Without good content, you may have a nicely designed website that won't hold peoples' attention; or social media messaging that no one reads.

But what exactly is content? There's a misconception that 'content' has to be something big like an article or an entire web page. The best way to think of content is everything with which your audiences interact, be it seen or heard. That includes all written materials, videos, photos, podcasts, radio ads …it's all content. And just because it's small doesn't disqualify it.

Bite-Sized content works even harder. E-mail subject lines, for example. When we send out an e-mail, we send out several batches. The only thing that changes between them is the subject line. When you have space for just three or four words, you have to choose them carefully. Between the batches sent out a change in subject line raised the unique open rate by over 18%. That's important: if our audience doesn't click on that three-word 'advertisement', the whole e-mail goes unread.

Every minute, more than 33 million messages, photos and videos are posted on social media. So your content must stand out. Make sure to adopt copywriters, bloggers, designers and creative talent in your team who can lift your content to a higher level.

Tell your story

Companies are still waking up to the fact that they need good content to drive brand preference. Every organisation has a brand story to tell. When written the right way, every brand story is exciting and engaging. Inbound marketing, where you draw customers to you rather than, say, landing unsolicited in their mailbox, has brand and content at its core. Inbound tools like social media marketing, search engine optimisation, search engine marketing, videos, presentations and speaker events are powerless without great content to animate them. Whatever you do, make sure you have something interesting to say.

Now, keep in mind that people don't read a year's worth of Twitter posts and then devour your entire website. Most people haphazardly consume content. You have to hook them slowly while developing a relationship with them. That's why it's essential to reinforce the same brand story, in the same tone, across media: their impressions of your brand, your voice and your products and services need to be consistent.

You've heard the phrase 'Content is king', well it is! You can have stunning web design, send out copious social media messages, have a great marketing automation system, but you need excellent content to feed these tools and function the way they should.

Customer experience: Down with the silos!

Most companies have different departments: sales, marketing, customer service, IT, finance... All these departments often operate as silos, independently, using other software platforms and communicating separately to the market. From their point of view, it seems perfectly reasonable, but the customer knows only one brand or product. For him, it doesn't matter if sales, marketing or customer services approach him. Non-matching, overlapping or even conflicting information from the same company will be experienced as odd, disturbing or confusing.

Therefore, we are increasingly using a CX (customer experience) approach, transcending the marketing level. When mapping content from a CX approach, we will automatically tune and harmonise the content that is typical for marketing, sales and customer service. Furthermore, we will also reduce the silo thinking pattern and work towards shared goals using shared platforms. This approach increases efficiency and results in a better ROI.

Lead generation and nurturing can be an explicit goal, but it can also be an inherent part of your strategy. After all, content marketing is the basis of every inbound strategy and therefore, perfect for collecting data and generating leads.

The next logical step is to convert these leads into customers, which can be facilitated by modern techniques, such as marketing automation. It would be a shame if the effort you put into creating good content didn't result in leads and satisfied colleagues from the sales department.

Generate quality sales leads with content

How do you create quality sales leads with content? It's not difficult. All good content, whether for the top, middle or bottom of the sales funnel, brings prospects closer to becoming customers. And let's not forget that great content also keeps customers sold.

To effectively market to qualified prospects, you must get them to reveal who they are. Traditionally, this has been done by 'gating' content: forcing registration to gain access; but this puts up barriers and can actually do more harm than good. So give your prospects a choice. Let them download your content without exchanging their information, but if they find your content useful, suggest they subscribe to receive updates and links to more of your awesome publications!

Suppose you can offer content that contains valuable information, like a well-written eBook, an in-depth explainer video or a best practices resource. In that case, people may give you their name and e-mail address to receive your newsletter and, therefore, more of the same type of content.

You can also use automation to give customers more of what they like. That's what many content providers do, for example, YouTube. Watch a video or two on cats playing or motorcycles racing, and suddenly you're being fed a steady diet of cat play or motorcycle race videos. You can do the same thing for your prospects, directing your most relevant content their way. That's where analytics and marketing automation comes into play.

