Businesses of all sizes are investing more time, resources, and money into content than ever before. According to this 2017 study, most successful B2B marketers dedicate around 39% of their marketing budgets to content. Furthermore, with B2B marketers enable their sales teams with the right content is a big part of their content spend. However, with an ever-increasing focus on content, it is not uncommon for marketers to find themselves in a sea of content that is spread across different applications within their organization. Common reasons why companies end up with content in disparate systems:
- Content Formats: Marketers are investing in different formats. Videos, Slideshares, Blogs, Articles are common formats adopted by organizations of all sizes. To support these varied formats, companies end up with multiple content management systems. You are more likely to have your videos hosted on YouTube than on Google Drive or Sharepoint.
- Team Preferences: It is quite common to find different teams use different cloud storage apps or content management systems to store their team content.
- Content Security: Even with the popularity of cloud applications, there could be circumstances where companies don’t publish their content outside their firewall.
Having your organization’s trusted content in multiple systems is a significant drag on your organization’s productivity costing your organization hundreds of thousands of dollars. A practical approach to address this challenge is to consolidate access to your company’s trusted content. Here are five benefits you gain by consolidating access to trusted content.
#1 Productivity, Productivity, Productivity
This is a no-brainer. A central place for all the essential and trusted content can deliver a much-needed shot in the arm for your organization’s productivity. Not only this helps scale your content beyond tactical engagements, but it also helps keep your customer-facing team members on message. For one, you will stop seeing those redundant and repetitive requests for content in your email inbox or slack channel. Furthermore, your colleagues can have access to the right content when they need it. Cloud storage apps are notorious to become dump ground for everything and anything. By centralizing access to trusted content that is on the cloud app, you can separate your valuable, accurate assets from the sea of drafts and half-baked ideas that feed into the clutter.
#2 Avoid Duplication and Leverage Investments
The primary benefit of centralizing access to your content is you don’t duplicate content. Content continues to reside in their original content management system. YouTube videos stay on YouTube and WordPress blog posts continue to exist on WordPress. You don’t move assets. You only consolidate access to those assets. This also helps align with different team’s preferences. If your customer success team prefers using Box to store its digital assets, it can continue to do so. This non-intrusive approach helps adoption.
#3 Integrations
Companies are investing in providing their sales team access to the right content at the right time. However, when your content is spread across multiple systems, delivering the right content to the sales reps can significantly increase integration costs. A central access point for all your content helps reduce the integration cost. Instead of integrating with individual content management systems, organizations can simplify sales enablement by integrating into one central access point.
#4 Reporting and Tracking
When your digital assets and content is spread across different systems keeping track of those assets becomes a difficult and laborious process. Additionally, tracking engagement on that content is even more challenging. With a consolidated access point to content, marketing can easily address these challenges. They can benefit from a single application to,
- measure content coverage across different systems.
- track and report on engagement to make future content investment decisions.
#5 Content Maintenance
Content maintenance is an integral part of marketing operations. Content maintenance includes,
- Re-branding content
- Refreshing content
- Retiring or archiving irrelevant content
It is much easier to maintain content assets when you can access and measure them from a central access point. Content will continue to be a focal part of any B2B marketing team. However, the proliferation of content can be overwhelming and result in content chaos. If marketing can centralize access to these ever-increasing and evolving content assets they can not only help their colleagues in sales but can also significantly reduce the time and resources to maintain and scale their content.
