You’re asking yourself “Why aren’t my prospects responding to my campaigns?” or “Why isn’t my customer count growing?” The warnings are clear; lack of new logo acquisition and increased churn. Minimal change in cross-sell / upsell as a percentage of total revenue is another. Here’s the bad news: your target audience just isn’t listening.
The fact is customers and prospects aren’t responding to your campaigns. The return on the marketing investment (ROMI) is not there. Your budget was cut yet again and you’re starting to wonder if you’ll have a job in 2014.
You begin rehashing the feedback from sales, customers and prospect surveys. It continues to be the same:
- Your marketing team is sending generic content not specific to a problem the audience is trying to solve
- You’re sending existing customers material on products they don’t want or already have
- The feedback from customers & prospects is “you guys are sending us too much”
Blanket marketing is annoying customers. Treating them generically is turning prospects away from engaging with your company.
The problem is typically not the quantity of material, it’s the quality. If the message isn’t resonating, it’s noise to customers and prospects.
5 Remedies for Poor Response:
- Build / update your Buyer Personas – align content to the persona. Read more on personas here.
- Build / update your Buyer Process Maps – align content to the BPMs. Read more about BPMs here.
- Improve your Voice of the Customer (VOC) with better customer & prospect survey data (online or interviews).
- Implement or upgrade your win/loss/no decision program. If you’re still doing it internally, it’s likely producing limited insights. Stop and reallocate those funds elsewhere; it’s a waste of your budget.
- Perform a Content Audit to determine if your content is aligned to your buyers from beginning to end.
A Content Audit is what we’re focusing on today. It’s a complete inventory of your marketing content aligned by buying stage. The ability to map content by buying stage allows you to identify any gaps in content. These gaps help explain lack of early, mid or late stage leads. The inability to move the buyer through the buying process results makes ROMI impossible.
Most companies have solid product content that is only valuable at specific points of the buying process. The goal is to drive the prospect through the entire buying process. Sequencing content based on buyer insights adds velocity to the lead funnel.
Have you audited your marketing content yet? If so, how often do you audit your content? Is it mapped to the buying process? Are you regularly updating your material, adding new content, and removing old content? Failure to remove stale content is the killer. Companies that don’t maintain their content inventory effectively lose control quickly. Content soon becomes unmanageable.
Download the Content Audit Template and determine if you have a content gap. Assess which phases of the buying process are weak. The audit template example provided includes categories and sub-categories of content.
Content Audit Template Example:
The content download template includes blogs as a category example. In order to audit your blog content, start by listing all blogs. Then organize them by sub-category and determine which buyer phase they support. The template utilizes 3 phases of the buying process: 1. Awareness, 2. Consideration, and 3. Preference. To properly map your content, align each piece of content to your Buyer Process Maps.
If you have any questions or concerns contact me at [email protected]. We’ll spend 30 minutes to walk through the content audit template and how to rank and align content by phase.
