Over the course of a month, your marketing team creates new sales content: a pitch deck, a customer success story, or a whitepaper with compelling industry stats. All of these items get handed over to the sales team and that’s that. But the question often remains: do sellers use this content and is it seen by prospects?
This is a situation that many sales and marketing teams experience on an ongoing basis. And while sales collateral can be a powerful tool in the sales process, creating new sales and marketing content over and over doesn’t necessarily translate to success. In order to understand how content influences deal cycles, go-to-market teams (GTM) need to measure and review how content is performing.
Without a way to track which content is most effective, when it’s used, and which audiences respond best to it, your GTM team may struggle to optimize buyer engagement. Companies may pour time and resources into strategies that aren’t effective because they can’t pinpoint what worked.
Content metrics to track with sales analytics
Content and sales analytics are two significant components that make your organization’s content marketing strategy run smoothly. Sales content analytics is a great way to track content ROI and make decisions about future content for GTM teams to use.
Content analytics help marketers know what content is resonating with the audience. It allows sales reps to see content engagement time, and leadership can identify and scale the ideal workflow. The important part is knowing which information should go to your GTM teams. Here are just a few metrics your organization should track:
- Content usage: This includes tracking how many times reps download or share content.
- Content engagement: By looking at open rates and average page views, teams can see if buyers are engaging with the content they receive.
- Content value: What type of content is being sent throughout the purchasing journey?
How to keep track of this information
Tracking content analytics is a big task, and it can feel overwhelming if you don’t have the right content tracking tools. Using the best content planning tools can make the job less daunting since it creates an easy, fast, and efficient tracking process. Here’s how:
Turn data and reports into actionable insights
The best content tracking software offers ways to better gather, store, organize, and access information, data, and different types of sales reports. You can use these to improve your content, content usage, marketing strategies, and more.
Share data across teams easily
While this information will significantly improve sales and marketing performance, it will be less efficient if sharing and accessing across departments is difficult. This can lead to gaps in communication, slowed progress, and misalignment. Content tracking software provides a quick and easy way to access and share the information you need, whenever and wherever you need it.
The benefits of using content planning apps and software
Using a sales analytics dashboard provides a visual representation of critical sales content data. By asking the right questions, you’ll gain insights that will help you refine the sales process, improve buyer engagement, and increase close rates. That’s why enablement teams need to access and analyze several aspects of your company’s sales content data.
How are sellers using your sales content?
Teams should regularly review sales content popularity and watch what type of content trends up or down over time. If a certain asset consistently trends downward, it may be outdated or your sales reps don’t find it helpful. Either update the content or remove it from your library and focus on promoting more successful content.
When do prospects view content, and for how long?
A good enablement platform will allow you to track how content is being used. Do prospects open and view it? How long do they spend on it before moving on? Once you see which content drives the most engagement, you can adjust your sales content strategy to meet seller needs.
What do sellers search for most?
Do sellers search for certain content more often than others? If so, you can infer that these pieces are more valuable in helping sellers close with leads. Or, if you see that sellers run searches that have no results, you know that there is a need that your current content strategy isn’t addressing. Fill that gap to empower your sellers and stay attuned to their everyday needs.
Why you need Seismic
With sales enablement intelligence and AI, Seismic has the tools you need to track every valuable content metric across your organization. Boost your sales content engagement and increase ROI with the number one global enablement platform. The Seismic Sales Enablement Cloud™ is purpose-built to help organizations ignite growth. If you’d like to learn more, download our eBook, The Enablement Cloud: A Unified Platform for Engagement & Growth.
