and marketing alignment is not that hard.
It just takes commitment, cooperation and communication.
There’s no denying that alignment between marketing and sales creates unparalleled opportunities for improving business performance. When marketing and sales teams work together, they can increase productivity, generate greater returns and drive business growth. Given that, one would think the two would always work closely together, but the reality is that quite often, they don’t.
The age-old issue is that marketing believes it is feeding sales what it needs in the way of qualified leads and targeted campaigns. However, sales often says that most of the leads they receive are unqualified, and that marketing fails to address the real pain points of the customers.
There are a lot of tools on the market today — from marketing automation platforms to CRM — that promise to bridge the divide and bring marketing and sales closer together. The reality, however, is that there are no silver bullets and all the automation, intelligence and plug-and-play tools available are not going to affect the kind of change necessary to solve this issue. To turn “the dream” of sales and marketing alignment into reality, the teams must commit, cooperate and communicate.
The first key is commitment.
Sales and Marketing must begin by committing to working together. Without a commitment, from both sides, the teams will eventually drift apart, fall back into their old ways and be right back where they started — facing the same issues all over again. As with life, successful relationships take commitment.
The second key is cooperation.
The teams must realize the value that both sides bring to the table and that they are working together towards a common goal. They must be willing to put forth the effort necessary to work through the critical processes of defining lead profiles and targets, determining lead scoring models and management processes, and developing cultivation campaigns. The teams must get on the same page with all of these initiatives.
The third and final key is communication.
Sales and marketing must establish clear lines and processes for communication. There will be hits and misses along the way, but the teams must understand and embrace iteration and optimization. Sales should invite key marketing members to key sales meetings and vice versa. The two teams should meet to regularly review outcomes, discuss performance and apply what they’ve learned to improve marketing and sales tools, lead performance, lead scoring, lead quality, etc.
Sales and marketing alignment is critical to organizational success. Commitment, cooperation and communication are key to getting both departments on the same page and moving your business to new levels of top-line growth.
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Today’s customer is an intimidating breed. Thanks to the internet, they know more about products than ever before, and they’re almost always influenced by easy-to-find online reviews. They don’t talk to salespeople until late in the sales cycle, and at that point, they’ve often already made a decision. Their knowledge and independence makes the modern customer challenging for salespeople and marketers alike.
We think sales-marketing alignment is the answer, and here’s why:
Complete Picture of Customer Journey
Today’s complex customer is hard to keep up with. Salespeople understand their motives and needs, because they’ve spent time in conversation over social media, email or the phone – they’ve got the human perspective down. Marketers bring science to the table by sharing what web pages customers visit, what content they like and what drives their internet browsing – actions speak louder than words. Neither team can fully understand a customer with their given set of data, but together, they complete the puzzle.
Packs the Biggest Punch
After working together to understand the customer from every angle, combined sales-marketing teams have the power to develop strategies that really work. Again, the salespeople provide the personal connection, while the marketers meet them in the middle with creative content, useful data and keywords. A hybrid team has the power to sell effectively to the customer of the digital age – and look towards the future.
Makes Your Brand Relatable
No matter how complex your B2B product is, today’s customer expects a friendly, relatable brand voice. Social media and the internet are partly to blame, but this can work in your favor. Some B2B companies that used to feel inaccessible are now thriving in customer relations, thanks to the internet. Aligned sales-marketing teams are best equipped to greet customers with a friendly – yet no less strategic – voice.
Do you combine sales and marketing insight to better understand your customers?
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It’s no secret to B2B marketers that mastering social media is a must. We even dedicated our blog entirely to useful social tactics last month. But amidst the hype, this study from eMarketer reminds us that linking social media to revenue is still difficult. While social has proven great for collecting leads, marketers can’t measure exactly how it helps close the sale.
Sales-marketing alignment is the most effective approach to closing sales with social.
By approaching social media with combined sales and marketing insight, companies can better understand its effect on the bottom line. Salespeople have innate customer knowledge that provides information about where the sales cycle goes after a lead enters from a social network. To complement that, marketers understand how to gain leads initially on social platforms, and they’re experts on analyzing data and using it strategically. Combining these perspectives paves the way for true social optimization – and a deeper understanding of how social leads to sales.
Sales-marketing alignment might pave the way to better data.
Though it doesn’t solve the problem of measuring social’s impact on closing sales, an integrated team might lead to a better understanding of how social generates revenue. Linking the marketers’ social lead generation to the sales team’s nurturing in one cohesive unit is useful. By streamlining and clarifying the process, your company may very well gain a more accurate, complete picture of how social can lead to the point of sale. Social media will certainly hold its place as a favorite top-of-funnel marketing tactic, but eventually, attributing sales to social might get easier. An integrated team will leave you ready.
How do you combine sales and marketing in your social strategy?
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We’ve been talking about how to integrate sales and marketing teams, and this week, we’d like to shed some light on how it will optimize your company. According to MarketingProfs, organizations with tightly aligned sales and marketing strategies had 36% higher customer retention rates and achieved 38% higher conversion rates – percentages high enough to get everyone’s attention. Sales-marketing integration generates proven success in the here and now, and even better, it paves the way for the future.
