Content Strategies to Drive More Leads
Caid Christiansen•Quality leads and good business contacts are the lifeblood of a sales organization. So, there’s constant pressure for marketers to gather and qualify those leads. Yet, only half of companies recently surveyed say that their content delivery tactics are meeting expectations.
Published in July of 2015, the study from the CMO Council and the Content ROI Center highlights the difficulties that companies have in creating content that provide measurable results in terms of leads generated. In the survey, a staggering 88% of marketers did not believe that they had “high-performance” content strategies. Among the key failings reported were:
- Not developing customized, content
- Not ensuring content was relevant and meaningful
- Not reaching the right target audiences
- Not leveraging the right contact and syndication channels
Taken individually, each one of these gaps could be addressed with content optimization, channel testing, and online tracking. Taken together, though, this points to a bigger failure–a lack of a content marketing strategy designed to hit key performance metrics and ongoing tracking against plan.
In the Content Marketing Institute’s (CMI) 2014 B2B Content Marketing Survey, 94% of small businesses reported using content marketing as a tool for business development. However, only 44% said that they had a documented content strategy.
That simple failing–the lack of a documented strategy–is what leads to the lack of results from content marketing. If content marketing is an important part of your current (or future) plans, you should make sure you answer the following questions:
Who is the target audience?
What kind of content is relevant to this audience?
How much time can I reasonably expect the audience to viewing my content?
What actions do I expect the audience to take and in what timeframe?
What are the measures of success?
How often will we measure and report on the program?
Once you have those answers, the final question you need to ask is the most important: “Does all this align with our sales strategy?” If it doesn’t, then you have time to re-work the strategy before executing.
It’s only when your documented plan is in alignment with sales strategy, and is measurable, that you’ll start to truly see the ROI on your content marketing strategy.
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