In 2015, Seth Godin made a bold statement: “Content Marketing is the only marketing left.”
He means content that provides value and insight to the reader rather than thinly veiled promotional messages. To accomplish this, the average B2B marketer devotes 28 percent of their total marketing budget to content marketing, while the most reputable devotes 46%. (source)
Despite the significant spending, 63% of the marketers don’t have a documented content strategy. As a result, their content doesn’t consistently speak to its audience, and experiments are not always well thought out.
In particular, the ability to deliver optimized content to prospects across multiple channels, nudging them through the B2B buyer journey, is a significant pain point. Enough so it’s given birth to “Content Enablement” services and platforms.
What is content enablement?
Content enablement is the practice of delivering high-quality business content to prospects that ultimately persuades them to move through the buying journey. It involves the creation, classification, dissemination, and optimization of content to convert prospects to customers.
Content enablement in a B2B context includes arming your sales organization with the assets they need to engage prospects effectively, including:
- PowerPoint sales presentations and slides
- Case studies
- Customer testimonials
- eBooks and Whitepapers
- Email campaigns and newsletters
- Long-form content and blog posts
For example, a sales team uses PowerPoint presentations to help sell a complex set of products to various customer personas. Depending on the specific products/features of interest, the value propositions that resonate, and the stage in customers buying journey, the sales team needs to pull the suitable slides to build a compelling presentation quickly. Managing this operation is the crux of content enablement.
Content enablement strategy improves the efficiency and effectiveness of your content marketing initiatives.
How is content enablement different from sales enablement?
Sales enablement is a broad term that covers many subfields including sales content management, sales training, coaching, and sales process optimization. Content enablement is a subfield of the sales enablement process.
In concert with the other subfields of sales enablement, content enablement provides solutions that ensure that compelling content is efficiently delivered to prospects (and customers). Content enablement has its own set of tools and processes to help achieve this goal.
What are some benefits of content enablement?
With a documented strategy in place and a toolset to support content management, creation, and delivery, you can unlock many benefits:
- Sales reps effectively access content using a streamlined process from a minimal set of repositories. They no longer need to be overwhelmed with different distribution platforms and disparate content.
- Coordination between the sales and marketing teams drastically improves. Sales reps are empowered to tell their own stories that resonate with their prospects, but in a managed process that meets marketings requirements (e.g., information accuracy, branding).
- Content chaos is reigned in as marketers can classify their content appropriately and map out their quickly growing repositories.
- Trends in content and delivery methods are identified early by analytics and allow for optimization and better results.
Conclusion
Content enablement is the process of creating, classifying, disseminating, measuring, and optimizing content to compel prospects to become customers.
