Marketing and sales teams face significant challenges in getting buyers to act. Compounding this is that sales and marketing teams often don’t seem to be aligned. Marketers build content they hope sellers will use and sellers pick and choose what content they think will work best for their buyers without a unified strategy.
In addition to this, customers don’t have a single path to purchase; they’re constantly consuming information from multiple channels and inputs. Although a buyer’s behavior may not be linear or predictable, they are more in control of their journey than ever before. They want personalized, tailored content experiences—the brand should know what content they’ve consumed and what they may want to see next. Buyers also expect content to be delightful, interactive and immersive, not linear and static, which characterizes most marketing content today. The challenges of capturing attention and driving action have only grown due to the emergence of a predominantly virtual selling model, an uncertain economy, and other changes resulting from the global pandemic.
What the buyer expects
Great content is at the heart of great customer experiences. Boring, generic content won’t stand out, engage, or compel buyers to act,which are all important steps that bring them closer to a purchase decision. That isn’t all. B2B buyers are increasingly demanding a B2C experience and they expect the experience to be personalized and immersive. Research data supports the new reality: personalization is key to getting buyers to take the next steps towards purchase. According to a Seismic-commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting, 85% of buyers will dismiss the first interaction if they don’t receive tailored information. That’s a high bar for any enterprise to get over
The personalized content gap
Remarkably, there’s no shortage of content in many enterprises. Businesses are creating more content than ever before, due to the exponential growth of web, mobile, social and other channels that support campaigns and sales engagement. The result has been an explosion of content initiatives across organizations. Despite all that content being generated, we’ve seen a major gap between customers’ personalization expectations and enterprises’ abilities to deliver. Budgets and supporting resources to create personalized content have not kept up with the “generic” content explosion.
The majority of content created today is not personalized or targeted for customers at various stages in their purchase journey. And sales teams, heavily dependent on presentations to product sheets to digital content to help tell a story to their prospects, are overloaded with content that isn’t personalized enough to address the needs of their buyers or appropriately tailored to the specific sales stage. Moreover, even if the relevant content exists, sellers often have a hard time discovering it, so they end up customizing what they have or going with their “old faithful” pitch from a year ago, which is every marketer’s nightmare.
The Seismic platform facilitates sales and marketing alignment
In late 2019, Seismic acquired Percolate, establishing a powerful storytelling platform for sellers and marketers. By combining Seismic’s industry leading sales enablement solution with Percolate’s marketing orchestration and campaign planning capabilities, go-to-market teams have the unparalleled ability to plan, create, and distribute the most compelling and personalized content wherever and however the customer interacts with their brand. The unification of two key pillars in the go-to market technology stack unlocks powerful analytics and insights for marketers to continuously optimize their entire content portfolio. It also provides sellers automated content recommendations for specific opportunities based on where the prospect is in his or her buying journey.
With a unified marketing and sales enablement solution, Seismic is able to help companies align their sales and marketing teams so their go-to-market engine is better coordinated and more impactful. The Seismic platform enables companies to streamline campaign orchestration and content creation, while also making it seamless for sellers to discover and use personalized content to deliver impactful buyer experiences.
Interactive content
With the launch of Seismic Interactive Content as part of the Summer 2020 Release, it is now easy to develop and deliver interactive content at scale within the Seismic platform. Marketers and sellers can create, distribute, and measure the impact of interactive content similarly to what they can do with traditional static content. Dynamic content types such as microapps or LiveContent are “no code”, easy to use content formats that can be personalized to provide the immersive, engaging experiences that today’s sophisticated buyers expect.
Easy to get started with the integrated solution
As part of the Percolate Developer Platform (PDP), we have built a free integration that seamlessly connects Percolate to Seismic, enabling tighter alignment of a company’s marketing and sales teams and unifying their strategies.
Key benefits of leveraging both solutions include:
- Align marketing and sales so they can operate seamlessly and jointly, in their common pursuit of delivering compelling buyers experiences through engaging, resonant, personalized content at scale
- Streamline processes on both sides of the marketing and sales equation: Marketing can operate more effectively and efficiently to create and manage content, and sales can discover and activate the right content at the right time for the right customers
- Break down organizational silos so cross-functional marketing and sales teams are able to work simultaneously towards common, measurable goals
- Use powerful engagement analytics to continuously optimize content strategy and creation based on content effectiveness.
The Forrester Wave™: Sales Content Solutions, Q3 2020 report ranks Seismic as a Leader among nine software vendors considered. Forrester writes that the integration with Percolate gives Seismic “more ability to unify marketing, sales, and post-sale activity and deliver content that engages buyers using personalized interactive experiences.”
Uniting marketing orchestration and sales enablement can help brands deliver exceptional buyer experiences. Find out more about how Percolate and Seismic are better together.
