We’re so glad you asked! Content marketing is a resource for customers that uses different assets to address business challenges and help buyers make a purchasing decision. It helps businesses reach, engage, and convert customers by addressing their business challenges and needs. The overall goal behind content marketing is to create a strategy that reaches and converts your ideal customers. 

What is a content marketing strategy?

At its core, a content marketing strategy is your “why, who, and how.” Why you are creating content, who you are helping, and how you will help them in a way no one else can. Organizations typically use content marketing to build an audience and achieve at least one of these profitable results: higher lead quality, faster conversions, and increased revenue.

You’ve probably heard the phrase, “content is king,” and with a thoughtful vision, it can also be an integral tool that helps you get the attention of your audience. We’ve identified 10 core building blocks that will help develop your organization’s content marketing strategy or take it to the next level. Check them out below!

1. Brand guidelines

The foundation of your strategy comes from your brand identity which should include clear guidance on personality, voice, and tone. Successfully communicating your brand identity through your content is critical if you want content marketing to work. Developing and putting to use your unique brand book will help create a consistent voice and tone across the different assets and channels your organization uses. 

If you need some inspiration, here are brand book examples from Mailchimp, Nike Football, Intel, and Cisco.

2. Marketing objectives

Your organization’s marketing strategy helps ground your team on its big-picture goals and objectives. To reach your content marketing goals, it’s helpful to align them with audience needs and streamline your content creation process. This will make it easier to reach your goals, and to be successful, they should be: 

• Specific: State exactly what you want to accomplish.
• Measurable: Determine the metrics for success.
• Achievable: Go for challenging but attainable results.
• Relevant: Make sure the goals support your marketing strategy.
• Time-bound: Outline the period in which you’ll work on achieving the goal.

3. Customer persona(s)

Understanding your audience helps align your content strategy to the addressable needs of your market. A customer persona is a fictional character that is developed based upon different attributes for a role or segment. These can include demographics like:

• Role and responsibilities
• Challenges and pain points
• Influence on the purchase decision
• Goals and objectives
• Solution requirements
  

Most importantly, work to uncover a unique insight about your target customer that the rest of the industry overlooks or under-appreciates. Often, it will serve as the creative catalyst for a successful content strategy or campaign direction.

4. Data and market research

Data and research help your organization understand the current conditions of the market as well as where it’s going. The content that your organization shares with its audience generates data and insights that can help your team fine-tune its content strategy.

Market research provides insights into what other brands have done to improve their strategy. Learning about the market includes learning about your competitors, as well. If you know what content your competitors share with their customers and prospects, you can use that to your advantage. Tools like social listening can help your organization understand how prospects and buyers discuss your product and industry online. These valuable insights can help your organization improve its content and gain an edge.

5. Customer journey map

Once you’ve defined who your customer is, a journey map outlines your persona’s needs and how you can meet them at every stage of the buyer’s journey. An effective map is a visual representation of the customer journey based on what the buyer is thinking and feeling at every stage of the decision-making journey. By understanding what a buyer is thinking and feeling, you can create content that best supports them as they consider your product or service. 

Customer journeys are not linear, but there are several ways your organization can be agile and adapt to changes. Savvy marketing leaders use a variety of methods to represent the journey, from post-it notes on a boardroom wall to Excel spreadsheets to infographics. The most important thing is that the map makes sense to those who use it.

It helps if your journey map is tailored to your specific customer profile (and how you reach and interact with them), but a few guiding principles and good design approaches apply. Here is what is typically included in a customer journey map:

• Buying process
• User actions
• Emotions
• Pain points
• Solutions

6. Content-market fit

At times, the content a company creates doesn’t always satisfy the customers it’s trying to attract, either because the content doesn’t reach them, doesn’t fit their needs, or both. For example:

• Findability issues: content is published without first considering how potential and existing customers might find it → time and effort are wasted on content that nobody sees.
• Relevance issues: content is published without making sure it is what potential and existing customers are interested in/need → time and effort are wasted on content aimed at the wrong audience.

As important as it is to understand your customer, it’s also important to understand the current state of content in your industry to look for opportunities. Be sure to also pay attention to the state of media behavior and content consumption formats, including device usage and visual trends. The key is to find your unique place to stand out and add value to the conversation. Simply put, the goal of a content-market fit is distributing content to attract and retain customers.

7. Process

Every effective content program requires an iterative process that helps your team focus on what’s important: translating creativity into effective content. To build an efficient content marketing machine, consider the following:

• Group content into a few core buckets (eg, videos, blogs, ebooks, microsites)
• Design a ‘best practices’ workflow for each core content type. Think about where each content type begins, who owns the business requirements and brief development process, when/where resources need to be turned on or off, how feedback and approvals are coordinated, how to measure each step, and who’s responsible for the final output.
• Meet with stakeholders and members of your team to see whether your ‘best case’ process is possible and makes sense for them. Identify what might be missing or that you haven’t thought of?
• Test the process. Does it work? Where are the gaps? Where are the breaking points? Processes will mature and develop over time. Stay cognizant of production time and resource requirements. Regularly check in with teams about any frustrations.
• Incorporate habits. Making your new workflows a habit is what will allow you to truly scale your content strategy. Enforce your new workflows internally and find champions at each checkpoint to help you.
  

