In a new report, top advisory firm Forrester Research emphasized the importance of impacting and measuring sales efficiency for B2B content marketers. The report, “Make Sales Efficiency A Key Addition To Your B2B Content Marketing Metrics” quoted top agencies, vendors and marketers, including Mediafly, on demonstrating positive business outcomes to stakeholders.
Finding that marketers struggle with translating metrics into actionable insight, Laura Ramos and Ryan Skinner explore how marketers can show the impact of content on their business with a series of recommendations.
Challenge of Measuring Content Marketing Impact
According to Forrester, marketers aren’t confident in their ability to measure content performance in such a way that shows bottom line impact, and they have a tough time measuring the value that that content delivers.
Those challenges express themselves in a few ways, including:
- Content repurposed and stretched across too many platforms and devices
- Too much focus on clicks versus long-term value
- Difficulty in calculating the ROI of individual pieces of content
- Understanding why users are viewing certain content over others
Connecting Content, Marketing and Sales Efficiency
Forrester has found that only 34% of surveyed B2B marketers named enabling deal-closing as a top objective. Mediafly Vice President of Marketing, Melissa Andrews, elaborated in the Forrester report: “Marketing content and campaigns tend to focus on the early part of the buyer’s decision-making, leaving sales to close the gap between interest and purchase on their own. Measuring not only how leads get passed to sales, but how well sales employs contextual content to continue the conversation is key to reinforcing sales and marketing alignment and empowering your sales force.”
Sales efficiency (content’s effect on conversations salespeople have with prospects) is one of the four dimensions that marketers need to measure and align in order to find the value in their content. The other three dimensions are:
- Content Performance: How content is consumed, interacted with and reproduced
- Audience Performance: The relationships that customers have with content
- Business Performance: Content’s effect on the bottom line
While there’s no simple formula for showing marketing content’s ROI, marketers do need to point to clear business benefits or they won’t get the support they need for additional investment. The best B2B marketers will be able to show the downstream value, and some metrics Forrester suggests to show that value include:
- Revenue generated through sales assisted by content
- Running polls, panels and conducting customer research
- Which types of content engage more valuable customers
Content’s sales efficiency can be tracked in a few major ways. The first is to maintain the same tone and messaging in your B2B marketing campaigns and sales content that salespeople use, tracking what works best in sales meetings. The tool that salespeople use for their in-person customer interactions should help “manage content activities to conduct effective sales meetings,” empowering them to find the right content at the right time. By carrying messaging and tone throughout the entire sales cycle, marketers can foster collaboration with sales, giving sales more fulfilling interactions with prospects, while improving the quality of the content they provide.
Marketers can not only show content’s ROI through measurement across these multiple dimensions, but can also find the right format, topic, channel and length for every piece of content, improving their content at every turn.
Forrester clients can check out the full report and all of its findings on Forrester’s website (non-clients can purchase it). To see how Mediafly connects marketing to sales efficiency, download our demo app, My SalesKit, today!
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