The times they are a’changing
Adopting new technologies in tandem with integrations for BD will fundamentally change how pitches are delivered and help quantify the quality of content throughout the process. “And it’s just around the corner”, says Mediasterling MD Rod Lambert.
The PSMG’s 2021 conference was fascinating. Naturally, all the movers and shakers gave a great performance and, understandably, local technology constraints occasionally made things a bit bumpy, but what an eye-opener to what’s round the corner and a stark reminder of our need for constant evolution on how we use technology to do business.
As fun as the avatars, spaces to roam and various interactions were, the global potential and opportunities for analytics is a true step change.
It was also interesting to see the increasing use of the “S” word (sales) in applying best practice in marketing and business development from other industries and this short article looks at technology opportunities to improve the effectiveness of content to generate business.
The American Bar Association says law firms ignoring technology trends such as AI or analytics will “scarcely be able to compete for new business.”
Much like the virtual conference, there are state-of-the-art platforms and future-thinking technologies that can be embraced now.
Professional services marketing can be more effective in the content it creates by looking at other industries and, specifically at the relationship between the content marketing strategy and sales enablement.
Content marketing is creating and distributing assets using various mediums to generate leads for the business. These are distributed via outbound channels such as sales, or inbound, like the company website.
Enablement ensures salespeople have the right content and guidance to close deals. This is by managing content repositories including just-in-time guidance in support of the sales process via customer conversations.
McKinsey predicts knowledge automation will generate an estimated $5-7 trillion across industries, with its ‘Disruptive Technologies’ report identifying emerging technologies will have an annual economic impact of $33 trillion by 2025
The specialisms are deeply intertwined. Without content, the sales enablement team have nothing to offer their sales force. But without a dedicated sales enablement team, content marketers struggle to ensure assets are used effectively and that prospective clients are armed with the thought leadership needed to make informed decisions.
Building understanding of content performance as buyers move through the sales funnel to closing a deal will highlight the distinct content needed to move deals forward. Looking at the three sales stages of Awareness, Consideration, and Purchase, because content marketers are focused so heavily on the earlier funnel efforts, content development efforts tend to focus on the start of the journey, the Awareness stage.
As an illustration, The Content Marketing Institute found B2B marketers allocate between 28-46 percent of their total marketing budget to content marketing. But if you look at it from the sales end, the Information Technology Services Marketing Association says about 80% of content created by marketing is rarely or never used by sales.
Content marketing spend 28-46% of marketing budget 80% of content created by marketing rarely or never used by sales
Software that both helps generate all marketing content more efficiently while simultaneously facilitating enablement will help close this gap. The good news is that this can be achieved through evolution, rather than taking on a whole new way of working, where platforms with integrations to other systems can slot in, offering multiple efficiency benefits.
“The Content Marketing Institute found B2B marketers allocate between 28-46 percent of their total marketing budget on content. But if you look at it from the sales end, the Information Technology Services Marketing Association says about 80% of content created by marketing is rarely or never used.”
Although not yet in professional services, Mediasterling is seeing a rapidly increasing demand for blending browser-based and traditional document-based authoring for investment research. This is driven by regulatory demands for greater transparency and accountability, but the fringe benefits of consumer analytics are ideal for sales.
Technically, a production workflow manages brand, regulatory compliance and multi-channel distribution to web portals simultaneously displaying any published content while giving metrics and engagement interactivity now standard for websites.
The same mechanism for compliant content is used for documents, presentations, videos and audio distribution in excess of 20,000 unique, trackable pieces of content per year for a team just over 100 analysts. This may seem a lot of content, but the dynamic nature of this particular business means that these have a short lifecycle with engagement peaking in days.
At a more sector agnostic angle, Templafy provides an integrated workflow to create any brand and business-compliant Office document, guide it through an internal approval process and then to an enablement solution. So, in a single pass, users can create content in Office, send to recipients directly from the applications, collaborate and then track the engagement in a first-of-its-kind fully complete document lifecycle.
Templafy also has a raft of integrations too. You can launch a document from anywhere (like your CRM), manage its compliance, automate its production via gating questions and database integrations, before sending it to anywhere, such as your DMS or existing sales enablement solution.
This gives a seamless production workflow plus the all-important metrics on document usage through to granular feedback of engagement for your content marketing withing the business.
As content and document production specialists - including pitches, reports and presentations - Mediasterling sees this as a short hop before client-facing BD materials lever the same benefits of enhanced interactivity with meaningful readership analytics on every pitch, feeding the CRM or bid reporting solution. By extension, you then can track the journey from a pitch to, for example, the case studies that are on your website rather than hard-set into a PDF.
So, as that newly arrived octogenarian Bob Dylan would say, “The times they are a’changing”. If you would like any advice on content enablement, pitch production or document automation please contact rod@mediasterling.com