I’d like to welcome a guest blogger, Nicole Sommerfeld, also from TDA Group. TDA Group is the premier B2B content marketing for high tech. TDA Group plans, creates, and manages content marketing programs that help maximize the return on marketing investments—and accelerate sales. And great content is needed to fuel great demand generation!
Remember the famous tagline for Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups? “Two great tastes that taste great together.” Whether or not you happen to be a peanut butter-and-chocolate fan, content and demand-gen definitely go great together. But to drive qualified leads, you need to combine the two ingredients effectively.
Read on, if you want to:
- Connect your marketing activities to revenue
- Improve marketing results by delivering truly relevant content
- Fuel your marketing automation engine with a scalable, efficient content strategy
TDA Group has partnered with Revenate Marketing to hit the sweet spot for growing companies. You may have implemented (or are considering) a shiny new marketing automation system (Marketo, Pardot, HubSpot, or the like). You’ve probably created demand-gen campaigns and assets to capture and incubate leads. As a result, you’ve nurtured some marketing-qualified leads and transferred sales-ready leads to your sales team.
But your marketing engine isn’t living up to expectations.
So where’s the problem?
We find the issue is often the combination of your content and demand-gen strategies. Maybe you have the right assets, but the wrong timing. Maybe your content doesn’t focus enough on the specific information needs of each different persona. Or maybe you have the wrong assets altogether. On the other hand, it could be your content efforts simply aren’t linked properly to your performance metrics, clouding your ability to assess what is working and what is not.
If you’re experiencing any of these issues, it’s time to remix the main ingredients and conduct a demand-gen content audit to uncover the great-tasting content in your marketing engine.
Why a demand-gen content audit?
Information needs change as your audience progresses through the buyer’s journey. A demand-gen content audit assesses how well your narrative serves the wants, needs, and information consumption preferences of key personas at each stage in their buyer’s journey. The audit also identifies content gaps and recommends how you can repurpose existing content to accelerate the journey. And it flags gaps in metrics associated with your content performance.
Poor content execution gums up your marketing automation system in countless ways. We see companies struggle with this piece of the puzzle when the content creation team isn’t in touch with the folks running campaigns. In some companies, these people are split into separate organizations that compete internally for headcount, influence, and budget.
Simply put, a demand-gen content audit helps get stakeholders on the same page, focused on priorities for success.
What goes into a demand-gen content audit?
When TDA and Revenate conduct a demand-gen content audit, we review and discuss your personas, explore the roles and information needs of your highest-priority audiences, and examine how the buyer’s journey maps to your campaigns. We also review messaging by persona, and help select the content assets to include in the inventory for the audit. Finally, we assess your marketing automation platform and make recommendations to improve the way you measure the true impact of content marketing efforts and tie results to revenue.
The scope of the inventory for your demand-gen content audit may be broad or narrow, depending on your specific situation and budget. The inventory typically includes web pages, emails, videos, blogs, and other content used in your marketing automation system, as well as assets used by your sales team or business partners.
When conducting the audit, TDA editors evaluate each asset against specific relevance criteria, such as how well the content and messaging:
- Articulate your business vision and brand POV
- Focus on the interests and media consumption preferences of each audience segment or persona
- Cover information needs for the pertinent stage in the buyer’s journey
- Address targeted industries or market segments
- Create effective visual presentations optimized for the delivery format—be it in print, on the web, or across digital/mobile channels
- Comply with brand style and voice guidelines
- Identify content gaps and areas where assets are being misused
- Determine metrics to improve content performance and measure results
This assessment provides the insights you need to set budget priorities and focus your marketing spend on the most effective content touchpoints for reaching your audience through the marketing automation system. And it’s an excellent foundation for building an editorial calendar to plan and execute your content strategy in alignment with campaign initiatives.
How do you get started?
Delivering off-target, unfocused, or misdirected material through a tool that is not primed to optimize the performance of the content in your demand-gen programs is like having the peanut butter without the chocolate (or vice versa). You can eat each one separately, but they taste so much better together.
And in our minds, you can’t feed your organization too many sweets: leads, data-driven analytics, and compelling content.
We’d love to help you tackle these content and demand-gen issues. We’ll even bring some Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups to our meeting. Let’s talk.
