We’re so glad you asked! Content marketing is a resource for customers that uses different assets to address business challenges and help buyers make a purchasing decision. It helps businesses reach, engage, and convert customers by addressing their business challenges and needs. The overall goal behind content marketing is to create a strategy that reaches and converts your ideal customers. 

What is a content marketing strategy?

At its core, a content marketing strategy is your “why, who, and how.” Why you are creating content, who you are helping, and how you will help them in a way no one else can. Organizations typically use content marketing to build an audience and achieve at least one of these profitable results: higher lead quality, faster conversions, and increased revenue.

You’ve probably heard the phrase, “content is king,” and with a thoughtful vision, it can also be an integral tool that helps you get the attention of your audience. We’ve identified 10 core building blocks that will help develop your organization’s content marketing strategy or take it to the next level. Check them out below!

1. Brand guidelines

The foundation of your strategy comes from your brand identity which should include clear guidance on personality, voice, and tone. Successfully communicating your brand identity through your content is critical if you want content marketing to work. Developing and putting to use your unique brand book will help create a consistent voice and tone across the different assets and channels your organization uses. 

If you need some inspiration, here are brand book examples from Mailchimp, Nike Football, Intel, and Cisco.

2. Marketing objectives

Your organization’s marketing strategy helps ground your team on its big-picture goals and objectives. To reach your content marketing goals, it’s helpful to align them with audience needs and streamline your content creation process. This will make it easier to reach your goals, and to be successful, they should be: 

• Specific: State exactly what you want to accomplish.
• Measurable: Determine the metrics for success.
• Achievable: Go for challenging but attainable results.
• Relevant: Make sure the goals support your marketing strategy.
• Time-bound: Outline the period in which you’ll work on achieving the goal.

3. Customer persona(s)

Understanding your audience helps align your content strategy to the addressable needs of your market. A customer persona is a fictional character that is developed based upon different attributes for a role or segment. These can include demographics like:

• Role and responsibilities
• Challenges and pain points
• Influence on the purchase decision
• Goals and objectives
• Solution requirements
  

Most importantly, work to uncover a unique insight about your target customer that the rest of the industry overlooks or under-appreciates. Often, it will serve as the creative catalyst for a successful content strategy or campaign direction.

4. Data and market research

Data and research help your organization understand the current conditions of the market as well as where it’s going. The content that your organization shares with its audience generates data and insights that can help your team fine-tune its content strategy.

Market research provides insights into what other brands have done to improve their strategy. Learning about the market includes learning about your competitors, as well. If you know what content your competitors share with their customers and prospects, you can use that to your advantage. Tools like social listening can help your organization understand how prospects and buyers discuss your product and industry online. These valuable insights can help your organization improve its content and gain an edge.

5. Customer journey map

Once you’ve defined who your customer is, a journey map outlines your persona’s needs and how you can meet them at every stage of the buyer’s journey. An effective map is a visual representation of the customer journey based on what the buyer is thinking and feeling at every stage of the decision-making journey. By understanding what a buyer is thinking and feeling, you can create content that best supports them as they consider your product or service. 

Customer journeys are not linear, but there are several ways your organization can be agile and adapt to changes. Savvy marketing leaders use a variety of methods to represent the journey, from post-it notes on a boardroom wall to Excel spreadsheets to infographics. The most important thing is that the map makes sense to those who use it.

It helps if your journey map is tailored to your specific customer profile (and how you reach and interact with them), but a few guiding principles and good design approaches apply. Here is what is typically included in a customer journey map:

• Buying process
• User actions
• Emotions
• Pain points
• Solutions

6. Content-market fit

At times, the content a company creates doesn’t always satisfy the customers it’s trying to attract, either because the content doesn’t reach them, doesn’t fit their needs, or both. For example:

• Findability issues: content is published without first considering how potential and existing customers might find it → time and effort are wasted on content that nobody sees.
• Relevance issues: content is published without making sure it is what potential and existing customers are interested in/need → time and effort are wasted on content aimed at the wrong audience.

As important as it is to understand your customer, it’s also important to understand the current state of content in your industry to look for opportunities. Be sure to also pay attention to the state of media behavior and content consumption formats, including device usage and visual trends. The key is to find your unique place to stand out and add value to the conversation. Simply put, the goal of a content-market fit is distributing content to attract and retain customers.

