Skip to content

THE SEISMIC SPRING 2022 RELEASE IS HERE. Learn More

CHOOSE YOUR LANGUAGE

  • English
    • Enablement Cloud

      Meet the unified solution that’s igniting revenue growth for customer-facing teams.

      Learn More
    • PRODUCTS

      • Sales Content Management
      • Learning & Coaching
      • Buyer Engagement
      • Content Automation
      • Strategy & Planning
      • Enablement Intelligence
    • PLATFORM

      • Platform Overview
      • Integrations
    • What is Sales Enablement?

      New to sales enablement? No problem. Learn what it is and why it matters here.

      Learn More
    • USE CASES

      • Sales Enablement Teams
      • Sales Teams
      • Marketing Teams
    • INDUSTRIES

      • All Industries
      • Asset Management
      • Banking
      • Healthcare & Life Sciences
      • Technology
    • Read Their Stories

      Read how global customers from all different industries thrive with Seismic.

      Read Their Stories
    • CUSTOMER STORIES

      • Genesys
      • Deluxe
    • FOR OUR CUSTOMERS

      • Seismic University
      • Seismic Community
    • About Us

      Discover who we are, what we value, and how we work at Seismic.

      Learn More
    • ABOUT SEISMIC

      • Careers
      • Leadership
      • Diversity & Inclusion
      • Partners
      • Aftershock Store
      • Contact Us
    • NEWS

      • Newsroom
      • Analyst & 3rd Party Reports
      • Shift 2022
    • Sales Acceleration

      Explore best practices for onboarding, ramping, and upskilling your sellers.

      Learn More
    • WHAT'S NEW

      • Blog
      • Events & Webinars
    • COLLECTION HUBS

      • Resources Center
      • Enablement Explainers
      • AI-Guided Selling
      • Social Selling
      • Financial Services
      • Buyer Engagement
  • Get a Demo
Return to the Blog
Marketing

The Mystery of the Content Marketing Black Hole

Spread throughout sales and marketing departments across the universe is a strange phenomenon.

Seismic
Seismic
October 13, 2017

Spread throughout sales and marketing departments across the universe is a strange phenomenon. Great, dense content — sales assets filled with incredible resources — disappear regularly after briefly burning bright. These marketing resources were built with the intent to be used. But instead they vanish, never to be seen again.

Where does the content matter go? It falls into the inescapable reaches of the Content Marketing Black Hole – a pit from which no content ever emerges again.

Marketing teams put an incredible amount of effort into the production of assets. In fact, the largest single budget item for any B2B marketing department is content creation. But more than budget, marketers put heart into their content. These are assets that they’re often very proud of. To see them lost, spinning toward disuse in the Content Marketing Black Hole is not fun.

So how do you keep your content from passing over the event horizon (including content built for, ahem, conferences)? How do you set your content rocket ship on a course away from the black hole? Here are a few tips to keep gravity working for you.

Push Content into Workflow

Sellers don’t have a lot of free time. So, they don’t want to leave what they’re doing to seek out content. They may be on the road meeting clients. They could be in the CRM updating a record. Perhaps they are working in email or in the browser. No matter where they are, they should be able to access great assets.

That’s no different than how marketers target prospects today — through a multi-touch approach. Look to understand how your sellers work and push your content out into their workflow so that they can access it in real-time from where they work.

Provide a Custom Environment

Sellers are like anyone else, they don’t want to filter through information that is irrelevant to them. For example, an SDR has little day-to-day use for highly technical documents, in most cases. And a technical sales engineer is not likely to be satisfied with high-level, door-opening content.

That’s why you need to filter how your content is presented to your sellers. You should understand the role, profile, language, and other elements that shape how your content matters to its users. Then, give your sellers that tuned, tailored experience. They’ll see more of the right sales enablement content and want to keep coming back for more.

Provide an Immersive Sales Enablement Experience

The environment you want your sellers to experience should be tailored to just their role. It should also be deeply immersive based on the sales situation they’re in. Again, sellers have limited time. So, if they are trying to understand how to sell a new product that you’ve just released, or they want to know how to address a competitive threat, they need to be able to immerse themselves in that context and get the right answers.

That means that if reps search, browse, or access recommended content, they should get every type of meaningful asset that can support the sales process. That could include video, PDFs, presentations, subject matter experts, sales guidance, and training. Immerse sellers and they’re going to use more of your materials — and succeed.

Make Finding Content a Snap

It can be frustrating for a sales person to visit a content site and not find what they need. They may try browsing or searching and not get the results they need or expect. What happens next? Well, you likely did not earn a repeat visitor in the form of that sales person.

How do you address that problem? Well, you need to make it easy for a seller to find the content they need. That should be via a powerful search engine that can index content terms and metadata. And it should be through the ability to browse for content by topic or role with ease.

It should also be driven by content recommendations. A great model for this is a content wizard. A sales person responds to questions about their sales situation, and the system reacts with the right resources to help prep the seller for their meeting or for follow-up.

Get Feedback and Measure

Too often we think that the disuse of content is sales’ problem. ‘If only they visited and saw our content, they’d love and use it!’ But what if you’re not building the right materials? What if the reason sellers make their own content — and leave 75% of your content on the shelf — is because the content sellers produce themselves is more in line with their needs?

Marketers should, again, treat sellers like a customer. That means gathering feedback from them about what content works and what they like. Look for content ratings that can help you learn where to reinvest in improving content.

More than just feedback, you should also look to analytics about your content performance. Is content being used in the wrong situations? Is content generating revenue for your team (i.e. can you attribute sales to content or content types?)? When you know these data points, you can invest wisely and get more of the content sales teams want.

That leads to a virtuous cycle. Sales people get more value from your content. And guess who they tell? Their colleagues.

Put these approaches together and that means your content is going to get more use, more adoption, and more visibility. Your content will be steered away from the black hole toward intergalactic success.

    Related articles

    Illustration of woman holding a tablet

    The 10 essential elements of a content marketing strategy

    Everything you need to create (or reboot) your content marketing strategy.
    Read More: The 10 essential elements of a content marketing strategy

    What is marketing enablement?

    Learn how marketing enablement drives alignment across GTM teams.
    Read More: What is marketing enablement?
    Illustration of a buyer interface on a mobile device.

    Building trust through storytelling

    The buyer is always the hero.
    Read More: Building trust through storytelling

    If you made it this far, we must be striking a chord.

    Get a Demo
    Seismic
    • Product
    • Seismic Enablement Cloud™
    • Sales Content Management
    • Learning & Coaching
    • Buyer Engagement
    • Content Automation
    • Strategy & Planning
    • Enablement Intelligence
    • Solutions
    • Sales Enablement Teams
    • Sales Teams
    • Marketing Teams
    • Resources
    • Blog
    • Resources Center
    • Trending Topics
    • What is Sales Enablement?
    • What is AI-Guided Selling?
    • What is Social Selling?
    • Integrations
    • All Integrations
    • Google
    • Microsoft
    • Salesforce
    • COMPANY
    • Contact Us
    • Careers
    ISO 27001 Certified by Schellman
    • © 2022 Seismic
    • Terms of Use
    • Privacy Policy
    • Follow us on Linkedin
    • Follow us on Instagram
    • Follow us on Twitter
    • Follow us on YouTube
    • Follow us on Facebook