Buyers are king and as they become more knowledge powered fostered through new communication channels, they are always in search of best research and sales processes leading companies to apply a more sophisticated, engagement strategies. To manage a greater role in decision making process, companies are evolving new ways of content marketing, to be a part of their internal communication strategy.


Content Marketing – Current Status and Challenges

A study released by Aberdeen Group, suggests that content maturation is steadily increasing, as around (59%) of leader respondents suggests that content marketing efforts are well aligned with sales methodology as compared to the other 45%.

Study also reflected 3 top challenges to content marketing success:
  • Gathering talent/resources for content development and management (39%)
  • Generating enough relevant content (37%)
  • Conforming the relevancy of content

A well-managed content program allows you to have a strong lead generation process to fall back on. To make the most of it companies devise different strategies in accordance to the noise received by sites that includes:
  • Company authored white papers (52%)
  • Web events (31%)
  • eBooks (31%)
  • Online assessments/ROI calculator (23%)

There are content resources that marketers tend to set free, like
  • Videos (74%)
  • Slides (48%)
  • Infographics (44%)
  • Company authored white papers (41%)
  • Third party curated content (27%)

Ungated content can be used for inbound objectives, catching attention and binding engagement, connecting with people and inviting them to next level of content experience. By producing relevant, informative content marketers adhere to support a relationship with the buyer and support their desire to move to the next level of engagement.

KPIs Tracking

  • Inbound/referral traffic (95%)
  • Utilization/consumption/views (91%)
  • Conversion (64%)
  • Impact on sales cycle (36%)
  • Virality (32%)

Getting content Fastracked – Five Takeaways

  • Excel the “hidden sales cycle”, a commonplace to educate buyers where they are good at answering their own questions.
  • Develop content helping brands get discovered on core messaging
  • Content is not important for every single buyer persona at every stage of the game
  • Sales is important for becoming a trusted advisor, eventually creating a need for marketing support
  • Align the content experience to sales methodologies and support alignment to enable strong metrics and conversion rates.