7. Process

Every effective content program requires an iterative process that helps your team focus on what’s important: translating creativity into effective content. To build an efficient content marketing machine, consider the following:

• Group content into a few core buckets (eg, videos, blogs, ebooks, microsites)
• Design a ‘best practices’ workflow for each core content type. Think about where each content type begins, who owns the business requirements and brief development process, when/where resources need to be turned on or off, how feedback and approvals are coordinated, how to measure each step, and who’s responsible for the final output.
• Meet with stakeholders and members of your team to see whether your ‘best case’ process is possible and makes sense for them. Identify what might be missing or that you haven’t thought of?
• Test the process. Does it work? Where are the gaps? Where are the breaking points? Processes will mature and develop over time. Stay cognizant of production time and resource requirements. Regularly check in with teams about any frustrations.
• Incorporate habits. Making your new workflows a habit is what will allow you to truly scale your content strategy. Enforce your new workflows internally and find champions at each checkpoint to help you.
  

You may also want to diagram your process, along with key challenges and opportunities for improvement, with a “swim lane” diagram:

8. Internal communications plan

An internal communications strategy can be a recipe for success, but without a detailed plan to execute that strategy, there may be a breakdown in your process. Your content team can bring in diverse voices — your head of communications, customer marketing, product marketing, and senior marketing management — to ensure they’re aligned with your strategy. This is particularly useful if your content team is operating as a ‘service’ function for other parts of the organization. 

9. Content calendar

Consistency is essential when building a digital presence, and a great way to have everyone in the loop is to manage a joint content calendar. This tool will help you plan and stick to a consistent schedule of publishing content. It can include information about the content format, time of posting, channels, and so on.

By scheduling content on a shared calendar, you can enable proper visibility and coordination across different initiatives, teams, and regions.

10. Ongoing analysis

It’s often said “a writer’s work is never done,” and the same is true when you’re responsible for defining a brand’s ongoing narrative. In general, “test and learn” is a sound operating philosophy, and it’s particularly true with content. Place small bets, iterate, gather data, listen for feedback, and then scale your successes. Building great content effectiveness requires patience and perseverance, so it’s important to progress incrementally, milestone by milestone, and break down your ideal outcomes into actionable programs and phases.

Create impactful content and campaigns with Seismic

Wondering how to create a content marketing strategy that is a custom fit for your company? At Seismic, we are committed to helping organizations and teams templatize workflows and task management that accelerate the delivery of high-impact campaigns. Our “work smarter” mentality will help you decrease the time it takes to create content and launch campaigns with robust workflows and proofing that ensure compliance and speed. Learn more here.

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Even more surprising? Many marketing teams haven’t cracked the code to improve their processes and technology to keep up with new demands. 

For example, today, with predominantly digital-only engagement options, B2B marketers face an unprecedented number of requests to create and activate content that enables sellers to move prospects and customers through the buying journey. Yet many marketers still struggle to adequately fill the content-demand gap and align their work to the specific needs of sellers. 

The marketing and sales divide is real

The content-demand gap is rooted in the broader reality that marketing and sales teams are frequently misaligned. Nine out of 10 marketing and sales leaders identify disconnects in strategy, process, content, and culture that hold back GTM efforts​. This lack of alignment creates gaps between marketing and sales where:

• Marketers create content that doesn’t get used by sales
• Sellers don’t understand how marketing content is relevant to their sales cycle, because it’s not contextualized for specific opportunities
• Sellers that are overwhelmed with content often ignore content that isn’t personalized for their audience.

Marketing teams face pressure to bridge the divide between marketers and sellers by creating engaging content that sales will use to engage customers and capture revenue moments in complex sales cycles. 

In reality, the marketing and sales technology at most companies prevent B2B teams from creating the right content to drive meaningful and personalized buyer experiences. That’s where marketing enablement helps bridge the gap.

What is marketing enablement?

Marketing enablement is the process of making marketing teams more efficient by measuring the impact of the work they do. It encompasses the set of technology and practices that empower marketers to improve alignment with sellers. Through strategic insights, marketers can deliver content that resonates and orchestrate campaigns that drive buyers to act. 

Marketing enablement can drive even greater results when organizations unite it with a sales enablement strategy and solution—creating a 1-2 punch that makes upstream marketing activities more efficient while enabling downstream sales activity more effectively. 

How does marketing enablement work?

Marketing enablement helps to align the goals of CMOs, CROs, salespeople, and other GTM participants so that all customer-facing teams can:

• Create, identify, and deliver the right story to the right people, at the right time in the sales cycle
• Ensure that sales and others in the organization can tell a consistent  story 
• Provide sales with the latest (and correct) news and information about products and services
• Orchestrate marketing activity to connect relevant content to campaigns.

What are the benefits of marketing enablement? 

Marketing enablement can have a measurable impact on businesses. Companies that leverage marketing enablement to align their GTM teams often create differentiated experiences for their buyers that yield faster time to close, higher win rates, and more revenue. 

What are the key components to look for in a marketing enablement solution?

