Content has become a large and rapidly growing part of the marketing mix for most companies. Spending on content is growing to support digital channels, social media, thought leadership, marketing automation and door opening. Research by the Content Marketing Institute shows that, on average, marketers spend one quarter of their marketing budgets on content marketing. And most plan to increase their spending on content in the next six months.
With this opportunity comes the potential for misdirected content marketing efforts and outright waste. Most organizations create selling videos, papers, collateral, articles, case studies, blogs and other educational resources in a highly fragmented fashion. As a result, the selling content they create is often inconsistent, expensive, and not aligned with the sales process. The consequences of this approach are duplication, inconsistent quality, poor client interactions and inefficient sales.
Organizations can fix the problem and “sell more for less” by reengineering the content supply chain. This involves putting in place a content architecture and disciplined processes for creating, aligning, distributing and reusing content. This is worth considering because it can significantly reduce spending on wasted content that does not directly support the client engagement process or generate measurable sales outcomes.
For example, the consulting firm McKinsey & Company advocates that if organizations adopted a “disciplined content supply chain” it would cut costs by 30%, halve the rate of content volume growth, and double the rate of customer engagement. The article suggests taking a publisher’s discipline to curb costs:
“Supporting the consumer’s decision journey requires a vast and growing range of content—well beyond advertisements. As companies chase digital opportunities, most have slowly but steadily begun publishing everything from static content, such as product descriptions, to games and other multimedia. Most companies have now essentially become publishers, with a more complex set of cost and quality concerns, yet continue to behave like simple advertisers. Most marketers, failing to adopt the discipline of a multimedia publisher, don’t realize that deep within their operations, they are facing rapidly escalating production costs, unnecessary duplication, inconsistent quality of content, and second-rate interactions with customers.”
Specifically, reengineering the content supply chain would achieve several important goals:
- It would improve sales process alignment and support, ensuring content generates measurable sales outcomes and justifies its expense.
- It would expand distribution of content to customers, prospects and influencers. Most content is stuck at the “top of the sales funnel” in digital, social and mobile channels. Except in e-businesses, very little of this content is being delivered through primary or “human” sales channels which drive deeper into the sales funnel and generate the lion’s share of actual sales. By packaging, parsing and distributing content through more channels, it impacts more customer interactions, and significantly improves return on investment.
- It would help control content in a resource efficient manner ensuring the quality, execution, consistency, control, scalability and reuse of marketing content across the organization. This would significantly reduce costs and make the most of management time by leveraging, repurposing and reusing and refreshing assets. It will also reduce marketing management and field management workload in execution and delivery.
- It will help grow more for less through additional leverage by increasing market reach with the same level of resources in terms of number of quality interactions and people touched.
To help you take action, Profitable Channels has outlined a five step process that leading organizations are putting in place for creating, aligning, distributing sales content assets:
1. Document the Customer Engagement Process. Many organizations do not have a formal sales process in the first place. So to begin, document (or create if necessary) a client engagement process, from generating awareness and interest to delivering advice and closing business. This needs to be a cross-functional picture of all marketing and selling channels (sales, partner, retail, call center, interactive channels). Be sure to include downstream relationship development calls and human sales meetings (which make up most sales contact). An advanced exercise includes adapting the process to illustrate how it addresses specific customer segments and show the mix of channels used in each step or interaction. Finally, to keep focused on business impact, include a definition of the customer experience and needs, speed of engagement and key performance indicators/metrics.
2. Conduct a Marketing and Selling Asset Inventory Assessment. As a next step, create a map of marketing and selling assets to determine how well they support the customer engagement process and target customer needs. Do this by conducting a “marketing and selling asset inventory” that aggregates and organizes all existing sales tools, programs, selling content and collateral by type, engagement process step and selected channel.
3. Align go-to-market content assets with the sales process. Assess how well existing selling assets map to and support the multi-channel customer engagement process by aligning existing go-to-market assets and resources with the steps of that process. This will help identify ways to leverage and repackage existing assets to support day-to-day selling, create more sales events and interactions, and generate measurable sales outcomes. It will also allow versioning of assets so they can be delivered efficiently through web, e-mail, influencer and face to face channels.
4. Create a thought leadership agenda and content architecture. This is a plan to direct the development of new content and the repurposing of existing assets. It ensures that new assets will support segment, messaging and sales process objectives. Equally important, the thought leadership agenda is a centralized control point to ensure any assets created are differentiating the sales experience from the competition with education, relevant advice and ideas. The content architecture is a framework for directing the development and repurposing of selected proprietary thought leadership assets designed to fill gaps in the process, address unmet owner needs and directly support sales and marketing objectives.
5. Put in place a programmatic and multi-channel delivery approach. Using the thought leadership and content agenda as a guide to create a portfolio of core content assets, including but not limited to educational videos, case studies, reports, seminars, pitchbooks, blog posts, interactive tools, retail selling tools, e-mail “ready” advisory assets, and face to face workshops. The creation and approval of these assets should be controlled centrally, either in house or with a dedicated partner. The distribution should include channel owners and regional sales organizations.
Ideally, these five steps will help the organization document and quantify the business case to maximize return on investment in marketing and selling assets, channels and resources by improving the go-to-market process.
To get help putting in place a thought leadership agenda and content architecture or for examples of how leading organizations like HP, DuPont, and Intel are reengineering their content processes, contact Profitable Channels.