You may also want to diagram your process, along with key challenges and opportunities for improvement, with a “swim lane” diagram:

8. Internal communications plan

An internal communications strategy can be a recipe for success, but without a detailed plan to execute that strategy, there may be a breakdown in your process. Your content team can bring in diverse voices — your head of communications, customer marketing, product marketing, and senior marketing management — to ensure they’re aligned with your strategy. This is particularly useful if your content team is operating as a ‘service’ function for other parts of the organization. 

9. Content calendar

Consistency is essential when building a digital presence, and a great way to have everyone in the loop is to manage a joint content calendar. This tool will help you plan and stick to a consistent schedule of publishing content. It can include information about the content format, time of posting, channels, and so on.

By scheduling content on a shared calendar, you can enable proper visibility and coordination across different initiatives, teams, and regions.

10. Ongoing analysis

It’s often said “a writer’s work is never done,” and the same is true when you’re responsible for defining a brand’s ongoing narrative. In general, “test and learn” is a sound operating philosophy, and it’s particularly true with content. Place small bets, iterate, gather data, listen for feedback, and then scale your successes. Building great content effectiveness requires patience and perseverance, so it’s important to progress incrementally, milestone by milestone, and break down your ideal outcomes into actionable programs and phases.

Create impactful content and campaigns with Seismic

Wondering how to create a content marketing strategy that is a custom fit for your company? At Seismic, we are committed to helping organizations and teams templatize workflows and task management that accelerate the delivery of high-impact campaigns. Our “work smarter” mentality will help you decrease the time it takes to create content and launch campaigns with robust workflows and proofing that ensure compliance and speed. Learn more here.

The post The 10 essential elements of a content marketing strategy appeared first on Seismic.

Among B2B marketers, storytelling is a buzzword that’s often assumed to be the narrative that brands tell their buyer. In reality, impactful storytelling asks brands to identify their buyer’s challenges and create a content experience that motivates the buyer to identify a solution. 

Today, buying and selling are becoming more digital. While the old world relied on face-to-face interactions and transactional relationships, modern buyer engagements are hybrid—both digital and in-person—with a greater emphasis on relationships. As buyers swap office buildings for home offices, companies have adopted new digital sales techniques in order to reach and build trust with their prospects and customers. 

Connect with buyers where they are

The first part of storytelling is connecting with the buyer. With less face-to-face interaction, companies have to be more creative about how they connect with their audience. Fewer in-person events and conferences are pushing more engagement online, particularly to social media platforms like LinkedIn. An IDC survey found that seventy-five percent of B2B buyers use social media during their customer journey. But, connecting with an audience isn’t as simple as blasting corporate-sponsored content—your go-to-market (GTM) team has to connect with buyers on their terms. 

Storytelling is about putting your best foot forward in the medium where your buyer is. This is why social selling is growing in popularity. In order to create successful digital conversations, sellers need to use social media to build credibility before they’re invited by the buyer for additional dialogue. 

Use data to tell the right story

Modern buyers want a continuous conversation, and companies that personalize their content experience have a competitive advantage. From their inbox to social media, buyers are inundated with generic content that doesn’t address their specific needs. Businesses that invest in understanding their audience’s needs are best positioned to build trust through personalization. 

With more interaction taking place online, buyers are having more conversations about their challenges and, oftentimes, your brand. Organizations that invest in social listening or pay attention to review sites can better understand customer needs and how to address them through personalized content. In fact, before you share content with a prospective customer, your salespeople should already know the challenges that they’re solving for. That’s the level of anticipation that customers expect. 

Customers have also grown to expect immersive, interactive content experiences. Advancements in technology help companies deliver these experiences. Instead of presenting content unilaterally to all buyers, interactive content gives the buyer an opportunity to choose the content experience that best meets their needs. For instance, interactive content like a microapp gives buyers multiple options to choose from. Organizations can use the data from their unique content experience to better understand how to address the buyer’s real challenges. In effect, data is a resource that brands can leverage to create better buying experiences for their audience.  

Always remember the buyer is the hero

Every story has a hero. While it may be tempting to make your brand the hero, the buyer is always cast in that role. Donald Miller makes this point in his book, Building a Storybrand. In digital marketing, you only get one chance to capture the buyer’s attention. To make the most of this opportunity, you have to tell your story on the buyer’s terms—which means the story is about them, not your brand. 

Think about it: the buyer is on a journey to find a solution to their business challenge. Along their journey, your brand—through effective storytelling—accompanies the hero on their “hero journey” to resolve their challenge. Through insightful content, your brand can foster the hero’s growth and help guide them to their happily ever after.  

By understanding your buyer’s needs and joining them on their buyer’s (i.e. hero’s) journey, you are building a relationship and brand trust. Storytelling goes beyond sharing the same singular corporate narrative. It requires your sales and marketing teams to understand your buyer’s needs and personalize content in a way that leads your buyer to the best solution for their organization. 

Want to learn more about storytelling and building trust with your audience? Check out binge-worthy on-demand content from Seismic Digital Shift!

The post Building trust through storytelling appeared first on Seismic.

Too often, for large global enterprises and small businesses alike, the bottom of the funnel is a black hole: a mysterious place where the science of marketing meets the art of sales to produce deals—and nobody quite knows how.

Enter Seismic’s Content Analytics: a suite of data, dashboards, and integrations that offers a 360-degree view of content performance from creation to close that powers revenue teams to accelerate deals and business growth. 

With our Fall ’20 Release, Seismic’s analytics for marketing, enablement, and sales teams are better than ever—and unlock even more potential for enterprises to uplevel efficiency and effectiveness, streamline go-to-market strategies, and jumpstart revenue. 