Marketing enablement establishes activities that, when executed, will make marketing efforts more efficient. These activities include: 

• Orchestration: Execute campaign strategy, content creation, and measurement across channels
• Curation: Scale content creation and management for stories that matter
• Activation: Package, publish, and promote the right stories with context across channels
• Learning: Leverage data and analytics to understand which content is effective with specific audiences and improve content experiences.

Go-to-market teams will remain under pressure, for the foreseeable future, to create more resonant and engaging content to support sales, often with the same or fewer resources than in prior years. Yet, with a solid GTM strategy backed by marketing enablement capabilities, marketers can deliver the right content and campaigns more efficiently and help sellers be more effective, satisfy prospects and customers, and achieve revenue goals. 

Learn more about how Seismic can help you get started with marketing enablement.

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Among B2B marketers, storytelling is a buzzword that’s often assumed to be the narrative that brands tell their buyer. In reality, impactful storytelling asks brands to identify their buyer’s challenges and create a content experience that motivates the buyer to identify a solution. 

Today, buying and selling are becoming more digital. While the old world relied on face-to-face interactions and transactional relationships, modern buyer engagements are hybrid—both digital and in-person—with a greater emphasis on relationships. As buyers swap office buildings for home offices, companies have adopted new digital sales techniques in order to reach and build trust with their prospects and customers. 

Connect with buyers where they are

The first part of storytelling is connecting with the buyer. With less face-to-face interaction, companies have to be more creative about how they connect with their audience. Fewer in-person events and conferences are pushing more engagement online, particularly to social media platforms like LinkedIn. An IDC survey found that seventy-five percent of B2B buyers use social media during their customer journey. But, connecting with an audience isn’t as simple as blasting corporate-sponsored content—your go-to-market (GTM) team has to connect with buyers on their terms. 

Storytelling is about putting your best foot forward in the medium where your buyer is. This is why social selling is growing in popularity. In order to create successful digital conversations, sellers need to use social media to build credibility before they’re invited by the buyer for additional dialogue. 

Use data to tell the right story

Modern buyers want a continuous conversation, and companies that personalize their content experience have a competitive advantage. From their inbox to social media, buyers are inundated with generic content that doesn’t address their specific needs. Businesses that invest in understanding their audience’s needs are best positioned to build trust through personalization. 

With more interaction taking place online, buyers are having more conversations about their challenges and, oftentimes, your brand. Organizations that invest in social listening or pay attention to review sites can better understand customer needs and how to address them through personalized content. In fact, before you share content with a prospective customer, your salespeople should already know the challenges that they’re solving for. That’s the level of anticipation that customers expect. 

Customers have also grown to expect immersive, interactive content experiences. Advancements in technology help companies deliver these experiences. Instead of presenting content unilaterally to all buyers, interactive content gives the buyer an opportunity to choose the content experience that best meets their needs. For instance, interactive content like a microapp gives buyers multiple options to choose from. Organizations can use the data from their unique content experience to better understand how to address the buyer’s real challenges. In effect, data is a resource that brands can leverage to create better buying experiences for their audience.  

Always remember the buyer is the hero

Every story has a hero. While it may be tempting to make your brand the hero, the buyer is always cast in that role. Donald Miller makes this point in his book, Building a Storybrand. In digital marketing, you only get one chance to capture the buyer’s attention. To make the most of this opportunity, you have to tell your story on the buyer’s terms—which means the story is about them, not your brand. 

Think about it: the buyer is on a journey to find a solution to their business challenge. Along their journey, your brand—through effective storytelling—accompanies the hero on their “hero journey” to resolve their challenge. Through insightful content, your brand can foster the hero’s growth and help guide them to their happily ever after.  

By understanding your buyer’s needs and joining them on their buyer’s (i.e. hero’s) journey, you are building a relationship and brand trust. Storytelling goes beyond sharing the same singular corporate narrative. It requires your sales and marketing teams to understand your buyer’s needs and personalize content in a way that leads your buyer to the best solution for their organization. 

Want to learn more about storytelling and building trust with your audience? Check out binge-worthy on-demand content from Seismic Digital Shift!

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Too often, for large global enterprises and small businesses alike, the bottom of the funnel is a black hole: a mysterious place where the science of marketing meets the art of sales to produce deals—and nobody quite knows how.

Enter Seismic’s Content Analytics: a suite of data, dashboards, and integrations that offers a 360-degree view of content performance from creation to close that powers revenue teams to accelerate deals and business growth. 

With our Fall ’20 Release, Seismic’s analytics for marketing, enablement, and sales teams are better than ever—and unlock even more potential for enterprises to uplevel efficiency and effectiveness, streamline go-to-market strategies, and jumpstart revenue. 

Let’s take a look at Seismic’s Content Analytics and what they can do for your business.

