According to the Forrester study1, 94% of B2B firms struggle to generate insights from their marketing content. And although most marketers believe they are central to driving business, not as many sales leaders agree. One of the main disconnects is content delivery and performance; most marketers think they’re generating quality data and insights to their sales colleagues, but 63% of salespeople said insight into the relative interest of the buyer in their business proposition is of top importance, while fewer than half of the marketers surveyed identified this type of insight as a priority. It’s a problem that bubbles all the way to the top of most organizations.
“CMOs really need to pay attention to the difference in priorities when it comes to the types of insights sales teams consider most useful,” Mason says. “Better alignment between functions on the kind of buyer insights that matter will help marketing understand where they might need to evolve the types of data and insights they are capturing, and will help marketing more clearly impact business wins.”
Understanding and then leveraging the important role content can play in your organization is one way to ameliorate this pain point—fast. Mason offers three ways B2B marketers can use content to bring on this transformation:
Smart B2B marketers know that the days of “telling” their customers about their products and services are over. For today’s customers, it’s all about the two-way conversation. Smart content marketing platforms can transform that old school didactic experience into an interactive dialogue with the customer that yields great data. If your marketing and sales teams are still set on “telling” customers about their products and services, versus engaging with them, it might be time to embrace… the conversation.
“Interactive content prompts the reader to take action when navigating the piece, which in turn provides points of measurement that reveal more about their motivations and drivers than passive content, which they simply scroll through,” says Mason. “Also, because the reader has to take action, they engage more consciously with the content. It’s like having a conversation, rather than giving readers a lecture.”
Smart marketing platforms can help sales and marketing departments begin to speak the same language—a language that’s based on data (i.e. facts), that can lead to better-informed campaigns that generate sales. “Content platforms help with data capture and can provide an objective view of what drives more revenue, says Mason. “As long as everyone is working from the same scorecard, content marketing platforms can help both sales and marketing organizations identify what is making the biggest impact and do more of it.” The right platform can also lead to more efficient workflows, greater consistency in the quality of output, reduce the cost of production and improve—as well as demonstrate—ROI.
High-performing content strategies require a strong—and clear—vision for which insights are of greatest use to your business. But not all marketers feel confident in their ability to reverse engineer those insights into a data strategy. A smart, data-rich content platform can do much of the heavy lifting and, in the process, can help many marketers better understand their data along the way, “but marketers also need to start developing their skill-sets and comfort levels when analyzing data, so they know how to translate the data into a language the business understands,” Mason says.
1 Interactive Content Experiences Help Marketers Better Understand Buyers, Cultivate Leads, And Close Deals, an October 2019 Turtl-commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting
