Content is the number one failure point of demand generation programs. In this webinar Paul Rafferty, CEO of Sales Engine International, covers the top five challenges to delivering relevant content. The presentation includes best practices on: defining your message, developing a content strategy, building an editorial calendar, segmenting for targeted content, utilizing resources for outbound campaigns, and using content for social media.
Top Five Challenges to Delivering Relevant Content
1. The Top Five Challenges to
Delivering Relevant Content
Overcome the Barriers to Effective
Prospect Engagement
2. For Today‟s Presentation
• To join the audio portion of this webinar:
Call: 1 (773) 945-1011
Access code: 286-562-701
• We will start promptly
at 1:00 PM EST
• Your phones are muted.
Please use the Q&A
function of the meeting
window. (found under “Tools” menu)
3. About today‟s speakers
Paul Rafferty: Presenter
Paul Rafferty is the Founding Partner of Sales Engine International and Chief
Executive Officer. Paul is a richly experienced Senior Sales Executive whose
unique insights and "steady hands" are greatly valued by all Sales Engine clients.
Prior to founding Sales Engine, Paul spent 20 years with a Fortune 500
company, rising from Field Sales Rep to Regional VP of Sales and finally National
VP of Sales Operations with responsibility for a sales organization exceeding 600
people.
4. About Sales Engine International
• Private - founded in 2006
• Executive team of senior
sales and marketing
executives expert in:
– Sales Operations /
Acceleration
– Go to market strategy
– Demand generation
• Delivered ½ decade double
digit sales growth for $1B
company
• Provide Sales Acceleration
Services to companies from
Start-ups to Fortune 50
• Profitable by walking our
talk
5. Agenda
What are the challenges to delivering relevant content?
• Defining the messaging
• Developing a content strategy
• Building an editorial calendar
• Segmenting subgroups for targeted content
• Having enough content/resources for outbound
• Content to maintain social media sites
• Summary
• Q&A
7. What is content marketing?
RIGHT Person, RIGHT Message, RIGHT Time
Irrelevancy reduced chance to close a sale by 45%
- International Data Group
8. 1. How do we define our messaging?
• Messaging starts with understanding your
audience
– Identifying their pain points
– Using their language
• Then, telling your story
– Positioning your organization first as a source
of information of value to the customer
– Demonstrating how your product or solutions
brings value, solves a problem or meets a
need
9. Ideal Prospect Profile
Demographics Psychographics
• What are their interests? Career paths? Professional goals?
• What keeps them up at night?
• How do they influence the buying process? Who influences
them in the buying process?
• What do they read? Where do they go to learn?
10. Map Their Buying Journey
• What high % business
challenge does she
face?
• How will she go about
solving that challenge?
• Why you are her best
alternative to help
solve that business
challenge?
12. Messaging Workshops – Key Areas
for Discussion
• What are the unmet needs of the market-
place?
• What specific competencies does your
organization have in this area?
• Why are prospects evaluating vendors?
• What is the measurable impact of your
solution?
• Why would they choose you over a competitor
• Customer stories – proof points
13. 2. What is a content strategy?
• Develop content that attracts
• Develop content that differentiates
• Develop content that aligns to the way people
use the web to solve problems
• Develop content that converts anonymous
suspects into known prospects
• Develop content that nurtures until the prospect
is „sales ready‟
15. 3. Why Editorial Calendars?
• In BtoB, the messaging has to be
delivered consistently to be effective
• Each piece of content has to be part of a
bigger picture
16. Editorial Calendar Best Practices?
• Part calendar/part project plan
• Basic details: Title, Author, Publication
Date, Publication Status
• Destination
• First and Final Draft Dates
• Back up content
• Process steps: Images, Layout, Legal
Review, Test Site
19. 4. How can we segment subgroups
for targeted campaigns?
A: Marketing Automation
Content
Right Right Person
Message
Marketing
Buyer Buying
Phase
Automation Persona
Platform
Right Time Right
Follow-up
Online
Activity
20. The Role of Marketing Automation
Co-Dependent Relationship
Content
Marketing
Automation
21. 5. Exploding your Content - Volume
for Campaigns
Keyword
research
Messaging Scripts & Additional content
workshops questions
opportunities:
• Flash presentations
Videos • PowerPoint
presentations
• Press Releases
• Microsites
• Webinars
HTML
Article
Video > Podcast > Transcript > Article > PDF
23. SalesEngine.TV Content Portal
“Mask” the Domain so
the
clientname.salesengine.tv
subdomain becomes the
“Resources” page for
your website
24. 6. Leverage Social Media content
1 Blog post
becomes 5 social
1
media
Blog
placements
2
Facebook
Lorem
ipsum dolor
sit amet,
3
Twitter
4
LinkedIn
5
YouTube
25. Summary
• Content is and will remain “King”
– The most trusted form of Advertising
• You need to declare a deliberate strategy
• You need the support of your organization
• You need tools to measure success and ROI
– Good news, they are better than ever!
• There are smart ways to maximize the quality
and quantity of content
• You must stick with it! It DOES WORK!
26. About today‟s speaker
Paul Rafferty, CEO and Founder, Sales Engine International
Website: www.salesengineintl.com
Blog: www.salesengineintl.com/blog
Email: prafferty@salesengineintl.com
27. Q&A
• If you have a question for
Paul, please type your question
in the Q&A section of the
meeting window. (found under
“Tools” menu)
• Your question will be answered
in the order it was received.
• If we don’t get to your question
due to time restrictions, we
apologize and will email you a
response shortly after the
session has ended.
28. Get the Map
If you would like to receive a copy of the Sales Acceleration
Map, email: alexis.borucke@salesengineintl.com
Editor's Notes
Thanks Alexis and thanks everyone for joining us today. Recently I read a report from B to B Magazine on the “State of Email Marketing”. - It surveyed many top marketing and sales execs at hundreds of B to B companies and asked them to answer questions about ever aspect of their email marketing programs. The top concern wasn’t SPAM… or compliance… or list purchases. The overwhelming majority are concerned about content, specifically producing and delivering relevant content to their prospects and customers.
So let’s start with a Definition…Content marketing is the technique of creating… and distributing …relevant and valuable content.It is designed to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience - with the objective of driving customer action.The belief is that educating the customer results in the brand’s recognition as a thought leader… and industry expert and in turn, drive leads researching their options to the seller. Content is the most trusted form of advertisingMany organizations are hiring “content engineers”, which is a marketer who creates, optimizes, and distributes the different types of content required to engage customers on the social web, based on the data of many analysis tools.Proof Point for MAP…DemandGen Report, reveals that 95% of buyers chose a vendor that provided ample relevant content throughout their buying cycle.
Understanding your audience or audiences… is difficult in B to B. When we work on messaging, we consider the different buyer persona that we are trying to reach. All your messaging should be created for one persona or another, whether it’s a CFO or a CEO or a functional user like an HR director or a financial analyst. - Keep in mind that at different points in the engagement cycle, different personas become involved in a buying process and although their pain points may have a common they may be very differentAt the core of your messaging, you have to establish credibility, not just as a vendor of your solution, but also as reliable and valuable source of objective, relevant information in your area of expertise. By starting from that position of trust, you are more likely to maintain your prospect’s attention when it’s time to move on to the specifics of your solution.
Paul will Comment:Most good messaging processes contain a similar flow…but wWhat is keeping your DM up at nightWhat can you do to specifically help with those needsThis is the gap between my current state and where I need to get to…this spurs prospects to actTurn the knife a bit, exposing the impact of the pain or shortcomingFrom there…let’s layer in the competition, and what they are likely to say…and shine the light on OUR strengths over them.
There is some basic homework that has to go into creating your messaging. -Questions you have to ask yourselves as an organization. -Sometimes it can be pretty difficult to gather everyone together …and get some consensus on these questions, but you have to get buy in at all levels for your messaging strategy to carry weight. - Because if you can’t get the stakeholders to agree on your messaging, you’re going to have a hard time living up to it in the marketplace.-To craft meaningful messaging, you also have to understand your competition. You may not ever directly talk about them, but you need to know realistically how you stack up when you position yourself to win
Once you’ve got your message down, you need to develop a strategy around the types of content you’ll create, what to use in different media and at different phases of a buying cycle. To be effective, your content strategy has to be broader than just one marketing medium. Your strategy needs to be at a higher level, so that you can make the best use of your resources for developing content and the resources you have for moving a message out to the marketplace.The purpose of a b2b marketing strategy is to attract prospects, convert the anonymous shoppers to known visitors and engage them through the entire buying process.
Because of the change from the traditional sales model, the content you create is replacing the interactions of sales people. You don’t know exactly when your buyer is going to step forward and raise his hand, digitally. So you have to be organized and consistent in the delivery of your message to increase your “odds” in being in the right place at the right time. If you skip a campaign because you didn’t plan out your content in advance, you’ll never know who you missed.
The content calndar or editorial calendar is more than just a schedule of what is going to be shared on a particular day or week. - You’ll need to consider all the content needs – the destination for the content. - Also consider your resources, don’t set yourself up for failure by creating an overly ambitious calendar. - You may need to recruit contributors from outside of your department (executives…or third parties), whose priorities are set by bosses other then yours…be careful with this…as it will doom your schedule before it is even distributed
There are many ways to create editorial calendars…the key thing is to get SOMETHING logical on paper to share.If you plan on distributing outbound content via email campaigns… posting content to social media sites and blogs… and producing new content for your website – you may want to consider a master calendar for a high level ability to track the overall progress of your content strategy. The events on the master calendar may vary in frequency, you might tweet daily, blog once a week and publish eNewsletters and webinars on a monthly basis. But having this in one place for all to see is key
You can then use campaign specific editorial calendars …like this social media calendar, for example… as a means of tracking at a more detailed level, the steps needed on a monthly or quarterly basis to keep social media sites current with fresh content. Here you might plan out in advance what content you will share via each channel. If you can tie it all together with a theme, that can make it a lot easier to prepare the content in advance. So try to plan content themes for a full quarter, and then draft it all in advance, so that it is queued up and ready to go . Suddenly, social media content management is not so daunting. We’re going to talk more about keeping social media content fresh in a few minutes,
Your Marketing Automation Platform is the content disseminator… enabling you to automatically build a relationship with your clients by having a relevant conversation with them at the time that is right for them. Some you may be familiar with are Eloqua, Manticore and Marketo. These solutions are a necessity to execute top tier marketing campaigns, score leads, and get an aggregate view of your prospects.A MAP enables you to collect the information you need to determine buyer persona & buying phase and then move them thru the buying cycle with content that is relevant . It improves targeting a segmented group with a campaign once you’ve identified not just who they are but also where they are in the buying cycle.
Marketing Automation and Content Depend on each other. MAP is useless without targeted, value add… content. Conversely, you can have incredible content, and a great strategy but without the right tool to distribute it to the right person at the right time, you will underperform. If you’re not using marketing automation software, it’s probably time to start. -A recent Gartner study found that marketing automation has the strongest growth of any solution in the CRM category. -- -SiriusDecisions expects 50% of BtoB marketing orgs will have marketing automation adoption by 2015 andTiming is also a big part of your relevance… and it takes a MAP to keep you in synch with buyers.You can have the best messaging out there and it might be perfectly pitched to a critical buyer persona, but if you haven’t identified that segmented buyer in a marketing automation tool, haven’t captured their consumption of your content digitally, then it’s going to be pretty hard to know when to send them the right outbound campaign to engage their interest and move them forwards in the buying cycle.
Here is a method that Sales Engine uses to generate content for its customers: - First, messaging workshop - then, keyword research - THEN, WE write scripts and Q&A questions loaded with SEO keywords - we shoot 30-40 videos of varying length - convert them to Pod, Transcribe, tweak 10-20% for a downloadable PDFOther format and derivative Options available once you capture the CORE content
Sales Engine TV:Portal Containing all content created in this processCan be linked to company website as “resources” pageAdds keyword rich content for Seo.
Leverage social media content to automatically appear in multiple places.