Making your content interactive can also improve lead generation. Interactive content can enable an exchange of information that bridges the gap between content delivery and engagement. Building in interactivity doesn't cost much, and the returns can be attractive. Here are the three main advantages of using interactive content:

1. It helps engage your clients, and start a conversation; This can help you gain valuable insight into your customers' challenges, and objectives, and how you can help them with your products or solutions.
2. It enables the prioritisation of marketing efforts based on data. With the information they provide, you can easily measure and identify leads that require more nurturing or are ready for conversion.
3. It removes or eases the friction associated with lead forms. By first providing value and personalised experiences, your clients will be more willing to give you lead information in return for insights.

Here are five types of interactive content:

• Benchmark survey
• Social media chatbot
• Interactive eBook
• Interactive infographics
• Calculators and configurators

What slows down content production?

Marketers know they need more content. In a 2019 survey, 63 per cent of B2B respondents reported a lack of sufficient content. The solution lies in getting content out the door faster. But why isn’t this happening?

One reason is that the process for generating content is just too onerous. Getting a piece done may require six distinct steps: generating the idea, approving the topic, writing the piece, getting approvals, designing the piece and putting the content online. If each of these steps takes a week, you can quickly get an idea of how hard it is to generate multiple pieces of content that are all timely and informative!

With this type of delay — or bottleneck — it is nearly impossible to capture the buyer’s attention with the right piece of content at just the right time. And by the time one particular piece is out the door, another five may be lined up behind it. It’s a cycle that is doomed to repeat itself.

Applying some good common sense can solve a lot of problems and the content bottleneck is one of them. If a single individual or group of individuals — let’s say marketing — is responsible for generating a piece of content, it’s bound to get bogged down. The key is to break down this linear process from six discrete steps into parallel tracks where everyone is working together to achieve a common goal.

Democratizing Content

Typically, marketing has primary ownership of marketing content and production. But it makes far more sense for these responsibilities to be shared among groups that also work with customers and understand their needs from unique perspectives. Instead of having just one person write content and then circulate it for approval, design and production, multiple people can be writing content and producing it themselves using simple software. That’s what a good content platform provides — a reliable path toward multiplying the volume of content, essentially by distributing the burden. The logic for this approach is intuitive. The better your understanding of customer pain points and problems, the more likely you are to generate content that delivers a helpful solution. By allocating content responsibility among various teams, you can more closely mirror the customer journey as prospects learn about your product and move further along their purchasing path. Different teams have different areas of expertise, all of which inform the potential buyer. A salesperson might have the perfect blog post for explaining, say, the advantages of a particular software versus competitors’, while a customer support manager may be the best one to explain through video how to avoid a particular pitfall in using the product. At the same time these are being generated, perhaps the marketer is creating a customer success story that shows how one customer used the product to improve productivity. With all of these teams generating content separately, much more can be generated at a single time.

The Benefits of Letting Go

It’s human nature for the marketing team to want to retain control over an area as central to their function as content creation. A lot of what keeps the marketing team active and thriving is having their pulse on the news and developments that might be of interest to customers and prospects. But ceding some control over the content generation process benefits everybody — if it’s done correctly using a good content platform. A series of templates and style guidelines, customized to reflect the company’s brand, can keep brand messaging intact. Drag-and-drop editing can eliminate the need for professional graphic artists to make things look pretty. And advanced permission settings ensure that only designers can edit templates, while only publishers can put out a live piece. Once you’ve blown through those pesky bottlenecks, think of all the other great things the right software will allow you to do. Foleon’s content experience platform helps you reach all the right milestones: more and better content, stronger analytics to track your results, integration with your entire martech stack, and the power to get your message heard. By working together to solve the content bottleneck together, marketing and sales can solve one of the biggest roadblocks your prospects face in committing to your company. Your prospects will have the information they need to make informed decisions about their future. And with any luck, you’ll soon have another client name to add to your roster.