Let’s take a look at Seismic’s Content Analytics and what they can do for your business.

Make data-backed decisions that drive your team forward—data science degree not required

If the words “BI Tool Integrations” or “APIs & SQL” in the graphic above left you worried, don’t be! You don’t need a data science degree to use Content Analytics to uplevel your team’s impact. For teams looking for focused insights into metrics they can take action on right away, our new Role-based Dashboards offer just the right balance of context and curation they need to make an impact—fast. 

Say you’re a sales manager with a dozen young, fast-moving reps to juggle, ever-increasing quotas to hit, and an ever-shifting market to capture. As your sellers fight harder than ever for every demo and deal, you can’t simply let them craft pitches using hearsay and tribal knowledge. But you also don’t have time to wade through Salesforce, parse spreadsheets of data, or draft a list of everything the marketing team is doing. 

That’s where our new Role-based Dashboards come in. From sales managers to content owners, CROs to CMOs to enablement leaders, Seismic’s Content Analytics now includes actionable, curated, out-of-the-box reports, and visualizations tailored to the distinct challenges of specific roles.¹ No superfluous metrics to distract you or slow you down; just the relevant reports and visualizations you need to understand what’s happening and take informed action, leverage your discipline’s best practices, and create your own custom reports to go deeper. Whatever the business challenge or your comfort with data analysis, Role-based Dashboards are your ticket to fast-tracking learnings and improvement for yourself and your team. 

Explore your data, your way

Love your new Role-based Dashboard, but want more flexibility? If you’re working cross-functionally to solve tough business problems, sometimes you need incredibly specific data or filters to get the answers your stakeholders are looking for. That’s why we released new LiveInsights Flexible Dashboards this summer to make the Content Analytics dashboards and data as flexible and portable as possible. To get started with custom dashboards, just duplicate and adjust our out-of-the-box managed dashboards so they answer your organization’s specific questions. And, using KPI filters and widgets, you can drill down to the granular view you need to answer detailed follow-up questions. 

But don’t stop there. Connect Seismic with your team’s other business intelligence tools via our Snowflake integration, or a custom integration and our reporting APIs. By merging your bottom-of-the-funnel data with other cross-functional data sets such as CRM, HR, and customer success, your go-to-market team will have a holistic, yet singular, source of truth to answer its most challenging business questions. Armed with shared answers, you’ll be equipped to build executive alignment, boost confidence in the teams’ ability to hit numbers, and scale best practices that truly move the needle. 

Discover new, comprehensive insights into the entire buyer journey

Staying focused on needle-moving best practices can be especially challenging and critical for Marketing. Especially when business resources are increasingly tight, CMOs need to quantify every cent spent, but their teams just can’t find a way to connect those dollars spent to deals won. Proof of their team’s impact on revenue becomes the Holy Grail—the key to justifying headcount and budget. That’s why Seismic’s Content Analytics provides the rich workflow and content performance insights marketers need to make data-driven decisions about where and how to spend time and resources. 

Say your marketing team is orchestrating a new campaign around a unified theme. Percolate by Seismic Analytics’ interactive dashboards offer insights into which campaigns and asset types take up Marketing’s time; and now with our Fall Release, they also show performance metrics for content published from Percolate to any and all channels—including Seismic, thanks to our new pre-configured dashboard. Now, without leaving the platform, marketers can see how sales is leveraging the assets they’ve created, helping marketers stay efficient, maximize their effectiveness, and spend their time on assets that actually get used.  

Start here, go everywhere

Here at Seismic, we’re passionate about using our own software; and one of the reasons we’re excited about Content Analytics is that anyone can start using these tools to drive change for their teams right away. Packed with all these features and more, Seismic’s Content Analytics starts by shedding light on content performance from creation to close, but it doesn’t stop there. As more and more individuals are empowered with comprehensive, flexible, actionable insights they can actually use, and as enablement teams mature, we’re excited to see more and more opportunities open up to build alignment and scale best practices—both for ourselves and our clients. 

We’d love for you to join us on this data-powered journey. If you’re a customer and would like some help getting started with our new Content Analytics upgrades, reach out to your Customer Success Manager. If you’re evaluating Seismic, learn more about Content Analytics and request a demo on our webpage.

_{¹Chief Revenue Officer and Content Owner Role-based Dashboards are available now; Chief Marketing Officer, Sales Manager, and Platform Administrator dashboards are coming soon.}

The post Fall 2020 Release: Three ways Content Analytics power revenue teams appeared first on Seismic.

What we are seeing from our customers

As the world has shifted to fully digital selling over the last few months, we have been using engagement analytics to better understand how our customers are using our platform to activate sales content. It’s evident that our customers are sending more content to buyers—we have seen a close to 90% increase in content shared on the Seismic Platform. Additionally, when we look at our customers’ sales content libraries, we find that they contain predominantly static content that can only be consumed in a linear manner. This is a sharp contrast to interactive or visual content that is often promoted through top of funnel channels such as websites, social media, and videos. A whopping 70% of our customers’ sales content libraries were made up of static content types. As buyers progress down the funnel from Marketing Qualified Leads to Sales Accepted Opportunities, the content they receive is less likely to stand out, engage buyers, or match the brand experience they received earlier in their journey.  

Today’s buyers expect brands to deliver personalized content experiences at every touchpoint of their journey with your brand, from awareness all the way through to purchase. 

