Your marketing team creates awesome content for your sales team to use out in the field, but are you actually tracking its effectiveness? Not just guesstimating, but actually looking at the analytics behind every piece of marketing collateral?
If not, you’re not alone—only 35% of sales teams report tracking the effectiveness of their content. But if you fall into the 65% who doesn’t, it’s time to rethink your strategy.
It’s not always easy to determine the cause of your failures or even your successes. It may not be
apparent why your strategies produce results only some of the time. But tracking your content allows you to easily see which of your assets performed best. With the right sales enablement platform, like verbTEAMS, you can store your compliant digital content in a centralized location that can be accessed by your entire sales team, and see which shareable assets are delivering the best results. But without tracking and receiving analytics on your content, you can never really know what content is successful with your reps and your customers. Let’s talk more about what makes tracking content is so valuable.
Let's talk about why tracking content is so valuable…
Once marketing hands-off content to sales, they usually don’t know what happens next. It’s a lot like tossing it over the fence and hoping for the best. Did the reps use it? Did they even see it? Was it helpful? Marketing receives no visibility once they turn content over to sales reps. They have no idea if the content they are creating is really helping sales. Last week, we discussed the benefits of aligning your sales and marketing teams. Tracking content is just one piece of that puzzle, but it’s an important one.
When you track your marketing collateral, marketing receives insight into what content is being used. They can see what content is helping sales reps (or what’s not) and continue to create optimized content. When they see a piece of content is performing, they can make others like it. Or, if there’s a piece of content that could be improved, they know to go back to the drawing board. These analytics helps your sales and marketing teams work together to create an engaging journey for buyers.
Save Time and Money
Instead of spending a good amount of time and money creating content and hoping that it’s effective, wouldn’t you rather know that it will work? Backed up with user-generated analytics? It can be very frustrating to spend resources on content that brings no ROI. Tracking marketing collateral gives you insights into what is being viewed and shared, so you know what’s working and what’s not. You can minimize the time and money spent as your marketing team creates content, and maximize the effectiveness of your content.
Give Reps Content that Actually Supports Sales
Your content is probably one of the first things that your prospects will interact with, so it needs to make a good impression. According to DemandGen, 51% of B2B buyers rely on content now to research their buying decisions. They want interactive content that educates them and caters to their needs and wants.
As you track your sales and marketing collateral, you’ll be able to have a better understanding of the effectiveness of your content. With these insights, you can create and distribute even more powerful content to your reps. You know how content is being shared, who is sharing it, and how often it’s being shared. You can equip reps with sales collateral that moves buyers through each stage of the buying process.
Now you know the why behind tracking marketing collateral, but you might be asking how do you track it?
How to Track Marketing and Sales Collateral
Do you remember the days of sending emails with file attachments? If you’re still doing that, you should know there’s a MUCH better way. If you’re only utilizing email attachments to share your content, you’re not receiving any insights—you have no idea if your customer is engaging with the content you shared, or if they’ve even opened the email. You might even end up sending multiple emails hoping that they open one, and only succeeding in annoying your prospect in the process.
Earlier in this post, we talked about marketers getting frustrated once they hand their content over to the sales teams because they get no insights. Well, this is other side of that coin. Sales teams are handing over content to prospects and getting no insights into their interactions.
verbTEAMS does the dirty work of tracking your marketing and sales collateral for you! Both teams get real-time feedback on content, with insights they care about to do their job successfully.
We empower marketing with the intelligence they need to create powerful funnels of marketing content. They receive in-depth insights into their content, what reps are using it, how many times it’s being shown and shared. All these analytics are delivered on our powerful admin platform so your marketers can optimize content.
And, at the same time, we empower sales reps with their metrics, how they share and present content. As they share content, they can track when their prospects interact with their content and what they view. All the data is delivered to them on an interactive contact timeline. This helps them know how to position their next conversation.
Track your Content with verbTEAMS
Tracking your marketing collateral is a powerful way to see whether or not you’re getting the results you want. You learn what pieces of content are facilitating sales and what can be improved. verbTEAMS tracks your sales and marketing collateral as it gets shared from your sales reps to prospects. Oh, and did we mention that we’ll also store it in a centralized location? The average number of sales rep spends 440 hours each year trying to find the right content to share with their prospects and customers. What else could they do with that time if they didn’t have to make that decision?
Learn more by watching this video.
