Today’s ever-changing buyer makes it difficult for marketers to develop, manage, and distribute content effectively. Yet, content is critical to your success. How can you keep pace and produce quality content that your audience craves?
We recently spoke with Toby Murdock, the co-founder and CEO of Kapost about this difficult task. Kapost is a content marketing software that helps marketers organize their content marketing efforts. They specialize in ideation, production, distribution and analysis of content marketing activities. And their brand promise is “end content chaos.” So, what does this mean to all the marketers out there?
Content Chaos
Toby explained there are two levels of content chaos. First, how that chaos manifests to the buyer. And secondly, the internal chaos around the operation to produce and distribute the content.
Murdock states that many organizations are providing a poorly aligned customer experience. What does this kind of experience look like? All the touches along the customer’s journey are disjointed. Often the messages have nothing to do with each other. And the efforts to bring buyers through the buying process suffer and aren’t effective.
Similarly, there is internal chaos between the sales and marketing teams. Too often they operate in silos with their own tools and channels. They’re misaligned and not working together which results in wasted content, resources, and time.
What is the fix? How can companies master this and have a fantastic, aligned customer experience? Toby believes the answer is managing content effectively across that entire customer journey. And across the entire content process.
Creating Content that Works
One of the first steps to rid your organization of chaos is understanding the customer journey. Murdock recommends understanding every step of the desired journey. And keep in mind, it’s not always about the kind of content. In fact, Toby states the medium doesn’t matter. Instead focus on the topic and the questions the buyer is asking themselves at each stage of the process. What question is your content answering? The medium can come later.
Toby also suggests starting with your objective in mind. You’re not creating content just for the sake of creating it. It’s about attracting your buyers, moving them through the buying process, and creating new customers. It’s also about delighting those customers you already have to generate repeat business. Only by keeping these goals in mind, can you be sure you are creating content that will be successful.
Testing and Improving Your Content
He also recommends having one, cohesive, integrated view of how content is performing across all channels. Because at the end of the day, the only thing buyers care about is their overall customer experience. This is why organizations need an integrated approach.
Second, he recommends scoring your content. This doesn’t just mean looking at the raw performance numbers. It means understanding if the content helped move the buyer further down the journey. To do this you need to combine content consumption analytics with your marketing automation data to see where it was effective. This scoring then gives you insight to improve the content you create going forward.
Ultimately, it’s the age of the customer. In order to win, marketing and sales need to provide an outstanding customer experience across every element of the journey. And it’s really content that defines that experience. If you’re going to make the number, you need to have winning content. To do this, marketing and sales teams must be aligned. This will enable your organization to produce content needed to make your number. If you need more help with your strategy, download our playbook here. It will guide you in developing a successful content process.