Reimagining sales content

Content is meant to be consumed, not scrolled through. To meet buyers’ needs we’re introducing two new features that reimagine sales content as differentiated, engaging, and buyer-driven experiences. Say hello to Seismic’s Interactive Content bundle, a new offering which unlocks two new content types in the Seismic platform: Seismic microapps, powered by Tiled, and LiveContent. Whether you are looking for evergreen sales content to be shared with many buyers or a customized piece of content for a single buyer, we’ve got the solution to transform your static sales content into engaging and memorable interactive buyer experiences.

Seismic microapps, powered by Tiled: Experiential sales content that drives engagement

Seismic has partnered with Tiled, an innovator in immersive content experiences to deliver native microapp functionality directly within the Seismic platform. What is a microapp? Think of it as a new content type that combines the interactivity of a mini-website or an app with the ease of delivery of a document. Microapps meet the needs of use cases for evergreen content that supports sales in their top of funnel, one-to-many buyer engagements. Our customers leverage microapps for event invites, digital product brochures, buyer’s guides, eBooks, and more. 

A flexible, interactive microapp builder right within Seismic’s Content Manager, makes it seamless for content creators to use their familiar workflows. Key features include:

• Easily drag n’ drop interactive “tiles” to imported content transforming it into scrollable image galleries and panes, in-line videos, quizzes, and more
• No code required—makes it easy for content creators to adopt interactive content types within their existing content strategy 
• Adaptive screen sizing for various devices (mobile, desktop, tablet) ensures an optimized end user experience 
• Builder that is compatible with most static content types including: PDFs, JPEGs, PNGs, and more
• Review and approve your content experience before publishing to end users via Seismic’s powerful content targeting capabilities

LiveContent: Personalized sales content that drives revenue

As buyers progress down the funnel, seller engagements shift from one-to-many to more personalized, one-to-one conversations. LiveContent empowers sellers to easily transform traditional presentations into personalized, memorable, dynamic stories that are tailored for one-to-one engagements.

Presentations are created using authoring tools, not engagement tools,  but sellers need to be able to deliver that same engaging conversation in a remote environment, whether in lieu of an in-person meeting or as a follow up to one. The typical methods of sending content require exporting to a static format. LiveContent allows sellers to send presentations in always-on presentation mode, the way that they are intended to be.

Key capabilities of LiveContent include:

• Leverages the ubiquity of presentation tools, making it easy for sales and marketing teams to use familiar workflows
• Seismic intelligently converts standard presentations into LiveContent, allowing all the embedded animations, transitions, videos, GIFs and voiceover to be delivered remotely, exactly how a seller would deliver in person: in presentation mode.
• Seismic stores the original presentation file allowing content creators to make future updates based on powerful engagement analytics 
• Personalize your content at scale with LiveDocs that pulls from any data source to tailor your content “on the fly” so presentations are not only interactive, but also very specific to the buyer’s needs
• Page-by-page engagement analytics provide instant feedback about what is most important to your customers 

Transform buyer experiences

Both Seismic microapps and LiveContent allow sales and marketing teams to leverage existing static content and transform them into personalized, interactive content experiences. Every journey is unique for every buyer because they can choose their own path based on their own interests. Whether you want to build one-to-many or one-to-one buyer experiences, Seismic’s Interactive Content bundle gives you what you need. 

Learn more

To learn more about how Seismic Interactive Content works and request a demo, please visit our website.

The post Interactive Content: Capabilities that transform buyer experiences appeared first on Seismic.

At the end of the day, however, sales and marketing are on one same team. And as customers demand more consistent and more personalized experiences across all channels, it’s never been more important for sales and marketing to work hand-in-hand. 

So how can you achieve sales and marketing harmony? Well, unfortunately, the fix isn’t one size fits all. Alleviating the constant tension over qualified leads and content ROI will take time, patience and strategic coordination. 

We’ve created a few guidelines that have helped smooth out the marketing-sales alignment that are sure to at least be a starting place for your B2B team. 

1. Keep everything that sales needs organized and in one place

Nothing will discourage a sales rep more than taking the time to look for apiece of  marketing- created content, only to not find it anywhere. Invest in a sales enablement tool and ensure everything you want sales to have access to is in there. This way, they can see how much work marketing is actually doing, and they know they can find what they need, when they need it.

2. Communicate any important campaigns multiple times, through multiple channels

Overcommunication can sometimes be better, especially when you’re dealing with a sales rep with hundreds of “out of office” replies in their inbox. So after you send an email, make sure to communicate via Slack or whatever your internal messaging system may be. Once you’ve done that, schedule a 15 minute meeting with them. This way, sales has the information they need on what’s coming, and you can avoid them asking the dreaded “what’s that?” when you mention a campaign. 

3. Provide “everything you need to know” documents for every campaign

Unfortunately, it is not enough for a sales rep to be able to find what marketing is doing. They also need to know how to use it. The more context and instructions you provide, the more ROI you will see. Here at Percolate, we provide an “EYNTK Doc” for every piece of content, webinar, event, or asset we produce. This includes all relevant links, email copy, and talking scripts, so our sales team can start running immediately. 

4. Always remember to address “what’s in it for them” 

What better way to collaborate with a rep than to use their own sales tactics on them? Set an upfront contract that makes explicitly clear what they will gain from investing time and energy into your campaign. This ensures that they are bought in from the beginning. 

5. Get feedback once the campaign is over

Just like with any relationship, there will be hiccups. Some campaigns might fall flat, and that is okay. What’s important is that all teams feel that their input matters, and will be considered when planning the next campaign. One easy way to do this is to provide anonymous feedback forms that you review with the Sales team. 

