Stop paying the price for unused content
All marketing gurus preach that relevant content is key to master end-to-end customer experiences. Content is king, they say. And so we find ourselves hitting the keyboard each day to build up what eventually becomes a flood of digital content. We create content strategies and use pricy marketing tools. Marketing departments produce content in abundance, simply because it’s part of their KPIs. However, more than often, the sales team doesn’t provide feedback to new content, making the marketing team uninformed about whether their content is answering customers’ questions. Does it generate value for the sales team? In a B2B research, SiriusDecision Inc found that 70% of content ends up being unused. Marketers’ hard work isn’t paying off.
When marketing and sales work in silos, no one wins
According to the EMI Industry Intelligence Report, during an average week, technology sales professionals spend 8 hours developing client presentations, 5 hours looking for marketing collateral, and 4 hours searching for customer information outside the organization. Over the course of a year, 17 hours weekly equals a total time-waste of 100 sales days.
If sales professionals always find themselves re-creating content because 1) they can’t find what they need when they need it 2) there is too much to choose from, so they simply give up - you need to acknowledge the disconnect between your aspirations and reality, and start looking for alternative methods.
Struggling in searching for content is not only cost-heavy and a waste of internal resources in terms of reproduction of content, it’s damaging the bottom line by dragging the closing phase endlessly or making the sales not happen at all. Every second with a customer counts. When a sales professional loses an hour searching for content, they have an hour less for closing the deal. Imagine how many sales they could close during 100 days.
Organizations who allocate budget and effort into content creation, without clear use scenarios and distribution in mind, are the ones who end up paying the price for unused content. Your time is valuable, so make it count.
Don’t reinvent the wheel – use what you already have
Every touchpoint serves a purpose. To show the direction for your content, you must illustrate where each blogpost, video, whitepaper and infographic belongs in the customer journey of discovering, engaging, purchasing, and ultimately becoming a brand ambassador. Start by asking your sales team which type of information their prospects are seeking before the initial contact, after a demo, and when evaluating the product. Your sales team has all the insights into what’s important for customers – use it to turn content flood into content intelligence. Then, when your content is systemized, your sales team will have a much better understanding of what's in front of them.
Make it available anywhere and from any device
Once you have put an end to content redundancy, the next step is to enable the sales team to find what they need when they need it - in a matter of seconds. This is where digital asset management (DAM) software proves itself as a business-critical resource for professional management of digital content. DAM empowers marketers to upload, manage, search, share on multiple channels and reuse all types of digital content from one place. With automated and optimized processes you can:
Tag digital files (making search a fast experience).
Enable rights management (to ensure only the right people can find and get access to your content).
Create collections (a group of files to select and send to specific people).
Share content across channels simultaneously.
The sales team can more effectively engage with leads and serve relevant and timely content on the go, on any device. Ultimately, closing better sales and increasing the business revenue.
By working more intelligently and gaining insight into content usage, while enabling the sales team to quickly access the right content from a unified platform at the right time, you as a marketer can gain confidence in knowing that your resources are not wasted. You will get a faster time-to-market, increase operational efficiency in sales and marketing, and ensure faster lead management. And of course, better results to show to the upper management.
View other resources here.
Let us show you the new digital path
Together we can embark on a journey and digitally transform your company.