Content marketing adoption is pretty universal amongst marketers all over the world, yet as more marketers continue to adopt these strategies, a major challenge continues to permeate the B2B world as sales reps struggle to accommodate the explosive growth of digital content marketing.
Today we explore the trends and challenges of digital content marketing for the sales team.
What is Digital Content Marketing
With so many adopting digital content marketing you would think it wouldn’t need defining, but the definition has evolved over the years.
In 2013, content marketing was defined as the “creation and distribution of educational and/or compelling content in multiple media formats to attract and/or retain customers.” – 93% stated they use content marketing at that time.
In 2014, this changed to, “A strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience—and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.” – 86% stated they use content marketing at that time.
That definition carried over to 2015 by the team at The Content Marketing Institute (CMI), and the percentage has risen to 88%.
Yet some confusion around the terms remains, and up to 77% of the least effective content marketing teams lack clarity around the definition (Source: Content Marketing Institute, 2015).
Meanwhile, the percentage of marketers who stated they are “effective” at content marketing actually declined in 2015 to 30%, from 38% the year before.
(Image Source: Content Marketing Institute, 2015)
If you’re hung up on the terms, CMI put out this take on three content-like terms that tend to cause some confusion.
The Problem with Content Marketing for Sales Reps
Digital content marketing creation tends to evolve into digital sales content creation. Sales content and marketing content both serve empowered buyers by allowing them to progress their own decision journey and interact with the company/sales reps on their own time.
However, 60-70% of B2B sales content is never used (Source: Sirius Decision, 2014), and instead sits on warehouses collecting dust, creating friction, and drainig budgets. Let's examine why:
Sales Reps Don’t Like Content Marketing,
The problem is, with so many businesses creating content and so few believing they do it effectively, we tend to see challenges such as these:
Top Reasons why Sales Doesn’t Use Content from Marketing
- 67% - It’s too generic;
- 40% - Content isn’t relevant to the buyer;
- 36% - Prefer to make their own; and
- 20% - Content is out of date. (Source: Firebrick Consulting, 2012)
Interestingly, the reasons that buyers don’t like marketing content are similar to those of sales reps,
- The content overhypes the company and the product/service;
- The content is overly technical and is thus not useful for the inquisitive buyer;
- The content is blatantly self-serving (selling) and/or lacks objectivity; and
- The content lacks depth and/or is tailored to no specific buyer. (Source: Zambito, T. 2013)
Exact numbers were harder to find for buyer perception, but as few as 9% of buyers felt vendor content marketing was among their most trusted sources (Source: CMO Council, 2013).
In our joint demand metric study last year we found that when marketing teams don’t collaborate with sales teams, a majority believe their content is effective for generating leads, but very few felt it was strong for closing. Meanwhile, when marketing teams collaborate with sales teams, a majority felt their content was effective for closing. We created this infographic to help illustrate the situation.
Sales Reps Can’t Manage Content Marketing,
While marketers struggle to define and implement an effective content marketing strategy, sales reps are left on the receiving end of ever increasing volume, variety, and velocity of digital sales content that only adds friction to a stagnating sales process.
Only 9% of sales reps have a dedicated digital content management system that sorts content into an impulse consumable and search-friendly platform. The remaining 90% of sales reps use content management strategies that make finding the right content a chance driven ordeal at best.
Content Marketing is Making Sales Reps look Bad,
Poor or uncoordinated content marketing creation at the top of the sales funnel results in content marketing creation that can’t support selling near the bottom of the sales funnel and only deteriorates the value of a sales rep.
Only 21% of sales reps indicated that they have anything relevant to share with buyers. Buyers contact sales reps when they’re ready to make a purchase decision and expect sales reps to continue a discussion based on the knowledge (digital content) already consumed along the decision journey.
When sellers use content that doesn’t add value towards the end of the sales funnel, we start to see things like:
- Only 62% of sales reps deemed as “knowledgeable” about their own products;
- 24% of sales reps were deemed as knowledgeable about the buyers specific business;
- 23% of sales reps can relate to a buyer’s role and responsibility in an organization; and
- 22% of sales reps understand the buyer’s issues and are able to position themselves in a role where they can actually help.
Selling Time is Declining
Sales reps are spending more time searching for content, more time researching a smarter buyer, more time creating their own content, and less time actually selling.
In 1998 a study found that sellers spent 47% of their day in direct selling activities, by 2013 that number declined sharply to 35% (Source: ROInnovation, 2014). A 2015 suggested a number as low as 23% of a day spent selling to new clients (Source: Marketwired, 2015).
This isn’t to suggest to that content marketing is bad for sales, as best in class marketing and sales teams with effective sales and marketing alignment; service level agreements (SLA) and appropriate technology integrations along the entire sales and marketing value chain tend to see incredible ROI and excellent feelings about the value of content marketing for the sales process.
Are you seeing these challenges from content marketing creation? Request a demo and let us show you how easy it can be to optimize digital sales content for the needs and challenges of your sales process.
What do Sales Teams Need from Content Marketing to be Successful
In our next post we’ll explain the key needs that sales reps and sales managers have from content marketing creation, and how you can get your team there. Subscribe to our mailing list of an immediate update upon release. A hyperlink will be added here.