A rocky sales and marketing relationship goes beyond an occasional tense email. In order to actually communicate your product’s value to customers, marketing and sales must work together. The sooner you take the first step towards tight alignment, the sooner you will see your engagement with customers improve.

With the very nature of sales changing, it is even harder to keep marketing and sales aligned—but also more important.

The post 5 tips to align sales and marketing appeared first on Seismic.

So what has made Percolate a Leader for the third straight year? And how is Percolate leading the future of content marketing?

Executing cohesive campaigns

Percolate has always been excellent at giving marketers the tools they need to execute the best, most cohesive marketing campaigns. Our platform is designed for even the most complex organizations with teams across the globe to collaborate and develop almost any type of content. With robust approval structures available, integrations across the business technology landscape, and the flexibility to customize workflows for each organization’s needs, Percolate  can help a wide variety of organizations create and orchestrate effective content to tell great stories in the marketplace.

Putting the buyer first

With Seismic, Percolate is now going to play a major role in the ability of organizations to tell one single story through the entire buyer’s journey. According to Salesforce, 84% of buyers claim that their experience is just as important as products and services. But when sellers are not reaching buyers with information that matters to them, that experience is not going to be positive, and buyers are going to be hearing stories that are not relevant to their needs. So the capabilities Percolate now has to seamlessly lead go-to-market teams from marketing orchestration into the sales cycle will make teams more effective at reaching buyers with stories that resonate. As Gartner puts it themselves in their report, we are “bridg[ing] the gap” between effective marketing and effective selling – in a way that will make a major difference for buyers and deliver them the experience they deserve.” 1

Preparing for the future

At Percolate, we are excited about the future of content marketing because we are shaping it. A successful story goes beyond just one piece of well-executed content. It is about continuously connecting with a buyer with a compelling narrative, reaching them with the right content at the right time to consistently deliver the best stories to that buyer. Percolate is driving a vision for content marketing that allows marketers to tell the right stories, and make a greater impact on buyers than ever before. Being named a Leader in the 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant is proof of just how exciting Percolate’s future, and the future of content marketing, really is.

Read more about Percolate’s Leader status in the 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Content Marketing Platforms here.

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

1 Gartner “Magic Quadrant for Content Marketing Platforms” by Nicole Greene, Laurel Erickson, March 23, 2020.

The post How Percolate is Shaping the Future of Content Marketing Platforms appeared first on Seismic.

However, despite these advances, there are still a number of challenges manufacturers need to overcome before they can adopt this status. Shifting workforce demographics have prompted executive teams to rethink how to train and onboard new associates; a proliferation of new product releases has generated a mountain of additional work for various operations teams; the Amazon effect has driven customer expectations through the roof; and tightening industry regulations have put traditional production processes into question.

And of course, amid – and perhaps because of – these developments, there are also mounting frustrations between two departments who feel the knock-on pressures further downstream: Sales and Marketing. In order to keep apace with accelerating product development cycles, sales and marketing teams need to work collaboratively in terms of collating and accessing content. So why, in this era of industrial digitalization, are these teams finding their efforts misaligned?

The Misalignment of Sales and Marketing

Firstly, increasing product updates mean that even the most efficient sales operatives find they are wasting significant chunks of their day trying to access the right files in order to present their customers with the latest, most relevant messaging. They also need to engage in quick and efficient back-and-forth discussions with their marketing counterparts on projects such as updating product specifications, or developing sales presentations, but this can prove impossible without the right systems in place.

Meanwhile, marketing execs are often disheartened by the lack of feedback from the sales team on which content is engaging (or discouraging) customers, and what changes need to be made to improve the overall brand messaging. This channel of communication between teams needs to be established from the outset of the sales journey, so that any messaging can be consistently personalized throughout.

Manufacturers who want to keep ahead of the competition have to be able to collaboratively customize their content – at scale – but many are finding their internal teams simply don’t have the tools in place to facilitate this way of working together.

Bridging the gap between digital manufacturing and complete digitalization

The arrival of Industry 4.0 has brought about a whole host of digital advances in the manufacturing industry specifically. But there is an important distinction between these processes, and the digitalization of sales and marketing systems which are responsible for getting the product from the factory into the hands of the customer.

For example, innovations in manufacturing processes include 3D printing, mechatronics, advanced robotics and smart (or connected) machines. Meanwhile, sales and marketing teams are often working with multiple legacy tools, such as CRM and marketing automation platforms, with no way of joining up these siloed systems. 

Recognizing the disparity between manufacturing technology and content management technology is half the battle, but how can manufacturers go about completing their journey towards digital transformation?

Silo busting with sales enablement

One of the most effective ways to unite sales and marketing teams is to integrate a sales enablement solution, which taps into existing tools to provide a single source of truth, allowing everyone to access and update collateral as and when they need to. It also eliminates the content creep that occurs when years of conflicting and mismatching information is stored in different places.

With sales enablement, the sales team automatically receives approved collateral and information relevant to the specific status of their sales motions without having to manually search for them; and the marketing team gains insights into seller and buyer engagement with content; which interactions are making an impact on prospects; and which campaigns should be optimized.

By combining this with advanced automation tools, visions of personalizing customer content – both in real time and at scale – is now becoming a reality for Sales and Marketing. Augmenting CRM and marketing automation with sales enablement technology allows teams to carry out in-depth analytics across a range of areas to justify their marketing budgets and provide more accurate reports to their executive teams, empowering them to have more of an influence on future strategies.