Make data-backed decisions that drive your team forward—data science degree not required

If the words “BI Tool Integrations” or “APIs & SQL” in the graphic above left you worried, don’t be! You don’t need a data science degree to use Content Analytics to uplevel your team’s impact. For teams looking for focused insights into metrics they can take action on right away, our new Role-based Dashboards offer just the right balance of context and curation they need to make an impact—fast. 

Say you’re a sales manager with a dozen young, fast-moving reps to juggle, ever-increasing quotas to hit, and an ever-shifting market to capture. As your sellers fight harder than ever for every demo and deal, you can’t simply let them craft pitches using hearsay and tribal knowledge. But you also don’t have time to wade through Salesforce, parse spreadsheets of data, or draft a list of everything the marketing team is doing. 

That’s where our new Role-based Dashboards come in. From sales managers to content owners, CROs to CMOs to enablement leaders, Seismic’s Content Analytics now includes actionable, curated, out-of-the-box reports, and visualizations tailored to the distinct challenges of specific roles.¹ No superfluous metrics to distract you or slow you down; just the relevant reports and visualizations you need to understand what’s happening and take informed action, leverage your discipline’s best practices, and create your own custom reports to go deeper. Whatever the business challenge or your comfort with data analysis, Role-based Dashboards are your ticket to fast-tracking learnings and improvement for yourself and your team. 

Explore your data, your way

Love your new Role-based Dashboard, but want more flexibility? If you’re working cross-functionally to solve tough business problems, sometimes you need incredibly specific data or filters to get the answers your stakeholders are looking for. That’s why we released new LiveInsights Flexible Dashboards this summer to make the Content Analytics dashboards and data as flexible and portable as possible. To get started with custom dashboards, just duplicate and adjust our out-of-the-box managed dashboards so they answer your organization’s specific questions. And, using KPI filters and widgets, you can drill down to the granular view you need to answer detailed follow-up questions. 

But don’t stop there. Connect Seismic with your team’s other business intelligence tools via our Snowflake integration, or a custom integration and our reporting APIs. By merging your bottom-of-the-funnel data with other cross-functional data sets such as CRM, HR, and customer success, your go-to-market team will have a holistic, yet singular, source of truth to answer its most challenging business questions. Armed with shared answers, you’ll be equipped to build executive alignment, boost confidence in the teams’ ability to hit numbers, and scale best practices that truly move the needle. 

Discover new, comprehensive insights into the entire buyer journey

Staying focused on needle-moving best practices can be especially challenging and critical for Marketing. Especially when business resources are increasingly tight, CMOs need to quantify every cent spent, but their teams just can’t find a way to connect those dollars spent to deals won. Proof of their team’s impact on revenue becomes the Holy Grail—the key to justifying headcount and budget. That’s why Seismic’s Content Analytics provides the rich workflow and content performance insights marketers need to make data-driven decisions about where and how to spend time and resources. 

Say your marketing team is orchestrating a new campaign around a unified theme. Percolate by Seismic Analytics’ interactive dashboards offer insights into which campaigns and asset types take up Marketing’s time; and now with our Fall Release, they also show performance metrics for content published from Percolate to any and all channels—including Seismic, thanks to our new pre-configured dashboard. Now, without leaving the platform, marketers can see how sales is leveraging the assets they’ve created, helping marketers stay efficient, maximize their effectiveness, and spend their time on assets that actually get used.  

Start here, go everywhere

Here at Seismic, we’re passionate about using our own software; and one of the reasons we’re excited about Content Analytics is that anyone can start using these tools to drive change for their teams right away. Packed with all these features and more, Seismic’s Content Analytics starts by shedding light on content performance from creation to close, but it doesn’t stop there. As more and more individuals are empowered with comprehensive, flexible, actionable insights they can actually use, and as enablement teams mature, we’re excited to see more and more opportunities open up to build alignment and scale best practices—both for ourselves and our clients. 

We’d love for you to join us on this data-powered journey. If you’re a customer and would like some help getting started with our new Content Analytics upgrades, reach out to your Customer Success Manager. If you’re evaluating Seismic, learn more about Content Analytics and request a demo on our webpage.

_{¹Chief Revenue Officer and Content Owner Role-based Dashboards are available now; Chief Marketing Officer, Sales Manager, and Platform Administrator dashboards are coming soon.}

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1. Wrong content

Wrong Content encompasses two main issues. The first is pretty straightforward – the content is wrong because it’s incorrect. Informationally wrong content is an easy fix, though correcting it can still introduce extra headaches and expenses to your content cycle. The second issue is a little more complex – content that is not informationally, but existentially wrong.

