Aligning Your Go-To-Market Teams: Why Is It So Freakin’ Hard? – Chapter 5
Content Strategy
At B2B companies, a content strategy is always a sales content strategy, so it makes sense to keep sales involved in the content auditing and content planning process. Sales can provide input and anecdotal feedback to keep content aligned with the buyer journey, or provide introductions to customers when planning for video content or case studies.
When it comes to your content strategy, all your entire go-to-market team should be invested in the content that is being created:
Marketing creates the content that the buyers consume, so they need to stay on top of what content is informative and will resonate. Marketing wants to enable buyers to self-educate and learn about the solution without friction.
Buyers are consuming the content on their own before they have sales conversations. Sales wants educated buyers who are ready to make a purchasing decision.
Customer success sends relevant content to customers with the expectation of finding upsell opportunities and fostering continued use of the product.
While all organizational teams should take an interest in content creation, the role of content creation still falls within marketing. Without data to validate what content is relevant, and what will contribute to higher conversion rates, it can become a bit of a tug-of-war. It leaves marketers creating tons of off-base material that gets buried and goes unused. This can lead to poor quality leads and missed opportunities with customers (and the vicious cycle of finger pointing).
With teams aligned, businesses can:
Improve the content development process.
Combine key marketing messaging with sales’ customer knowledge to create content that speaks to your organization’s mission and customers’ needs.
Quickly and easily research ideas for new content.
With customer insight from each team, use data to shed light on topics that other people at the company don’t have visibility into. By building a customer-centric content strategy, you can focus on aspects of the customer experience that have varying degrees of visibility for each team.
Determine what’s most popular.
As the keeper of the content strategy, marketing has the opportunity to track content performance through analytics. On the other hand, sales receives direct feedback from prospective customers. Both sets of inputs provide a well-rounded idea of how customers interact with content, so you can strategize better.
With content intelligence, a unified go-to-market team can move beyond simple page views and clicks to really understand what their customers want—and isn’t that every team’s goal?
