Too often, Content Marketing teams are reactive (responding to requests from the organization) or one-dimensional (e.g. only focused on SEO). Meanwhile, resources are limited.

Content plays a role across the customer journey and needs to be produced for multiple scenarios.

Requests come from all kinds of sources (salespeople, exec team, campaigns etc.) and there is no way to prioritize.

Content leaders need to act like Product Managers and run a content roadmap process.

Prioritize the highest ROI items for the business against the limited resources available to product content.

Don't just produce random content.

Do you have a content roadmap?

Your sales response time is critical to the effectiveness of your marketing programs.

Your prospect, in many instances, has booked a demo with AND your competitors at the same time (especially if they did research online).

The person who contacts the prospect the fastest has a huge opportunity to set the right frame for the sales conversation.

Not only that but you get a chance to speak to the person when they are actually trying to resolve their pain.

Each hour / day lowers your odds of closing the deal.

If you take a week, you're likely putting that lead into the "No response" category.

Bad follow-up can be the reason why a good growth channel is overlooked.

Act accordingly.

Content is so heavily under-utilized to equip sales to have better conversations:

1) You educate the prospect (never a bad thing)

2) You showcase that you understand their pain

3) You build trust and credibility

Most importantly, you earn the right to contact that person again and they look forward to hearing from you because you provided them with value.

You are always selling transformation and who your prospects and customers will become if they buy from you.

Marketing and sales becomes a whole lot easier when you know your product can move people further away from their pains and closer to their aspirations.

Build a culture where people fall in love and are obsessed with helping your ideal customer navigate this journey and you will build a winning company.

Paid Media and Content scale differently. That's the main reason why companies jump to invest in paid media while hesitating to invest in content.
One has a low-barrier to entry (money). The other has a high-barrier to entry (time, effort and creativity).

Building the content engine for a company takes patience and playing the long-game.

Content is also how you scale paid media faster because all kinds of possibilities open up beyond the usual campaigns that everyone else in your market is competing for.

As many companies have found out firsthand, hiring salespeople with great track records doesn’t guarantee your sales team will hit their targets.

Even if you fill your team with talented sales reps, they won’t be able to deliver their maximum value unless you train them to be experts on selling your specific products to your specific target market.

A study by Bridge Group shows that the average tenure for a salesperson is only around 1.5 years, so chances are you’re regularly onboarding new salespeople. The faster you can get them up to speed and selling effectively, the more value you’ll be able to get from your limited time with each rep. 

The key to training reps better and faster is to create a sales playbook. This asset outlines your company’s particular sales processes and best practices so everyone on the team can refer to and learn from it. The sales playbook should include all the resources new reps need to start making sales.

Whether you’re building a playbook from scrat...

Digital marketing can generate incredible ROI, but to capture that potential value you need a well-organized team of experts.

If your Facebook ads are already driving leads, a paid media expert and a skilled marketing designer could optimize the ads to deliver leads that are higher quality. If a blog post is capturing 20 email addresses each month, the right writing and SEO skills could help it capture 50. 

Building a team that can maximize the impact of your digital channels isn’t just a case of hiring extra digital marketers. Instead, the most successful marketing teams are structured in a way that focuses on digital marketing results and includes specific key skills.

You can use these links to jump to a specific section:

• Two hiring approaches that hold teams back
• What a digital marketing team should include
• How to structure a marketing team
• Digital marketing team role descriptions

When you're ready to start hiring, click here to download our Marketing Leader Job Descript...

Does it seem like your team is churning out content without any means of prioritizing what to work on next?

We see this often within companies that have recently merged or made an acquisition and have a central marketing team. Teams can slip into the habit of working on each product line in a siloed way and lose sight of the projects that can best benefit the business as a whole.

Instead, the output of Marketing needs to be managed across product lines by focusing on measurable results. Building a cross-product content marketing roadmap allows you to strategically allocate your resources and drive leads in the most efficient way.

You can use these links to jump to a specific section:

• The content dilemma of multiple product lines
• The data-driven alternative approach
  
  • Inventory audit
  • Performance audit
  • Gap analysis
  • Redesign, repurpose or merge
  • Prioritize
  • Timing and resources
• Roadmap output

The content dilemma of multiple product lines

Many companies with multip...

One of the things we see when companies are acquired is that the acquiring company will do all kinds of due diligence. For most companies, that includes technical, financial, and legal due diligence, as well as an assessment of the market and the pipeline. But one area that we see being consistently overlooked is marketing due diligence. 

There is plenty of data, information, and opportunities hidden within the marketing side of every business that aren't analyzed before an acquisition. With all the other kinds of due diligence happening during the LOI-to-close stages, marketing due diligence often isn’t prioritized. 

In this blog post, we’re going to show the types of insights that can be uncovered, and the value they can help you capture, and even give you a step-by-step checklist to follow. We’ll cover:

• Why marketing due diligence is critical
• Three marketing questions you need to answer in the due diligence period
  • Where are the opportunities to scale demand gen
  • Where are t...