If you’re doing customer experience (CX) or account-based marketing (ABM), you need a lot of content to support your strategy. If you’re doing both, you need even more content. But it’s not solely a volume issue –  just having a giant pile of random content won’t actually help your CX or ABM. You need a high volume of content that’s relevant to your very specific customer, and designed to address their very specific needs. If it doesn’t do that, then it’s the wrong content.

Wrong content costs you money both by wasting the resources used to create it, and by losing potential opportunities by not connecting with the right people. So what do you do about it?

Solving the wrong content problem starts way back at the beginning of the content production process. Once you’ve determined your strategy and what you need to support it, make sure everyone involved in creating your content has that information, including the objective for each piece and how its fits into the bigger picture. With that information in hand, your team is positioned to create the right content, the first time.

2. Duplicate content

Duplicate content is the inverse problem of wrong content. In this scenario, your organization knows what content is needed and which customer it should address. The issue is that multiple teams decide to create the necessary content, without realizing they’re all working on the same thing. You end up with multiple variants on the same content.

Spending time and resources creating redundant output is obviously a waste of budget – for the same cost, you could have had each team create something unique, and have that many more content pieces finished. It can also cost more than just money. Presenting potential customers with a competing spread of similar content pieces can leave them more confused than persuaded, and possibly cost you an opportunity.

The key to solving the duplicate-content problem is cross-organization communication. It’s easy for marketing teams to become siloed, especially teams with regional or business unit separation. You need to ensure everyone in your organization has visibility into what everyone else is working on, regardless of what team they’re on. Awareness of what’s in progress on other teams will prevent your content creators from unknowingly double- or triple-booking on the same content.

3. Unused content

Unused content is one of the most frustrating types of marketing inefficiency, particularly for your content teams. In this situation, your team has done exactly what they were supposed to do. They’ve created the content you need to address your prospects’ needs and move them forward, and now that content is ready to go to work.

Except…it doesn’t. It sits, languishing on someone’s hard drive or on an intranet server somewhere, never to be used. Your sales team might not even know it exists.

In the short term, unused content costs money by wasting the resources used to create it. Because the content never finds its way into the marketplace, you don’t get any return on that resource investment. In the longer term, you once again face an opportunity cost – you’ll never realize the revenue that might have come from the piece connecting with buyers and convincing them to choose you.

So what to do? This is an area where the importance of sales-marketing alignment really can’t be overstated. Your team produces quality content, Sales wants quality content to help sell, it’s all a matter of fixing the communications breakdown. Better communications practices in general can help with this, as well as tech solutions like sales enablement platforms. The important thing is, have a single place where yours sales team can find all current content, and take an active role in making sure they know what’s available.

Besides just being a drain on your budget, these three inefficiencies have another thing in common: they’re all symptoms of larger orchestration issues, that can have a negative effect on your marketing.

Read more on how these happen (and more importantly, what to do about it) in our free ebook  A Guide to Common Orchestration Problems (and How to Solve Them). 

The post 3 types of marketing content to avoid appeared first on Seismic.

In addition to this, customers don’t have a single path to purchase; they’re constantly consuming information from multiple channels and inputs. Although a buyer’s behavior may not be linear or predictable, they are more in control of their journey than ever before. They want personalized, tailored content experiences—the brand should know what content they’ve consumed and  what they may want to see next.  Buyers also expect content to be delightful, interactive and immersive, not linear and static, which characterizes most marketing content today. The challenges of capturing attention and driving action have only grown due to the emergence of a predominantly virtual selling model, an uncertain economy, and other changes resulting from the global pandemic.

What the buyer expects

Great content is at the heart of great customer experiences. Boring, generic content won’t stand out, engage, or compel buyers to act,which are all important steps that bring them closer to a purchase decision. That isn’t all. B2B buyers are increasingly demanding a B2C experience and they expect the experience to be personalized and immersive. Research data supports the new reality: personalization is key to getting buyers to take the next steps towards purchase. According to a Seismic-commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting,  85% of buyers will dismiss the first interaction if they don’t receive tailored information. That’s a high bar for any enterprise to get over

The personalized content gap

Remarkably, there’s no shortage of content in many enterprises. Businesses are creating more content than ever before, due to the exponential growth of web, mobile, social and other channels that support campaigns and sales engagement. The result has been an explosion of content initiatives across organizations. Despite all that content being generated, we’ve seen a major gap between customers’ personalization expectations and enterprises’ abilities to deliver. Budgets and supporting resources to create personalized content have not kept up with the “generic” content explosion.

The majority of content created today is not personalized or targeted for customers at various stages in their purchase journey. And sales teams, heavily dependent on presentations to product sheets to digital content to help tell a story to their prospects, are overloaded with content that isn’t personalized enough to address the needs of their buyers or appropriately tailored to the specific sales stage. Moreover, even if the relevant content exists, sellers often have a hard time discovering it, so they end up customizing what they have or going with their “old faithful” pitch from a year ago, which is every marketer’s nightmare. 

