How to Get the Right Content to Your Internal Teams

If people within your organization don’t know where to find your marketing content, they’re not going to use it.

This sounds like an obvious statement, but content "findability" is a major challenge stifling B2B marketing strategies.

Marketing has always been responsible for supporting internal stakeholders – such as sales, customer success, and functions within marketing – with relevant, informative content. But demand has grown faster than organizations can establish processes for delivering content that supports every stage of the buyer’s journey, leaving internal teams high and dry while marketers struggle to get above water.

Most famously, B2B marketers experience this disconnect with sales.

Product marketing, content marketing, field marketing – these are just a few of the functions responsible for creating content to help sales reps close deals faster. But often, sales can’t locate the content they need to support the sales process. In fact, 65% of sales reps say they can’t find content to send to prospects, representing the most common complaint cited by sales teams. Instead, they end up requesting one-off assets from marketing or create assets on their own, inevitably resulting in inconsistent and off-brand messaging and a disjointed, confusing buyer experience.

And it doesn’t stop with sales. Even different functions or regions within marketing teams lack visibility into current content and campaigns. Repurposing assets and finding content to fuel digital channels has become a tedious and luck-dependent process, involving long email chains, inefficient meetings, and manual spreadsheets.

But there’s a light at the end of this tunnel.

The best way to support internal teams and provide the content they need is to create a single, internal content repository where sales, customer success, and the rest of your marketing team can share and find the right content to deliver to the right buyer at the right time.

As Scott Abel says, “The most important factor in succeeding as a content marketer is to acknowledge that your content is a business asset and worth managing effectively.” Time and resources go into creating content, and if it doesn’t get used, those resources are simply wasted.

Below are three key elements of a successful content repository supporting visibility and alignment across teams.

Accessible

Up to 65% of B2B content goes unused.

In order to use the content you create, people need to have access to it. The key here is to have everything in one place. Don’t send your sales team searching through your blog, email chains, or external resource center to find a case study or sales sheet. By establishing a single location for your marketing content, you’ll empower internal teams to quickly discover the right content and minimize one-off requests.

Relevant

The most effective companies are nearly 2x more likely to align content with both persona and funnel stage.

The next element of a useful content repository is that relevant content can be surfaced depending on the specific scenario facing your internal teams. Part of a modern B2B marketing strategy is creating persona-driven content that addresses the questions, interests, and concerns of buyers wherever they are in their journey to purchase.

Give your internal teams the ability to surface content based on these details. Conduct interviews to learn how people search for content, then begin organizing accordingly. Remember, the fields that matter to your business may be different from another company. For example, you might plan your content by product line, region, persona, buying stage, corporate theme, or campaign.

Trackable

Only 27% of marketers say they’re effectively tracking content utilization metrics.

You can’t improve if you don’t know what’s working and what’s falling short. To build an internal content repository that supports the buyer and your team, you need to know what content is actually getting used and whether or not it’s driving impact during the buyer’s journey. Make sure you’ve established a constant feedback loop to understand how often content is being used by internal teams.

Make sure you are creating the right content to share internally by downloading the Modern Marketing Guide to Content Marketing.

Author's Bio: Anne Murphy is the Director of Content at Kapost, makers of content marketing software. She oversees the Content Marketeer, a marketing blog dedicated to the art and science of content creation. Follow her at @amurphias.