Data governance and permissioning is also possible through sales enablement technology, meaning teams can now control which segments of their audience see which content, reaching the stakeholders they need to while remaining data compliant.

2020 may be an ambitious target for complete digital transformation, but by adopting a robust sales enablement strategy, manufacturers have every chance of succeeding.

If you’d like to find out more about how your teams could benefit from sales enablement technology, download our free whitepaper: From connected machines to connected content: the missing link in digital manufacturing.

The post Bridging the Gap Between Digital Manufacturing and Digital Transformation appeared first on Seismic.

More than just a series of boxes on a PowerPoint slide, a comprehensive marketing tech stack map gives you an at-a-glance view into all of your tools, why you have them, and how well they’re working. Obviously this can be useful for a number of applications:

• Increasing your efficiency. A map gives you clarity around any functional gaps or missing integrations that might be impacting your workflow or performance. Once you’ve identified those gaps, you can fill them.
  
  
• Reducing costs and increasing ROI. If you’re like most enterprise marketers, you probably have some duplicate tools in your martech stack, along with some that aren’t really fitting your needs any longer. By nature of being a large organization, it’s easy for these kinds of issues to fly under the radar. With a good stack map, you can more easily identify which parts of your stack are delivering ROI, and which should be dropped or replaced.
  
  
• Planning a big move. Even for small companies, adding or replacing key tools can be a big undertaking. There are workflows to reconfigure, integrations to replace, use cases to accommodate. For large enterprises, those same issues are multiplied and complicated by the sheer number of people involved. Starting with a comprehensive map of your current tech stack, showing how it all integrates and who uses it all, can prevent oversights and misunderstandings that can slow down change processes and drive up project costs.

Creating a map of your martech stack sounds straightforward, but there are actually several different ways to approach it.

For that reason, we created the Marketing Tech Stack Workbook to do a deep dive on several ways to map your tech stack, and how to use them:

• The System Map. Organized by function and role in the sales process, this map helps you evaluate how well your stack is supporting your funnel, and if any duplicate or missing functions are holding you back.
  
  
• The Experience Map. The Experience Map examines the same elements as the System Map, but through the lens of your customer’s journey. You can see how each tool interacts with your customer and what role it plays in helping them move forward, making it a great resource for marketing teams shifting to a Customer Experience-oriented strategy.
  
  
• The Workflow Map. This maps is all about how your team works, and what tools support them in the process. This map is especially useful for identifying inefficiencies and functional gaps.
  
  
• The Data Flow Map. A must-have for teams considering a major stack change, the Data Flow map carefully details how each system in the martech stack interacts with the other systems, including functions covered and data exchanged. This is vital for ensuring that any new stack elements are able to integrate with the right systems.

The Marketing Tech Stack Workbook is free to download. Check it out!

The post How (and Why) to Map Your Marketing Technology Stack appeared first on Seismic.

Sales and marketing must work together to deliver on the promise of alignment. Marketing must agree to move beyond demand generation content and build content designed to be used in the sales process. Sales must agree to use the content and provide feedback on what is working or not working. Sound familiar? It’s the same ground rules for demand generation alignment except we filled in the words “content” for “leads”.

Like demand generation, content won’t be successful without alignment.  This post outlines the process for sales and marketing content alignment.

1. Co-develop buyer personas

The most important factor in content selling is to understand what content your buyer values most. Both sales and marketing must develop personas together and agree on them. Actually, it’s the first step to ALL sales and marketing alignment: Agreement on the target buyer and their challenges.

Persona building is not just a matter of “who is the decision maker, influencer, and recommender” exercise. Your goal is to build a deep understanding of each critical stakeholder in the buying process. This exercise will not only inform content but also provide invaluable data for messaging and sales plays. Each persona should explore the following:

• Who the buyer is from a demographic perspective
• The role that the buyer plays in the organization
• What the buyer’s objectives, priorities, and challenges are
• What a day in the life of the buyer looks like
• How the buyer makes purchasing decisions
• What content they value in their capacity as a buyer

2. Map the buying experience

Step one is to develop buyer personas, then you need to map their preferred buying experience, which is how these make purchases. A buying experience map follows each step your buyer(s) take from status quo to purchase. For content selling, you will want to understand their content preferences for each step along their journey. The critical information needed to build the buying experience map should come from your target buyers and from sales.

For each step in the buying experience you want to understand the following details:

• Their key activities, pain-points, and challenges
• How they consume content and where
• How they communicate internally and externally
• What they need to get to the next step
• The roadblocks that prevent them from advancing in the process

3. Map and create content strategy

Now that you agreed on the buying experience for your buyers, map content that you will deliver across each buying step. The goal is to provide content that help the buyer move from one step to the next. For example, when faced with a buyer who is still happy at status quo, sales should be equipped with content that helps the buyer ask the right questions about their current situation and help them identify they have a problem or that they could be doing things better.  Like everything else, the content map should be built collaboratively.

Examples of Content Types

• Buyer Persona Documents
• Product Documents
• Case Studies
• Sales playbooks, scripts, and competitive battlecards

Learn more about the different content types

4. Have a dedicated resource

If you are going to commit to delivering content to sales, then commit resources. Companies will often say their going to deliver content to sales, but it only part of a list of a million things for marketing to do. For content selling to be successful, there needs to be a content organization of one or more dedicated people who are committed to delivering and optimizing content for sales. This resource is usually the sales enablement role or closely tied to a dedicated content manager or writer.

