It has never been easier to discern the relationship between content and revenue. But the recent rise in importance of content marketing will likely bring extra scrutiny to every dollar spent.
The ideal is a content strategy that engages an audience and leads many of them to become customers and come to rely on your brand's services and maybe even evangelize them.
But how do you prove that your content does any of this?
Phyllis Davidson, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester, shared a process that should help during the Content Marketing Institute's recent webinar Show Me the Money: The Role of Content in B2B Revenue Growth (Available upon request).
Connecting content, customer experience and revenue
Organizations create content to help their prospects and customers. Unfortunately, an overly complex customer experience (and content) sometimes gets in the way.
as per Forrester's study, B2B buyers generally find business content less helpful. Some of the unique and powerful data points include:
- 55% of respondents call the material they receive from businesses “external” and looked for content from other sources to confirm its validity.
- 61% say they receive too much material from businesses.
- 63% say content focuses more on style than substance.
- 67% of respondents say they appreciate competitive comparisons – and they don't get it from suppliers.
But Phyllis says one of the findings highlights the role of content in driving revenue: 69% of respondents say they are unlikely to extend contracts if the content they receive from a business isn't valuable or helpful.
“I can't think of a better point to make in this discussion about content and revenue growth than this,” she says.
But marketing teams often overlook this revenue opportunity. “No matter what you're selling, chances are you need to focus on retention. And that means the content journey needs to continue,” Phyllis says.
“However, we find that there is always so much pressure on marketing to sell that the pre-customer stages of content planning get more attention.”
Customers generate revenue. Content that influences, attracts and engages customers.
If your goal is to improve the customer experience, then improve the content that aligns with the entire customer experience should have a significant impact. After all, content is a crucial part of the customer experience that drives dollars to your business.
According to @Forrester research, 69% of #B2B buyers are likely to extend contracts with a business if the #content they receive is not valuable, says @PhyllisMusings via @GregLevinsky @CMIContent. Click to tweet
5 building blocks for building content
So how do you make sure you're focusing on the content that has the best chance of driving revenue? As usual, everything comes back strategy. Without one, you're just creating assets – not value.
And this content strategy must be based on the needs of your buyers and prospects. You also need to know where they go for information so you can make sure they find your content there.
But you can't begin to show the relationship of content to revenue without having these process and operational components to support your strategy:
- resources and alignment
- Property Management
- Metadata and Taxonomy
- infrastructure
- measurement
Here's how Phyllis explains the importance of each element and how it all relates to revenue.
1. Resources and alignment
Resources, skills and culture drive any content program. This is why Phyllis recommends that all organizations have these elements (f Management support Each):
- Dedicated content operations team
- content strategist
- Cross-departmental Content Council
The content operations team should be multi-skilled. Some of the roles and responsibilities in the team may include:
- Audit and inventory management
- Property Management
- Content data and analysis
- Labeling and taxonomy
- content technology
If you don't have a content operations team, create a proposal for a number of content employees, conduct a content skills assessment and create a content board. From there, focus your content actions and develop the necessary skills. But no matter where you start, the one thing you can't ignore is the need for it Content actions.
“Someone has to be in charge… more and more, you need operational people who can plan your content journeys,” Phyllis says. “There is a growing need for sophistication around this.”
The content management team needs to take ownership of the resources and skills to create content and Creating culture of innovation focused on digital transformation and customer experience.
2. Asset management
Property Management It's not the sexiest part of content creation, but the impact of poor management is resounding. Many B2B marketing organizations waste time, effort and money because they don't manage their content assets well.
According to Forrester State of B2B Content 2022 Research (fenced), 65% of B2B marketing organizations struggle with significant content waste.
More than half of the respondents in the survey report that the ability to search contributes to the waste of content. Another 30% say the lack of personalization contributes to wasted content.
A strong asset management strategy starts with content inventory, basic tagging and taxonomy. From there, content teams need to analyze asset gaps, consolidate the asset library, and optimize tagging.
Once you have a solid asset base, you can create a global content library and universal taxonomy strategy. Property management also translates to sales, and in turn to the bottom line of the business.
“If you want to talk about how content affects revenue, understanding what uses sales is key,” Phyllis says. “Using winning sales reps content and use it more than compared to their average peers.”
