Marketing’s role is continuing to evolve to become more tightly weaved into revenue generation. From creating awareness to nurturing leads to accelerating buyers along, and, in some cases, to producing its own revenue, your department continues to take on more. And the respect for your contribution should grow in kind (well, in theory).
As content continues to become part of more and more strategies, here are five ways that you can leverage your content initiatives to get more credit; from the executive suite, the water cooler and the target customers.
1. Create content for all phases of the buyer’s journey. Not just top of funnel but content for the middle to nurture and bottom to help close. Sure, content that is aligned to the lower stages is harder to create, but content that helps at the later stages of the journey is more likely to get easier-to-measure results.
2. Ensure that you are tracking content consumption and how content is moving buyer’s down the funnel. While aggregated data on content consumption is OK, individual content consumption data (especially for B2B) is better. This data should include comparisons of sales cycle length with and without content consumption, among other things.
3. Attribution measurement is finally getting its due. Since content’s effect on revenue can be hard to measure, incorporating attribution into your measurement practices is a must to prove its effectiveness. Said another way, attribution objectively proves why your content makes you a rock star marketer.
4. Develop a partnership with sales for sales enablement content. This partnership should go beyond tapping into sales for their content needs but should include developing a system of how to track the usage of content. With the right content and the data to show how it is working, even your chief revenue officer will be singing your praises.
5. Communicate content initiatives throughout the company. Communications should include: content strategy, editorial calendar, talking points for each content asset (including how to best use it) and results. Everyone is busy so connecting the dots can go a long way in getting credit.
Bonus tip: If you aren’t doing it already, consider developing marketing-based revenue goals. With buyers needing salespeople later in the journey (if at all) and content doing much of the heavy lifting at the top of the funnel, now could be the time to claim your piece of the sales pie.
