4 Ways To Improve Your Content Marketing

While most buyers today will evaluate your products and services on their merits – delivering memorable and emotional experiences at business events can distinguish you from your competitors.

- Frank Cespedes & Russ Heddleston

In the past decade, content marketing has become a widely established practice. Companies have hired writers and chief content officers to run departments, create blogs and other materials, and, in the process, some have assured sales people that content marketing can mean the end of cold calling.

The playbook sounds simple: attract prospects with content relevant to each stage of their buying journey and extend offers that motivate them to contact your sales team for a demo or discussion. With online technologies and targeted lists, this should be a cost-effective tool for separating the suspects from the prospects, accelerating customer conversion through the sales funnel, and, equally important, optimising ‘data-driven marketing’ by tying each piece of content to metrics like opens, reads, downloads, and so on.

But as Churchill reportedly said after Gallipoli: “However beautiful the strategy, you must occasionally look at the results.” Consider: blog output by brands has increased over 800% in the past five years but organic social share of blogs has decreased by 89% and about 5% of content gets 90% of engagement. An estimated 70% of the content generated by marketing is never used by sales reps and a similar percentage of the leads generated disappear into a ‘sales lead black hole.’ And despite the repeated mantra about “data-driven,” there is contradictory advice about which content marketing benchmarks indicate success as well as many blithe assertions about best practices in this area.

We examined 34 million interactions between customers and content on DocSend’s platform, which allows sales organisations to upload and share documents with prospects. The result is empirical data and a good starting point for examining core aspects of any content marketing initiative: how much time prospects actually spend on content, on which devices, when, and the type of content they prefer.