The Seismic platform facilitates sales and marketing alignment

In late 2019, Seismic acquired Percolate, establishing a powerful storytelling platform for sellers and marketers. By combining Seismic’s industry leading sales enablement solution with Percolate’s marketing orchestration and campaign planning capabilities, go-to-market teams have the unparalleled ability to plan, create, and distribute the most compelling and personalized content wherever and however the customer interacts with their brand. The unification of two key pillars in the go-to market technology stack unlocks powerful analytics and insights for marketers to continuously optimize their entire content portfolio. It also provides sellers automated content recommendations for specific opportunities based on where the prospect is in his or her buying journey.

With a unified marketing and sales enablement solution, Seismic is able to help companies align their sales and marketing teams so their go-to-market engine is better coordinated and more impactful. The Seismic platform enables companies to streamline campaign orchestration and content creation, while also making it seamless for sellers to discover and use personalized content to deliver impactful buyer experiences.

Interactive content 

With the launch of Seismic Interactive Content as part of the Summer 2020 Release,  it is now easy to  develop and deliver interactive content at scale within the Seismic platform. Marketers and sellers can create, distribute, and measure the impact of interactive content similarly to what they can do with traditional static content. Dynamic content types such as microapps or LiveContent are “no code”, easy to use content formats that can be personalized  to provide the immersive, engaging experiences that today’s sophisticated buyers expect. 

Easy to get started with the integrated solution

As part of the Percolate Developer Platform (PDP), we have built a free integration that seamlessly connects Percolate to Seismic, enabling tighter alignment of a company’s marketing and sales teams and unifying their strategies. 

 Key benefits of leveraging both solutions include:

• Align marketing and sales so they can operate seamlessly and jointly, in their common pursuit of delivering compelling buyers experiences through engaging, resonant, personalized content at scale
• Streamline processes on both sides of the marketing and sales equation:  Marketing can operate more effectively and efficiently to create and manage content, and sales can discover and activate the right content at the right time for the right customers
• Break down organizational silos so cross-functional marketing and sales teams are able to work simultaneously towards common, measurable goals
• Use powerful engagement analytics to continuously optimize content strategy and creation based on content effectiveness.

The Forrester Wave: Sales Content Solutions, Q3 2020 report ranks Seismic as a Leader among nine software vendors considered. Forrester writes that the integration with Percolate gives Seismic “more ability to unify marketing, sales, and post-sale activity and deliver content that engages buyers using personalized interactive experiences.” 

Uniting marketing orchestration and sales enablement can help brands deliver exceptional buyer experiences. Find out more about how Percolate and Seismic are better together.

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What we are seeing from our customers

As the world has shifted to fully digital selling over the last few months, we have been using engagement analytics to better understand how our customers are using our platform to activate sales content. It’s evident that our customers are sending more content to buyers—we have seen a close to 90% increase in content shared on the Seismic Platform. Additionally, when we look at our customers’ sales content libraries, we find that they contain predominantly static content that can only be consumed in a linear manner. This is a sharp contrast to interactive or visual content that is often promoted through top of funnel channels such as websites, social media, and videos. A whopping 70% of our customers’ sales content libraries were made up of static content types. As buyers progress down the funnel from Marketing Qualified Leads to Sales Accepted Opportunities, the content they receive is less likely to stand out, engage buyers, or match the brand experience they received earlier in their journey.  

Today’s buyers expect brands to deliver personalized content experiences at every touchpoint of their journey with your brand, from awareness all the way through to purchase. 

Reimagining sales content

Content is meant to be consumed, not scrolled through. To meet buyers’ needs we’re introducing two new features that reimagine sales content as differentiated, engaging, and buyer-driven experiences. Say hello to Seismic’s Interactive Content bundle, a new offering which unlocks two new content types in the Seismic platform: Seismic microapps, powered by Tiled, and LiveContent. Whether you are looking for evergreen sales content to be shared with many buyers or a customized piece of content for a single buyer, we’ve got the solution to transform your static sales content into engaging and memorable interactive buyer experiences.

Seismic microapps, powered by Tiled: Experiential sales content that drives engagement

Seismic has partnered with Tiled, an innovator in immersive content experiences to deliver native microapp functionality directly within the Seismic platform. What is a microapp? Think of it as a new content type that combines the interactivity of a mini-website or an app with the ease of delivery of a document. Microapps meet the needs of use cases for evergreen content that supports sales in their top of funnel, one-to-many buyer engagements. Our customers leverage microapps for event invites, digital product brochures, buyer’s guides, eBooks, and more. 