Want to explain how #Content affects income? Find out what parts the sales team uses, says @PhyllisMusings via @GregLevinsky @CMIContent. Click to tweet
3. Metadata and taxonomy
Understanding the effectiveness of content is impossible without it metadata and taxonomy. Their development requires dedicated time and effort, and consistent implementation in all content repositories.
Phyllis gives this example to illustrate their importance. Let's say your corporate content team has created an excellent e-book that is translated into multiple languages. Local offices around the world characterize it as different content types. One says it's a white paper, but another calls it a brochure. Without the appropriate metadata and global taxonomy, your company cannot accurately measure the impact of this content.
To clear up any confusion surrounding these terms and their roles, Phyllis offers the following definitions:
- Taxonomy is a database of standard words or labels that you use to tag your content.
- metadata is structured data that tells systems and users facts about content characteristics (such as target audience, topic, format and industry); When provided at the component level, this metadata enables modular content
Semantic AI is starting to help with these tasks. This set of technologies includes ontology, knowledge graphs, natural language processing and machine learning.
Many platforms use artificial intelligence for automatic tagging. Although these programs are not perfect, their development will only increase.
Once your organization develops a universal taxonomy, component-level metadata automation, and artificial intelligence at scale, content customizations become possible without as much manual work.
Phyllis returns to the e-book example to illustrate the possibilities. Let's say the e-book is developed around a topic. When you create the generic version, you also create industry-specific modules for the creation. AI identifies the industry of site visitors and provides the industry-specific version of the e-book.
Providing this kind of experience requires all three elements: taxonomy, metadata, and artificial intelligence.
4. Infrastructure
Infrastructure is the technological basis for the content machine. Unfortunately, many organizations lack the essential elements to support effective content creation, scheduling, scaling, workflow, asset management, and measurement.
While there is some overlap between capabilities in some systems, process documentation can help streamline adoption across the organization. Integrating existing technology is just as important as adding something new to the fold.
Start by taking inventory of technology Supporting your content and adapting it to business requirements. From there, estimate any new necessary investments, including piloting and adopting AI to do some of that work.
5. Measurement
Obtaining 360 degree content report Enables content strategy, creation and intelligent data-driven insights. But many organizations make the mistake of looking only at The ability of the content to attract a lead, promote a lead or close a deal.
This is a mistake in Forrester's analyst's perception because no piece of content causes any of these things.
“Content doesn't sell your solutions, but it can have a significant impact,” Phyllis explains. “Marketers need to teach the organization what influence means and why it is so important.”
What content marketing teams need measure? Phyllis recommends process and performance metrics. “Process plus performance equals content ROI,” she says.
Process plus performance equals ROI #Content says @PhyllisMusings via @GregLevinsky @CMIContent. Click to tweet
Just remember who needs to see what data.
Metrics around content, production, review and tagging activities show marketing leaders that you have the right elements in place. You also need to track how much content you create and how much is activated (ie, how much is used by sales and other teams).
Creating reporting dashboards with a wide variety of content metrics helps tell the story of your content team. Analytics help inform your content strategy throughout.
For example, if sales uses a content type more than the content type associated with closed business, you do more of that (or change other types to that format).
Phyllis recommends approaching content reporting the same way your organization approaches sales reporting: make it a quarterly activity against the same process and performance metrics.
For performance measures, e Content metrics should match the goals. So, if growth is the goal, the content plan should show how content will help achieve that goal. The quarterly report then shows what the team has tried to encourage greater engagement with customers in the growth area and how well these efforts have been achieved.
Hypothesis-based analysis can also help. Phyllis gives an example of a hypothesis where your contacts who consumed content closed faster and at a higher dollar figure than deals where no content was consumed. Find out which metrics will let you know if this hypothesis is true.
Get strategies on content linking and revenue
Strategic content is a crucial driver of B2B revenue growth. But connecting these dots involves more than tracking performance metrics. You need each of these five building blocks to develop the content intelligence you need to marry content and cash.
Learn more about connecting content and revenue during ContentReva free digital event, on Wednesday, December 14, 2022.
Cover image by Yosef Kalinovsky/Content Marketing Institute