Content plays an enormous role in the B2B sales cycle. Marketers everywhere are employing a content strategy to reach buyers. Yet, many struggle with measuring their effectiveness.
Thanks to advancements in technology, marketing has become more data-driven over the years. When it comes to metrics, marketers tend to focus on top-of-the-funnel metrics like social shares, impressions, page views and the like. But do those marketing metrics tell the entire story? What about content leveraged by sales to move prospects along in the sales cycle? How do you know that content is helping sales tell a compelling story?
Measuring the effectiveness of content becomes more difficult as efforts move further down the sales funnel. With sales enablement, there isn’t one single metric to measure results. So how do marketers create effective, compelling content that helps fuel sales?
Here are some metrics and considerations to help you deliver sales content that rocks:
Content Relevancy and Timeliness
It’s a marketer’s job to develop content that impacts the company’s bottom line. In order to make this happen, content must be timely and relevant. It should also build trust. Relevant and timely content helps potential buyers see solutions to their challenges. Creating content that leverages subject matter expertise is a great way to increase your credibility within the marketplace and ultimately capture your buyer’s attention.
Content Utilization
Data around content utilization gives marketers insight into what messages are being conveyed to prospects. Important metrics include what content is being used, which salespeople are actually using content with their prospects, and at what part of the sales cycle. These metrics allow marketers to evaluate how content is impacting the sales cycle. Determining if the sales cycle is shorter when a certain piece of content is used is a simple measurement that can help validate or improve sales enablement efforts.
Content Distribution and Sharing
Quality content that isn’t accessible or leveraged properly has little reason to exist. So when it comes to effective sales enablement, nothing is more important than getting the right content into the hands of sales reps. Monitoring how content is being shared—internally with team members and externally with customers and prospects—helps you understand if your content is reaching your target audience. Sales enablement efforts are more effective when you can see things like what reps are downloading what content and how they are sharing it with prospects.
Impact of Messaging
It’s important to remember that customers don’t just buy products—they buy solutions and results. So your content should remain focused around those things. But how do you know if the information you are presenting is capturing your audience’s attention? Look beyond traditional digital marketing metrics and analyze how your sales reps are using your content. Seeing which pieces of content your sales reps are using most often, for example, is an easy way to determine what topics are capturing your audience’s attention.
Easily Maintained & Updated
Marketing can demonstrate their value by maintaining up-to-date content that reinforces the company’s brand. Content should not be static—it should be dynamic and flexible so sales reps can have interactive conversations and tell a compelling story. At the same time, content needs to be easily accessible so sales reps can find what they need at any time, from any location and device. Before distributing content, you should think about how often you’ll be making updates. You don’t want your sales reps frustrated by out of date content or a lack of access to the most recent version. Investment in a mobile content management and distribution solution can ease the burden of maintaining and delivering up-to-date content to the field.
How does your team approach content creation? What metrics matter to you?
Melissa Andrews
VP of Marketing
Melissa became a “Flyer” in 2013. As VP of Marketing, she drives B2B marketing efforts through a comprehensive and agile marketing strategy, allowing her to enhance brand awareness and grow inbound lead generation. She is a key liaison and expert on combining creative, technical, and effective sales-generating customer engagement strategies, which has helped solidify Mediafly as a technology leader. She has over twelve years of experience in results-oriented marketing, customer relationship management, customer communications strategy, and B2B sales operations support across a variety of industries. She joined Mediafly from Ariba (an SAP company). Melissa graduated Cum Laude from Rollins College with a B.A. in Organizational Communications and International Relations and holds a Master’s Certificate in Project Management.
Comments are closed.