According to a recent Netline study, B2B content consumption at the decision-maker level increased more than 15.8% during 2021 over the previous year. That statistic indicates that aligned marketing — a partnership of sales, marketing, and other key teams to best reach those decision-makers — needs to be a top priority for the future.
Whether you’re trying to reach corporate executives or consumers, aligning your marketing with your company’s objectives and teams enterprise-wide is the most effective strategy to achieve your goals.
1. Align Your Marketing Goals with Corporate Objectives
That alignment needs to start with marketing teams meeting with their C-suite executives to align marketing goals with those of the company overall. Unfortunately, in many larger companies, both marketing and executive teams exist in silos rather than in partnership.
Take the initiative and break down those silos. Meeting with your company leadership will put your performance on the road to success. And, when you do help your corporation achieve its objectives, your C-suite will likely look more favorably on increasing your budget.
2. Partner with Your Sales Teams on Content
A joint study by Marketo and MathMarketing revealed that marketing-generated leads have a 67% higher likelihood of closing. Even more importantly, leads attributable to marketing generated 209% more revenue than leads from other sources.
But if you don’t know what your sales teams need from you, that percentage is likely to drop. Meeting with your sales teams to collaborate on content helps you set joint goals and keep you on track to hit those goals.
Ditch the silos between you and your company’s sales teams, and watch the magic happen. Here are some tips to make your partnership a success.
Set a “North Star” Goal
As PandaDoc CMO Nate Gilmore advises, start with a “North Star goal.” This goal should, of course, align with your company’s core objectives.
Then, create a roadmap to get you there. Set concrete goals for each step along the way so that you can track your progress. That way, if your content strategy isn’t hitting those interim goals, you can reconfigure it so that it does.
Discover the Buzz Out in the Field
Your sales teams have heard it all from their prospects. All the questions and feedback they hear can be fruitful sources of topics for future content.
Overcoming those objections and answering those questions can go a long way toward creating effective sales enablement content. Additionally, encourage your sales teams to request personalized content that will help them win over their major prospects.
Use your collaboration sessions to learn more about the sales process itself. Then, teach your teams about that process so they can tailor their content to support your sales teams at every step.
Focus on Generating Quality, Qualified Leads
As Marketing Insider Group’s Carter Grimm says, marketing teams often focus on generating huge volumes of leads rather than focusing on quality. This approach, he advises, leads to frustration and failure within the salesforce.
Encourage your sales teams to share their data with you. If your content platform integrates seamlessly with the sales analytics platform your company uses, it should take little time but produce a wealth of actionable information, allowing you to discover exactly who buys your product.
For B2B companies, that would include the size of your customers’ businesses, their industries, pain points, and the customers they serve. For B2C enterprises, this data includes your customers’ demographics, income level, interests, and the challenges that keep them up at night.
Armed with that information, your teams can construct buyer personas and buyer’s journey maps that align with your company’s target customers. Then, they have everything they need to craft compelling content that drives conversions.
Look at Both Sales and Marketing as Co-Owners of Success or Failure
Grimm also points to companies’ failure to tie ROI to both marketing and sales teams as a tradition that needs to land in the dustbin of history. Instead, he advises, take ownership of ROI yourself, tracking that metric as well as the number of leads, followers, and shares you generate.
3. Shore Up Your Brand’s Trust with Subject Matter Expertise
To achieve your company’s goals, you need to build your prospects’ trust in your brand. What better way to build trust than by taking advantage of the industry knowledge within your own company?
Content collaboration with your company’s subject matter experts will provide you with in-depth information that builds your brand’s reputation as a trusted authority in your field. Aligning your marketing strategy with their expertise does precisely that.
For example, if your company is an auto manufacturer, meet with the engineers that design your cars. If you’re a healthcare provider, consult with the top docs in your facility as part of your research. If you make accounting software, your dev team can tell you exactly why your platform outperforms your competitors’ offerings.
With that information, you and your teams can create content that helps your audience discover more efficient ways to do their jobs and live their lives. Since solving problems is the heart of effective content marketing, your subject matter experts’ advice is essential to driving your points home.
4. Create Content That Builds Loyalty Even After the Sale
Marketing shouldn’t stop the moment a prospect becomes a customer. When you create content that helps customers troubleshoot problems and get more value out of their purchases, you’re enhancing their overall experience.
As research from Bain & Company shows, companies that provide their customers with an excellent experience grow their revenue by 4% to 8% over their competitors — and yield customer lifetime values 6 to 14 times greater than companies that do not.
Aligning your efforts with those of your customer service teams through collaboration on product support content can help your company achieve those kinds of numbers.
Image via Bain & Company
5. Align All Your Communications with Your Brand Voice
The siloed environment of all too many large corporations often leads to a muddled brand voice. Spokespeople for each department often use jargon that they’re familiar with instead of using the language that defines your brand.
Using an AI content creation and governance platform like Writer can help your teams define and enforce your brand voice enterprise-wide. With such a tool, these teams can filter all their communications through a content checker that suggests alternate wordings when people veer off-brand.
Even better, when you pair that tool with a content marketing platform that has robust metadata management, you can easily identify and revise past content that doesn’t reflect your brand voice. DivvyHQ’s metadata management feature is second to none in the industry — and comes with an open API and integrations with hundreds of other platforms, ensuring seamless data sharing company-wide.
Better yet, you don’t have to buy it to see what it can do to align your marketing strategy with your company’s goals and other teams in your organization. With our 14-day free trial, you can experience the difference with no risk to you and your company. Start your free DivvyHQ trial today!