#1 Misaligned Content
For most companies, the marketing team generates all of the brand messaging and written content that is used throughout the sales cycle. Most content marketers identify heavily with the top of the sales cycle, like the generation of brand awareness. Once they’ve piqued a customer’s interest, they pass the baton to the salespeople, who then engage in back-and-forth with customers.
Because the marketing team does not engage with the rest of the sales cycle, they have a limited understanding of their prospects. Thus, in 2014, marketing content was tragically misaligned with sales conversations that actually unfolded with reps.
It would do marketing teams well to interface and learn from sales teams. Regular interactions and back-and-forth with sales can help the content writers to develop a better idea of the prospect audience. In the future, marketing content will act as an effective selling tool, accompanied with a sales enablement solution that spans the entirety of the sales cycle.
#2 Misplaced Content
The CMO Council stated that B2B salespeople spend about 40% of their workday preparing content for prospects. And, the marketing team spends the majority of their workday developing resources specifically so that reps don’t have to do this. That means that in 2014, chances are both your marketing and sales teams were wasting time on unused and inaccessible content.
There are two reasons for the inaccessibility snafu. One being lack of awareness of marketing content, and the other being limited access to marketing content. To remedy a lack of awareness, the marketing team needs to expose reps to the new content generation. Whether through a weekly-automated email, a sales enablement tool or another internal platform, new content needs to be pushed in front of the sales team. To remedy inaccessibility, marketing content needs to become available on all platforms, all devices, remotely, online and offline.
# 3 Misunderstood Content
In 2014, new marketing content initiatives abounded, but analytics initiatives were lackluster at best. Moving forward, sales enablement efforts in the content marketing field need to be measurable. And, monitoring revenue alone will not suffice.
Successful content marketers will employ a sales enablement solution to monitor closely which content resources are used, when and for what purpose. That way, the marketing team can learn where to expand content, what type of content to quit generating, and so on. In 2014, we learned that the unexamined content marketing initiative is not worth leading!