A flexible, interactive microapp builder right within Seismic’s Content Manager, makes it seamless for content creators to use their familiar workflows. Key features include:

• Easily drag n’ drop interactive “tiles” to imported content transforming it into scrollable image galleries and panes, in-line videos, quizzes, and more
• No code required—makes it easy for content creators to adopt interactive content types within their existing content strategy 
• Adaptive screen sizing for various devices (mobile, desktop, tablet) ensures an optimized end user experience 
• Builder that is compatible with most static content types including: PDFs, JPEGs, PNGs, and more
• Review and approve your content experience before publishing to end users via Seismic’s powerful content targeting capabilities

LiveContent: Personalized sales content that drives revenue

As buyers progress down the funnel, seller engagements shift from one-to-many to more personalized, one-to-one conversations. LiveContent empowers sellers to easily transform traditional presentations into personalized, memorable, dynamic stories that are tailored for one-to-one engagements.

Presentations are created using authoring tools, not engagement tools,  but sellers need to be able to deliver that same engaging conversation in a remote environment, whether in lieu of an in-person meeting or as a follow up to one. The typical methods of sending content require exporting to a static format. LiveContent allows sellers to send presentations in always-on presentation mode, the way that they are intended to be.

Key capabilities of LiveContent include:

• Leverages the ubiquity of presentation tools, making it easy for sales and marketing teams to use familiar workflows
• Seismic intelligently converts standard presentations into LiveContent, allowing all the embedded animations, transitions, videos, GIFs and voiceover to be delivered remotely, exactly how a seller would deliver in person: in presentation mode.
• Seismic stores the original presentation file allowing content creators to make future updates based on powerful engagement analytics 
• Personalize your content at scale with LiveDocs that pulls from any data source to tailor your content “on the fly” so presentations are not only interactive, but also very specific to the buyer’s needs
• Page-by-page engagement analytics provide instant feedback about what is most important to your customers 

Transform buyer experiences

Both Seismic microapps and LiveContent allow sales and marketing teams to leverage existing static content and transform them into personalized, interactive content experiences. Every journey is unique for every buyer because they can choose their own path based on their own interests. Whether you want to build one-to-many or one-to-one buyer experiences, Seismic’s Interactive Content bundle gives you what you need. 

Learn more

To learn more about how Seismic Interactive Content works and request a demo, please visit our website.

The post Interactive Content: Capabilities that transform buyer experiences appeared first on Seismic.

At the end of the day, however, sales and marketing are on one same team. And as customers demand more consistent and more personalized experiences across all channels, it’s never been more important for sales and marketing to work hand-in-hand. 

So how can you achieve sales and marketing harmony? Well, unfortunately, the fix isn’t one size fits all. Alleviating the constant tension over qualified leads and content ROI will take time, patience and strategic coordination. 

We’ve created a few guidelines that have helped smooth out the marketing-sales alignment that are sure to at least be a starting place for your B2B team. 

1. Keep everything that sales needs organized and in one place

Nothing will discourage a sales rep more than taking the time to look for apiece of  marketing- created content, only to not find it anywhere. Invest in a sales enablement tool and ensure everything you want sales to have access to is in there. This way, they can see how much work marketing is actually doing, and they know they can find what they need, when they need it.

2. Communicate any important campaigns multiple times, through multiple channels

Overcommunication can sometimes be better, especially when you’re dealing with a sales rep with hundreds of “out of office” replies in their inbox. So after you send an email, make sure to communicate via Slack or whatever your internal messaging system may be. Once you’ve done that, schedule a 15 minute meeting with them. This way, sales has the information they need on what’s coming, and you can avoid them asking the dreaded “what’s that?” when you mention a campaign. 

3. Provide “everything you need to know” documents for every campaign

Unfortunately, it is not enough for a sales rep to be able to find what marketing is doing. They also need to know how to use it. The more context and instructions you provide, the more ROI you will see. Here at Percolate, we provide an “EYNTK Doc” for every piece of content, webinar, event, or asset we produce. This includes all relevant links, email copy, and talking scripts, so our sales team can start running immediately. 

4. Always remember to address “what’s in it for them” 

What better way to collaborate with a rep than to use their own sales tactics on them? Set an upfront contract that makes explicitly clear what they will gain from investing time and energy into your campaign. This ensures that they are bought in from the beginning. 

5. Get feedback once the campaign is over

Just like with any relationship, there will be hiccups. Some campaigns might fall flat, and that is okay. What’s important is that all teams feel that their input matters, and will be considered when planning the next campaign. One easy way to do this is to provide anonymous feedback forms that you review with the Sales team. 

A rocky sales and marketing relationship goes beyond an occasional tense email. In order to actually communicate your product’s value to customers, marketing and sales must work together. The sooner you take the first step towards tight alignment, the sooner you will see your engagement with customers improve.