5. Collaboratively prioritize content

Even with a dedicated resource, you will not be able to create all the assets you need immediately. There are three important things to remember when trying to overcome this challenge:

• Crowdsource from other sources – Many organizations feel like all the content needs to be created internally which is simply not the case. The goal is to move buyers from one step to the next with content and there might be material already created by others such as third party thought leaders, analysts, or partners that provide the information buyers need.
• Repurpose content – When you are deciding what content to produce, audit your current content assets first. You will often find the raw material necessary to complete your content mission. In some cases, you can just use the content asset as is or you might need to take the raw material and re-package it.
• Ask sales to stack-rank their content needs – Marketing should be very clear with sales how much content they can create and the amount of time they need in order to create it. Marketing should then ask sales to stack-rank the content they want created based on urgency or need. Organizations typically suffer from one of two problems: Marketing creates the content they want without sales’ influence or marketing always agree to one-off requests for content and there is no agreement on the trade-offs.

The goal of this exercise is to create an editorial calendar with an expectation for sales of what they will get and when.

Marketing should be very clear with sales how much content they can create and the amount of time they need in order to create it.

6. Train sales

Most organizations create content, send it over in email, and then assume sales will use it correctly or at all. For sales to be effective using content, then organizations should invest in training sales on:

• What content to use
• Who to send it to
• When and how to deliver it
• How to track engagement and its impact on sales

Many marketers are surprised at the level of engagement from sales during these training sessions.  What they realize in these training sessions is how eager sales is to have great content at their disposal. In many organizations, training is the real problem. Marketing has created incredible content that goes unused. The issue was sales didn’t’ know how to use it or even where to find it. A sales enablement platform like Seismic is the perfect content management solution to organize the marketing materials and sales collateral that sellers use every day.

7.  Develop a new content handoff process

This is a very short bullet but is often a major problem for organizations. When you realize new content, have a process for letting sales know the new content has been released and allot 15 minutes training them on the “who, what, when, and how.” You don’t know how many times I have heard: “I emailed them the pdf” and then seen nothing happen. Remember, sales wants content but has to understand what to do with it.

8. Provide content selling tools and automation

One of the simplest problems that organizations need to solve is how to keep content in a single, easy-to-access repository.  Content should be easily accessed from their CRM application. Great content selling tools can even recommend content based on the type of buyer or their current stage in the buying experience. Seismic was recently named a leader in Sales Enablement Automation Platforms by Forrester Research.

Another critical feature in content automation is the ability to track what content is being delivered and the effectiveness of this content. An example of how organizations use tracking is to determine what content should be emphasized, optimized, or archived.  Sometimes tracking will just help you identify how to help sales. For example, if sales is struggling in current stages in the buying experience, you might see what content they are using if they are using content at all and guide them to the more relevant assets or replace them with new ones.

9. Measure marketing content’s impact on sales

It’s important to have regular meetings to review metrics (analytics and engagement insights) and to allow sales to provide anecdotal feedback, go over the editorial calendar, and make suggestions for new content pieces.

When you can see which pieces of content impacting sales opportunities and conversations you can invest more in the kinds of assets that improve your sales performance. And you can eliminate or tweak the content that doesn’t positively impact your opportunities.

The key elements that need to be tracked are:

• Which content was shared and by who?
• What was the sales context in which it was shared? E.g. what is the industry, sales stage, persona, geography (or whatever segmentation matters to you)
• How successful was the content? (Did prospects view or download the content? Is it correlated with advancing leads or closed deals?)

The good news is that Seismic does all of this tracking and provides sales content analytics. It connects content usage back to the sales context in which it was used. And it measures the performance of that material.

10. Optimize

The final step in sales-and-marketing content alignment is to optimize the program based on metrics and feedback. It’s that simple. If sales is seeing new trends in the buying experience that requires new sets of content to help close business, then the editorial calendar must change. If a piece of content isn’t working, then find out why. The process of creating a successful sales content program takes time and there will be challenges along the way. If both sides are committed to making the program more effective, then you will see a continued lift in results which ultimately leads to more revenue.

Interested in learning more? Download the 8 Challenges of Sales and Marketing Alignment Guide or take the How Mature is your Content Strategy Quiz

The post 10 Tips for Sales and Marketing Content Alignment appeared first on Seismic.

First, what is a habit? ‘Habits’ can be defined as behaviors that are repeated on a regular basis to the point where they are almost involuntary. Usually this term is used to refer to things in a negative context: smoking, swearing, comfort eating, maxing your credit cards, biting your nails, road rage, reality TV, etc. But habits can (and should) be positive and constructive. And once these habits are formed (science shows it takes about 66 days!), they are hard to break.

What makes a marketer great?

Below are some must-have qualities.

1) Having clearly defined objectives

How can you execute a marketing strategy without knowing what you are working toward? First, identify what you want to achieve in the next 30 days, the next 6 months, and the next year. Then determine how you will measure success. Is it website traffic? Meetings? Sales lead quality? Social engagement? Revenue? Number of new customers? Conversion rates? SEO ranking? Subscriber growth?

2) Embracing an agile marketing plan 

Technology and customer behavior can now change seemingly in the blink of an eye. A plan (and a clear understanding of your objectives) will help you develop short-term goals to hit those long-term objectives. A plan can also be used in forecasting, scheduling blog posts and content, and organizing. Together, the plan and objectives will help you to make informed decisions about which marketing activities to execute and when. Highly effective marketers will have agility to adjust their plan to adapt to constant changes and new trends to deliver the best customer experience.