Making the decision to integrate your teams presents many challenges, but here are two benefits that make it worth the effort, leaving you positioned for great things down the road:
Your company will be competitive for today’s leading talent.
The smartest up-and-coming marketing and sales professionals consider themselves experts in digital community and social strategy. They consider social media marketing and customer service to be inseparable, and they can use them effectively for sales in any arena. By proving your company is facing the future with a marketing-savvy sales team, you’ll be in a position to recruit the best of the best.
Your company will understand marketing’s impact on the bottom line.
In the world of complex B2B sales cycles, it can be difficult to measure the return on marketing investment. By aligning your marketing data with sales, you link each marketing dollar directly to the bottom line. There’s no better way to prove the value of your work, and you might find that marketing insight becomes more valued at your company as part of the whole. Manage your data carefully to find out exactly where you had the biggest impact, and be ready to use it to determine future investments. Remember that at the end of the day, everyone’s biggest interest is closing the deal.
Are you working towards sales-marketing alignment?
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As you work to bridge the gap between your marketing and sales teams, you simply can’t forget about data. In fact, if your company suffers from the great sales-marketing divide, metrics might be the missing link.
We touched on this Monday, but today we’ll elaborate. Numbers and data link marketing to successful sales, and they make the relationship between the two groups more productive and positive than ever.
Data is equally valuable to both teams.
Understanding data from Google Analytics serves more people in your company than just the marketers. They need customer data to shape content and strategy, but sales teams need data to understand the value of the website and the information it provides. They can determine how to best nurture leads by better understanding their habits and interests.
Understand who visits your site and why.
If your marketing and sales teams are divided, chances are that your salesforce doesn’t understand who is visiting the website and why. Knowing what company a visitor works for gives a B2B salesperson the chance to connect with that company’s employees on LinkedIn or to reach out by email. Understanding what content a visitor looks at on the site helps sales teams match product to needs and sell effectively. Likewise, gathering information from the sales team after they’ve closed the deal helps marketers create content that works.
Encourage both sides to share the wealth!
After you’ve shared marketing analytics with your sales team, make it an integrated endeavor. Have the sales team advise your marketers on how leads behave at the end of the sales cycle. Share marketing data in return, along with perspectives on making it useful. Marketers can probably suggest ways to put closing the sale in the hands of science rather than luck – and that works for everyone.
Do you make data an integrated topic for your company?
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Today is about the question every B2B sales team is trying to answer. It’s a tough one, but marketing insight shows companies the way to move forward.
What do you think – is cold calling dead?
Cold calling may seem more dated every day, but it holds a respected place in the B2B world. With a marketing perspective, sales teams can better understand how to make the most of cold calls within the evolving landscape. While phone conversations are dwindling, digital communication is at an all-time high. In our opinion, social media is the new cold call and we’re going to help you make that point to your team today.
Your salespeople should spend time developing their online seller personas
Employees often wonder how much social media at work is acceptable. Make sure your sales team knows to establish themselves on Twitter and LinkedIn as industry leaders. They should share social content that demonstrates thought leadership and insinuates they have the answers. They should be friendly and conversational with prospects, who will eventually look to your products to learn more.
Set benchmarks for daily social outreach
To successfully replace cold calls with social media outreach, salespeople should have a required number of outreach tweets and emails to conduct per day. Customers love hearing from brands online – it makes them more human, more personal personal and leaves them more likely to make a purchase.
Engage prospects on the #1 B2B social network
As we’ve mentioned before, LinkedIn is the B2B marketer’s perfect match. It allows highly technical communities to develop and gives niche B2B groups a place to connect. Encourage B2B salespeople to think like marketers and get on LinkedIn for social outreach. Private messages and group interaction are both effective ways to build relationships.
Cold calls might be dying, but social outreach is the answer. Good luck!
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As we continue to explore the value of the new sales team, or sales marketing alignment, let’s get practical. Some companies are not in a position to hire new people just to build a fully integrated team. In fact, some companies will find it difficult to make structural changes at all.
That doesn’t mean sales marketing alignment won’t work for you.
Even if you don’t create a team of employees that is equally adept in sales and marketing, give both groups the information they need to work together. As a marketing leader, it’s up to you to provide your sales team with the tools they need to help you reach your goals. This co-working will result in greater success for both teams.
Here’s how to do it:
Create a marketing toolbook. It’s that easy. Make a short, digestible document that tells your company’s salesforce the direct ways that marketing impacts sales, and vice versa. It should include key marketing goals, terms and strategies that can be applied to sales. Don’t shy away from numbers, either. Sharing data and analytics with your salesforce will help them understand who visits your website and why, and how to make the most of it from a sales perspective.
Your salespeople are your brand voice…literally.
A marketing toolbook will be worth the effort, because your salespeople will better understand your target and convert more sales with a bit of marketing insight. Be sure to outline what they need to know when it comes to life cycle, marketing-driven conversation prompts and brand voice. Soon, you’ll see the brand messaging strategy you worked so hard to create come to life. Your sales team will personify and deliver it in real ways to customers every day.
Aligned sales and marketing strategies are a proven success. Share your success stories with us below!
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