With the very nature of sales changing, it is even harder to keep marketing and sales aligned—but also more important.

The post 5 tips to align sales and marketing appeared first on Seismic.

So what has made Percolate a Leader for the third straight year? And how is Percolate leading the future of content marketing?

Executing cohesive campaigns

Percolate has always been excellent at giving marketers the tools they need to execute the best, most cohesive marketing campaigns. Our platform is designed for even the most complex organizations with teams across the globe to collaborate and develop almost any type of content. With robust approval structures available, integrations across the business technology landscape, and the flexibility to customize workflows for each organization’s needs, Percolate  can help a wide variety of organizations create and orchestrate effective content to tell great stories in the marketplace.

Putting the buyer first

With Seismic, Percolate is now going to play a major role in the ability of organizations to tell one single story through the entire buyer’s journey. According to Salesforce, 84% of buyers claim that their experience is just as important as products and services. But when sellers are not reaching buyers with information that matters to them, that experience is not going to be positive, and buyers are going to be hearing stories that are not relevant to their needs. So the capabilities Percolate now has to seamlessly lead go-to-market teams from marketing orchestration into the sales cycle will make teams more effective at reaching buyers with stories that resonate. As Gartner puts it themselves in their report, we are “bridg[ing] the gap” between effective marketing and effective selling – in a way that will make a major difference for buyers and deliver them the experience they deserve.” 1

Preparing for the future

At Percolate, we are excited about the future of content marketing because we are shaping it. A successful story goes beyond just one piece of well-executed content. It is about continuously connecting with a buyer with a compelling narrative, reaching them with the right content at the right time to consistently deliver the best stories to that buyer. Percolate is driving a vision for content marketing that allows marketers to tell the right stories, and make a greater impact on buyers than ever before. Being named a Leader in the 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant is proof of just how exciting Percolate’s future, and the future of content marketing, really is.

Read more about Percolate’s Leader status in the 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Content Marketing Platforms here.

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

1 Gartner “Magic Quadrant for Content Marketing Platforms” by Nicole Greene, Laurel Erickson, March 23, 2020.

The post How Percolate is Shaping the Future of Content Marketing Platforms appeared first on Seismic.

Staying productive

Staying productive during remote work is one of the biggest adjustments for people who are not used to working from home. Luckily, there are numerous tools that sellers can be leveraging during remote work to continue to stay on task and continue to efficiently connect with teammates and prospects.

Video conference apps such as Zoom have obviously seen a major boost in usage and popularity. But as the microapp points out, valuable online tools go beyond video chat. In our microapp, Winning by Design recommends use of in-meeting quizzes and polls, whiteboard capabilities, and more. 

Online coaching

For sales leaders, having to coach and manage exclusively online also provides challenges. Gone are the days of desk drop-bys and weekly in-person meetings. Instead, sales leaders will need to find ways to provide value to their teams and keep everybody on the same page.

Many teams at Seismic have moved to a ‘daily standup’ model to keep teams informed coupled with active learning and contests from our internal enablement team. The microapp also recommends expanding peer-to-peer coaching. With employees needing to become more self-sufficient while working remotely, continuing to leverage the entire team as a resource will keep that camaraderie and have everybody building skills at once.

Connecting with prospects

Most critically, sellers will need to adapt to connecting with prospects in-person, as that is not doable for the foreseeable future. Sellers who are used to connecting in-person with prospects will also need to adjust to finding methods to replicate those conversations remotely.

The first step is obviously finding your way into a conversation. Losing the ability to connect in-person means that finding the right language and subtleties is even more important. Being personal, and ensuring your initial outreach is relevant, shows that you are starting a conversation and not overbearing with a sales pitch.

It is also about ensuring relevance and telling the right story. The microapp points out the importance of finding a provocative, important message to leverage, which is something that we at Seismic feel passionate about. Finding the right materials and the right story to communicate to a prospect is going to make sure that conversations are always relevant to the prospect’s needs, no matter where that conversation is taking place. Utilizing content analytics, personalized content, and sales enablement to effectively reach a prospect with a resonant story will keep the positive momentum of building a relationship rolling as you seek to connect with more stakeholders and advance the conversation.

While moving work to exclusively online has a significant adjustment period, the core is still the same – bring value to the buyer, provide a relevant, resonant story, and ensure you focus on the most important information. Mastering all of the tips and tools available to truly excel at selling online will separate top sellers from the pack in the weeks and months to come.

Interested in learning more? Explore the full How to Sell Online microapp experience, in partnership with Tiled and Winning by Design.

The post Achieving Sales Excellence, Remotely appeared first on Seismic.