In agile marketing, the following are core values:

• Ability to respond to changes rather than strictly abiding by plans
• Emphasis on data-driven decisions instead of opinion- and convention-based decisions
• Rapid reactions rather than big-bang campaigns
• Smaller studies instead of a few large experiments
• Collaboration and regular stand-ups between teams colleagues

3) Understanding the target audience

Author Philip Kotler contends, “The aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous; the aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or services fits and sells itself.” On that note, who exactly is your audience? Use information such as demographics, geographics, and psychographics to develop personas. From there, consider the following questions:

• What are your audience’s pain points and challenges?
• What sorts of content and topics do they want? (Keep in mind that just as the selling space is always changing, so are the needs and expectations of your prospects and customers.)
• What marketing channels do they prefer: email, social media, mobile messaging, web, direct mail, events?
• How can you best help your audience? What problem are you solving, and how can you add value?

4) Knowing the competition

Continuously staying informed on your competitors is a crucial part of your business. A competitive analysis is your opportunity to take a deep dive into the market space and assess the competition. Answer these questions:

• Who is your competition? What do they do? Where are they? Who are their customers?
• What are the points of parity and points of differentiation between you and your competitors?
• How do consumers perceive your brand and you competitor’s brand?
• What is your unique value proposition?
• What can you learn from the successes and mistakes of your competitors?

Again, because the market is in constant flux, continuously re-assess your competition. Together with the knowledge about your audience, this information should drive your branding, messaging, and product strategy.

5) Taking the time to do research

What are the hot topics in your industry? Look at Google Trends, social media trending topics, and popular blogs to see what conversations are being had. Explore Buzzsumo to analyze what content performs best for any topic or competitor. What are industry experts talking about? Let this information guide your content creation process, ensuring your collateral is relevant and meaningful.

6) Considering new ideas and embracing creativity

Doing the same thing all the time opens the doors for burnout. Maybe you are in a content creation rut, or you are exhausting yourself as you crank out thousands of words. Consider fresh topics, try different types of content, experiment with new marketing channels! Just because you are a B2B marketer, it doesn’t mean your marketing efforts have to be flat and dry. Be willing to think outside the box. Those ideas that lean more on the side of creativity will help break through the noise of content overload. Creativity lends itself to innovative thinking, effective problem solving, out-of-the-box ideas, and fresh strategies. Never stop learning, listening, and questioning. With the proliferation of digital marketing in today’s B2B marketing space, there’s no room for staying stagnant – ‘the way you’ve always done things’ just won’t cut it anymore.

7) Paying attention to detail

You never get a second chance to make a good first impression. That is as true in life as it is in marketing. Paying attention to detail is important. Have you tested on multiple devices? You don’t want potential buyers or customers e-mailing you about a broken link, images or CTA.

8) Building customer relationships

It costs 5 times more to acquire a new customer than to sell additional services to an existing customer, stressing the importance of building and maintaining customer relationships. Relationship marketing forms a mutually beneficial relationship between the customer and the organization. For the customer, it’s less risky to do business with a familiar organization. For the company, loyal customers have a greater likelihood of future business, and satisfied customers will tell their friends about the positive experience.

9) Collaborating with both Sales and Marketing

Collaboration promotes trust and credibility, so don’t be afraid to ask for help from other teams and get their perspective to make your marketing campaign as successful as possible. Marketing and Sales teams should collaborate as much as possible, from acquiring and nurturing leads to closing them and driving customer success and advocacy. In other words, highly effective marketers will collaborate throughout the entire buyer’s journey.

10) Storytelling 

Today’s buyers are aware they are constantly being marketed to, and many prefer to avoid the hard sell. They instead prefer to be educated, entertained and inspired. Highly effective marketers are good at storytelling, which makes their campaigns feel more genuine. It’s important to use emotional connections in storytelling to deliver value and make a lasting impact so buyers and customers won’t forget your brand. Good storytelling is highly effective in all types of marketing, from product marketing, demand generation to content marketing and everything in between.

11) Harnessing data and knowing your metrics and KPIs

Don’t underestimate the power of analytics. A recent CMO study reveals that 94% of CMOs believe “advanced analytics will play a significant role in helping them reach their goals,” yet 82% indicate that their companies are “under-prepared to capitalize on this data explosion.” These stats validate the importance of data for B2B marketers. Your marketing activities should be an ongoing cycle of testing, measuring, and improving. Look at what works and what doesn’t and then adjust your plan accordingly.

12) Using time and technology wisely

The use of technology can be a significant differentiator between effective and ineffective B2B marketers. But with thousands of tools available, how do you ever choose? A sales enablement tool can integrate with marketing automation, allowing marketing teams to bring the value of content marketing to sales. Highly effective markers use their time wisely. By utilizing a sales automation platform, marketers spend less time locating content and creating custom sales materials. Salespeople can discover and use winning marketing content for any given sales situation; and any prospect or customer engaging with that content can automatically be scored accordingly. As a result, marketers know the ROI of their marketing content and marketing campaigns. The analytics in a sales enablement tool offer insight into what content is most effective at progressing the deal and generates the highest ROI, helping sales reps provide the right content at the right time.

Interested in More? Check out 8 Must-Have Qualities In a Great Sales Team Manager or learn about Building a Marketing Technology Stack to get insights on how industry-leading organizations leverage technology for sales enablement best practices.

The post The Top 12 Qualities and Habits of Highly Effective Marketers appeared first on Seismic.