Being a B2B content marketer is like being a quarterback in football. It takes vision and creativity to create scoring opportunities from thin space, but ultimately it is the responsibility of one of your teammates to make the final touch that leads to the goal.
And just as a soccer team won't score many goals when the strikers and midfielders are out of sync, it's hard for a company to generate revenue when the content and the sales team aren't on the same page.
Unfortunately, this kind of misinformation happens quite a lot in organizations that are still looking to market content that is right for their sales funnel. Frequently, salespeople receive content that they don't know what to do. In some cases, they may not fully understand the value of content marketing in general, ignoring what could be a particularly valuable tool to use in conversations with potential customers. .
In the “Storytelling Secrets from the Best Content Marketers” panel at Content Summit last week Magnet Media CEO Megan Cunningham explains that the fastest way to motivate salespeople to use your content is to show them exactly how much revenue it generates for your organization.
“Marketing needs to stop thinking of itself as a cost center, spend countless hours poring over thousands of metrics to try to prove their worth, and instead just look at performance from a savings standpoint.” cost savings and revenue contribution perspective,” she said. “Once you do that, you can have a loud cry that 'Content is…really contributing to the value of the story we're all trying to tell.'”
Cunningham, whose company Magnet Media combines the services of a marketing agency and video production company, has been joined on the board of OneSpot CMO Adam Weinroth and Avaya Senior Director of Global Communications Jeremiah Glodoveza.
Glodoveza reiterates the importance of aligning your content with ROI, saying that his team is incentivized to work closely with salespeople because Avaya's marketers have a fixed revenue target of $ million they need to achieve each year.
“When you put the marketing team on notice like that, on an almost quota-based system, it really changes the organizational structure and sense of urgency of the team,” says Glodoveza. "And I think that's a good thing."
To achieve benchmarks, members of the sales team actively participate in the company's content planning meetings. There, the marketing team explains the purpose of high-level campaigns while salespeople help develop concepts for pieces of content they'll use as discussion points during sales calls.
For the most part, Avaya generates white papers, case studies, and customer testimonials that focus on topics lower in the funnel persuading customers to upgrade their existing communication technology.
At OneSpot, a content delivery platform, Adam Weinroth's team provides salespeople with field notes full of suggestions on how different pieces of content can spark conversations with customers. potential customers. In fact, sometimes a company takes its sales-content synergy a step further by developing specific pieces of content for each lead the sales team is attracting.
“Sometimes it’s deeper, this is an interesting topic, something that all content marketers, or everyone in vertical, or some aspect of,” Weinroth said. of digital marketing interest. “But sometimes, we shrink the audience to be very, very account-specific. It's a segment of one. ”
When salespeople and marketers can work together, the results can be powerful. Take, for example, the Magnet Media video series created for information hosting company Tintri. The series is based on a character named Carl, a funny IT guy who turns to Tintri to alleviate his work problems. When the company's salespeople attended an industry conference with Joe Tantalo, the actor who plays Carl, they quickly realized they had developed a cult fan base. Tantalo was surrounded by admirers, who lined up for him to get autographs on their outfits.
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woo6PDZdPyU[/embed]
Magnet Media and the Tintri marketing team created the perfect strike, and it got Tintri salespeople in the right position to capitalize on the opportunity.
“Seeing is believing,” said Cunningham. “The sales team started seeing the needle moving video because they had one of the most popular booths at the show.”
When sales and marketing clearly understand how their respective efforts will benefit profits, cross-departmental collaboration will only help both parties do their jobs better. What good is a great pass if the person on the other end of the line isn't prepared to put it in the net?
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