Use your CRM to overcome these three content challenges
Guest post by John Murphy
Picture it; your latest campaign has finally launched and you’re so excited to be able to get content out to your audience that’ll drive brand awareness and sales for your company.
Now you want to check and see how the content your team created for the campaign is performing, so you log in to a few tools to see what’s happening. Your marketing automation tool shows low opens and clicks on your emails. You see from your YouTube analytics dashboard that they’re barely watching your YouTube videos. Google Analytics is showing your blog posts and landing pages aren't getting much traffic and have high bounce rates. “Why isn’t our audience engaging with our content?”
You also noticed there were delays in getting the content created. Looking at your project management tool, you see that your team isn’t able to easily share data or assets from their content management tools with other teams so they can be finalized and distributed, causing key deadlines to be missed and a backlog of work still to be done.
Then your VP of Sales comes to you asking, “how many leads did we get and how much revenue did we generate?” You begin to panic, as the thought of having to pull data from a number of different tools (or figuring out if you even have access to said data) to stitch together a report means a few days worth of unanticipated extra work.
Are you sensing a pattern here? Having lots of disparate apps in your tech stack makes your content marketing efforts much more cumbersome than they should be. On average, scaling companies have 242 SaaS tools, so challenges are going to arise when you have a cobbled together tech stack that’s managing your content marketing strategy. So what are these challenges? After doing some research (and drawing from personal experience), these three themes came up the most:
1.Audiences don’t engage: SEMrush’s Director of Organic Search said it best in the company’s latest blog post, “understanding what your audience needs and values is key to content marketing success.” Do you know what their pain points and goals are? What channels do they use to engage with your content? Do they prefer blogs, videos, or both? Your target audience should be based on research and data you’ve collected about them. Not being able to easily capture and mine this data from your tech stack can lead to lackluster content that barely gets any clicks or conversions. And with no leads or cross-sell/upsell opportunities in the funnel to work, your sales team is not going to be happy!
2. It takes too long to create: It can be tough pumping out content on a daily, weekly, or even bi-weekly basis. In a recent survey conducted by SEMrush of over 1,700 marketers for their 2023 State of Content Marketing Global Report, 38% cited creating more content as their top challenge. Your content team is busy, and being able to manage the content creation process efficiently is key to their success. Having to bounce from one app to another to put together an audience list, review and approve a piece of content, or publish it on your audience’s preferred channels kills your team’s productivity and slows down the rate at which content gets created and distributed.
3. Difficult seeing a return: Your team logged umpteen hours creating content for your latest campaign. You’re able to see your vanity metrics; impressions, shares, views, opens and click thru rates, just to name a few. But did the content in your campaign actually move your audience further down the funnel, and which pieces drove those conversions? Did it lead them to purchase your product or service? Content marketing accounts for 26% of B2B marketing budgets, so you need to be able to easily access reports that show the ROI of your content efforts. With so many different apps in your tech stack, finding the necessary data to build reports that say “we spent $x and generated $y”, can be a huge undertaking and may not be completely accurate. This makes the justification to increase or maintain your content marketing budget a nail biting conversation to have with your CFO.
As customer demand for high-quality, personalized experiences continue, content marketing and the tech needed to support it is a must for companies of all sizes. But what if there was one tool in your tech stack that your team can rely on to create lots of engaging and high converting content for your campaigns? There is - your CRM.
It’s rich in details about your customers since it collects, organizes, and stores that information centrally. And it's the one tool that aligns all the daily work you front and back office teams do. So what is it about a CRM that can help your team make really good content?
It’s the history record of your customers: Industry, company size, job role, buyer persona, products purchased, content consumed, surveys taken, support tickets opened; all of this data and more is available in your CRM. Consider it the single source of truth when it comes to your customer - marketing, sales, and service reps are logging their interactions to contact or company records. And with many CRMs offering native integrations with many of the SaaS apps out there today, you can sync customer data from other apps into it. With all that information in one place, you’ll be able to easily determine who your target audience is for your next campaign and tailor the content accordingly to create a truly personalized experience that drives engagement and conversion.
It streamlines processes: Many CRMs today allow marketers to integrate their content marketing tools to create, review, and publish content right from its interface. You can even pre-schedule campaigns in advance or trigger them to automatically start sending once a contact has completed a defined action. These native integration and automation features are perfect for your team to leverage so it frees up time for them to focus on creating content. And when it comes to making more of it quickly, some CRMs are starting to come out with their own generative AI tools that can help teams pump out more content faster using a simple prompt. But be wary; since this technology is new and not working with a lot of data, AI generated content can be of low quality and may not be completely accurate. Make sure your team is fully vetting what these tools return back to you; always include original research in the final piece, and check to make sure it’s in your brand’s tone of voice for authenticity before publishing.
Reporting is at your fingertips: CRMs make reporting and analyzing data simple. Some offer pre-made templates that can save you time building out certain reports, and some offer the ability to build custom reports to help you analyze the metrics that matter most to your business. From there, you can post these reports to a dashboard so you can see all the data you need from one place in real time. Being able to use data that’s natively hosted in your CRM or synced from other apps in your tech stack allows you to identify areas of opportunity, growth, and better content experiences for your customers.
So what are you waiting for?! Start leveraging your CRM in your content creation process. Once it’s configured to fit your business needs, you’ll be able to use it to identify your target audience, leverage native automations and integrations to increase your team’s efficiency, and easily report on what’s working and what’s driving conversions. In no time, your team will be able to create consistent, high quality, and engaging content that influences your customer’s decision making.
If you’re not sure what functionality your CRM has to support your content marketing efforts, check with your CRM’s Customer Success or Support teams. They’ll be able to properly guide you in data capture and reporting best practices, as well as how to utilize all the features in your subscription to achieve your business goals.
About John (he/him):
He’s a high energy, collaborative, and process oriented marketer with over 9 years’ experience developing and executing digital marketing campaigns for B2B and B2C brands that have led to increased sales, product usage, and customer retention.
He’s currently a Channel Consultant at HubSpot, working directly with marketing agencies in the company’s Solutions Partner Program to develop post-sales processes that lead to increased customer retention and lifetime value. In addition, he keeps them up to date on inbound marketing best practices and comes up with strategies on using HubSpot to manage marketing, sales, and service programs for their clients.
In his downtime, you’ll find him in the kitchen cooking up savory dishes from all over the world. He’s also an avid yogi, and participates in a variety of Boston based LGBTQ+ sports leagues. He has a love of traveling, hosting evening soirees with friends, tries to tend to his house plants, and takes care of his fur children - Cooper the dog and Georgie the cat.
Check out his LinkedIn profile to learn more about him.