The Content Void: Are Your Internal Teams Using Your Content?

5 minute read

Upland Admin

It happens time and time again: you create awesome content, it gets shared once, and then disappears forever into the content vacuum of death. Ok, maybe that’s a little dramatic, but the reality is you work hard to create great content, and if your internal teams aren’t using it, that hurts. 

And, to add insult to injury, we’ve got the stats to prove it. 91% of B2B marketers use marketing content, but 65% of the content created goes unused

Double burn. 

Whether it be an eBook, a SlideShare presentation, a webinar, or an infographic, the content you create is a valuable business asset that should work to support your internal stakeholders. Too much time and effort is put into creating compelling content to let it fall by the wayside and go unused.

Think about the content you share externally. When you publish a blog post, it goes onto your blog—every single time. Ideally, you are also distributing that content via other channels that your audience is already engaging in, but your blog is the repository that houses every post you’ve ever published. If a customer is looking for a topic that was covered a few months ago, they know exactly how to look for it, and likely have a search function to get them there quicker.

You’ve invested time and money to make this search process simple and intuitive for your leads. You would never scatter content across the web like a trail of bread crumbs for your customer—so why is it happening to your internal teams?

Just like your external audiences, your internal teams need an intuitive system to find the content they need to do their jobs. If you don’t have a system in place that makes your content accessible, relevant, and trackable, chances are your content isn’t being used—simply because no one can find it. 

So how do you know if your content is being shared and used effectively by your sales and support teams? To find out, ask yourself these three questions: 

1. Where Do Your Internal Teams Go to Find Your Content?

If you answered email, take a deep breath. You’re not alone. 

Not knowing where to store all of your content is a common problem that a lot of marketers face. You know the content exists, but you don’t remember where—and neither does anyone else. Whether it’s lost in a thread of emails, buried in folders, or stored on the cloud, there often is no central, intuitive place to search.

Now think about your sales enablement, social, and demand gen teams. If it’s difficult for you to find content, how is your digital asset management system (or lack thereof) working for all of your stakeholders?

Successfully sharing content within your organization means having one central location that houses all of your digital assets. Using a content repository not only makes digital asset management easier, but it enables your sales and other customer-facing teams to easily access the content you create. 

2. Do Your Internal Teams Know How and When to Use Your Content?

Unlike a blog post that gets pushed to a broader audience, sales and customer success teams use content to serve the needs of very specific people that they are communicating with one-on-one, at highly specific stages within the sales funnel. Often, sales uses content to show explicit value and overcome particular objections a potential customer may have. As such, your content is only a true asset to your internal teams when it’s relevant to the exact person it’s being delivered to, and targeted within a specific sales stage. 

If your content isn’t searchable by category, sales stage, or persona, then it’s likely not easy for the people in your organization to find the right content they need. Often, this bottleneck translates into new content being created ad hoc and thus, duplicated efforts.

To create an internal content repository that is functional, stakeholders need to be able to search and filter according to who they are communicating with, the sales stage they are in, and any other parameter that makes sense for your business. 

3. Do You Know Which Content Is Working, and Which Isn’t? 

One of the biggest hurdles marketers face is tracking the performance of their content. While most marketers are tracking top-of-funnel metrics like clicks, shares, and downloads, few are tracking how their content is being utilized internally

Simply put, content marketers need to know if their internal teams are using their content or not. Just like you need to know if your external assets are generating leads, it’s critical that marketers know if the content they are creating is supporting their internal teams. Otherwise, you’re living in a dark hole of content generation and run the risk of ignoring the needs of prospects that are further down the sales funnel. 

Without metrics to track internal use, it’s nearly impossible to know if what you’re creating is actually relevant to your key stakeholders, let alone optimizing existing content for future use.  And, if you’re not optimizing your content for re-purposing future assets, you’re likely wasting valuable time and money. 

It’s time to get out of email hell, clean up the bread crumbs, and create an internal content repository that is easy for all of your internal stakeholders to find the content they need. With a central location to house all of your assets, you and your teams will be able to better align your goals and strategies, and ultimately be able to serve your customers better. 

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