Marketers spend countless hours planning, creating, and testing new content to reach their audience and push new prospects through their sales team’s pipeline.
But up to 70% of content produced by B2B marketing organizations goes unused, according to SiriusDecisions.
Why is this content unused? It’s likely because your content library is not “sales-centric.”
A remote B2B seller needs to be able to find and pull resources quickly and accurately, whether it’s before, during or after a phone call or email.
If your marketing team’s analyst reports, whitepapers and vendor comparison documents aren’t being used by your sales team, then it might be time to re-organize your content library.
Here’s 5 ways marketers can organize content to support sales enablement:
1. Centralize and Standardize Locations and Formatting
If you have sales collateral in multiple cloud drives or digital asset tools, the best thing you can do is to centralize all of your content. This immediately will save your sales team time while searching your marketing resources.
One of the easiest ways to make your content searchable is with keywords and tags. You can create a keyword vocabulary with high-level, broad context keywords and low-level, specific context tags.
Standardizing the file naming structure is also essential to ensure that teams begin to learn where to find up-to-date assets themselves.
2. Create & Organize Content for Buyer Personas
When your content library is organized into specific buyer persona categories, your sales team can search for and locate specific resources much easier.
If you haven’t created and organized your content for buyer personas, here are some ways you can organize your content:
- Content for different company sizes (number of employees, revenue, customers, etc.)
- Content for specific industry types
- Content for specific geographic locations
- Content for specific roles at a company
- for other attributes of your buyer or target audience
Clearly defining your target customers and audience is crucial for sales teams and marketing teams to work fluidly to support sales goals.
By organizing your content accordingly, your sales team will be able to find the resources they need, when they need them the most.
3. Segment Your Sales Assets Based on Outreach Medium
When you define your marketing sequences for each buyer persona, your sales team will be able to follow your outreach strategy to a T!
And if you organize your content for specific outreach mediums, they’ll have an easier time locating your marketing materials and resources to leverage during communications.
For example:
Outreaches on Twitter are generally much more casual than a LinkedIn InMail message or an email. In some cases, it may be appropriate to have a marketing content folder for Twitter with branded GIFs and memes ready for sales teams to use.
In contrast, when doing an outreach via email, you may be looking to attach a research article or case study, so you can organize content depending on these outreach campaign sequences that are defined.
4. Group Marketing Content by Buyer’s Journey/Sales Cycle Stage
Sales teams have unique prospective clients in multiple stages of the buyer’s journey (or seller’s cycle). Try organizing your marketing content based on these 3 stages to help your sales team sort through resources easier:
- Content for the “Awareness Stage” – a prospective customer identifies a potential business problem and begins searching for more information
- You could organize problem-based content like analysts reports, eBooks and editorial content into a specific group for prospects in the awareness stage.
- Content for the “Consideration Stage” – a prospective customer realizes a need for a solution and begins weighing options
- Sorting through and grouping your solution-based content like webcasts, live interactions, or comparison whitepapers would be beneficial for sellers outreaching to prospects in buyer’s the consideration stage.
- Content for the “Decision Stage” – a prospective customer decides to act and choose between your company’s solution or a competitor’s
- When a potential customer or client is looking to make a decision, it’s helpful to keep resources like case studies, product comparison charts, and product literature together for sales teams to access during the buyer’s decision stage.
It’s a simple but effective way to organize content for your sales team to easily implement.
5. Always Keep the Collateral Database Updated
It can be difficult to get sales teams onto a new digital asset system, or to keep everyone on one in the first place.
If your system is only partially up-to-date, your sales team will not be confident in the materials. Having to double check which version is the most current or looking for the location of a specific file will only slow down your team.
Centralize your assets and always upload the current version of your files, templates and other assets.
Bonus Tip: Notify your employees whenever new documents are added or when changes are made to existing files. Keeping everyone informed about current materials is never a bad idea.
Here’s the Next Step…
Before you re-structure your sales content library, leave a comment below and tell me how your team has successfully or unsuccessfully organized assets in the past. I’d love to hear your insight!
