With the rise of digital innovation in marketing, B2B buyers now go through about 57% of the purchasing process before ever talking to sales. Demand generation strategies need to follow suit by leveraging the “ace in the hole” of marketing content: accessible, relevant, and trackable marketing collateral.
Do you have a simple, central repository for marketing collateral that meets customer demand day or night and converts prospects into customers? If you’re a content-minded enterprise, this is a no-brainer.
Or is it?
Creating an organized system for your marketing collateral isn’t easy to tackle when there’s no clear system for organization, or when team members have diverse opinions on internal content management. However, mining the power of your best marketing collateral and using it strategically is essential for fueling demand generation.
Buyers go through about 57% of the purchasing process before ever talking to sales. (source)
“Buyers go through about 57% of the purchasing process before ever talking to sales.”
Don’t you want to give potential clients every possible reason to say yes? Providing them with timely marketing collateral is the way to make this happen—but at the critical hour, when you need that custom image immediately, you’re left scratching your head as to where to find it.
The result? You have to create it yourself even though it already exists somewhere—ultimately wasting your time and the time of those that created it in the first place.
To wrangle in your marketing collateral and create more viable and time sensitive opportunities to entice customers, create a logical, easy-to-use content repository.
Adapt Now or Sink into Hazy Content Chaos
The type of marketing collateral you are sharing, when potential clients see it, and how easy it is to access are all essential points of entry into the sales cycle, and your team needs to be organized and ready to act with confidence.
The first criteria for organizing marketing collateral is to find a way to streamline searchability that also makes sense for the people who use it most.
These questions can help you formulate a clear starting point:
1. How do the people in your organization search for marketing collateral?
By keyword? By a step in the sales cycle? Type of customer or product? Type of marketing, such as a whitepaper, eBook or customer review?
2. What challenges do your teams have in finding, accessing, or using marketing collateral?
When you do an internal survey, you may discover key ways people are successfully searching for and using marketing content as well as the gaps in the process. Insights might even lead to new marketing ideas that inspire demand generation. Record their input and use it as a building block to shape your central repository.
3. What pain points do customers face most? This is a critical lead qualifier.
Demand generation can be swift and successful if you hook people with a solution to their problem. Does your sales team know which marketing collateral speaks to a specific customer pain point? Can they rely on documentation from other team members as a reference when searching for and using key pieces?
Know the Challenges You Want to Solve
The most important part of any content management system is to clearly understand why it’s worth it. When all marketing collateral is in one place it may be more centralized, but it also has to provide value based on the way it’s organized, classified, and used. Knowing these essential points will help you understand the connection between how you use marketing materials and how they tie directly to demand generation.
“Two-thirds of B2B marketers say content is fuel across all channels, including events, social, demand generation, etc.”
Big-picture goals for a content repository should address these key hot buttons:
- Can people conduct a content search using filters to locate relevant pieces?
- What’s the easiest way to share marketing collateral internally?
- Are you clear on how to get the right content to the right lead and share it quickly and easily?
- What type of tagging system makes the most sense, and who is responsible for the tagging?
- Is content easily trackable to determine the value of each of your content assets?
- Is there a simple way to train internal folks to use the repository?
- Are you creating a consistent buyer’s journey from top to bottom through content?
When you create an effective management system for marketing collateral, you can leverage the true power of your most valuable asset—content. By walking through a content organization process not only do you zero in on the true strengths and weaknesses of the buyer’s journey, but you also have a clear picture on how to make it better and more consistent, starting with the way you approach demand generation.