The genesis of my professional career started in the
Customer Marketing function at Sun Microsystems. Back in the late 1990s and
early 2000s, spreadsheets reigned as the means for tracking customer marketing
activities and content, with content
repositories
residing on flat files stored on intranet sites. Recognizing
the inefficiencies this presented to sales, marketing, professional services’
consultants, I wrote a business requirements document for a Java engineer down
the hallway who turned it into a three-tier, Web-based application that
streamlined our back-end management of customer
advocates-references
and provided a self-service intake-outtake interface
for the field.
Initially targeted at our Professional Services team (the
organization within which I resided at the time), the application was highly
popular and achieved virtual 100 percent adoption. Sales and consultants were
able to find content that met their business requirements quickly and easily.
In addition, rather than spending 25 or 30 percent of my time fielding
peer-to-peer reference requests and inquiries for case studies, videos, and
PowerPoint slides from account executives and consultants, I was able to focus my
attention on building relationships with customers, sales, and consulting as
well as creating compelling content. An ROI analysis we conducted demonstrated
several thousand dollars in annual productivity gains.
Based on this success, we were chartered to roll out the
same solution for all of Sun Services. Under the aegis of a Sun Sigma Project
commission, we consolidated 36 different Customer Marketing systems and
programs into a centrally managed group with the Web-based customer marketing management
system at its core.
The
result gave sales one repository that was fully tagged and searchable for all
Customer Marketing-related content (in addition to self-service peer-to-peer
reference capabilities), saving thousands of staff hours annually and enabling
sales and marketing to focus on customers and business-critical initiatives
instead of culling through 36 different systems and sites. Yet when it came to
content consolidation and syndication, the solution was limited to customer
marketing content and moreover did not integrate with the company’s customer relationship
management (CRM) system.
I spent the next nine years at Symantec as the head of
Content and Customer Marketing. I was initially recruited to lead Customer
Marketing, and a couple of years into my tenure I also assumed responsibility
for Content Marketing. No multi-tier, relational customer marketing management
system existed. For Customer Marketing content (which at the time consisted of
generic case studies), the salesforce relied on what was posted on
Symantec.com. Over a period of several years, my team rolled out three different
iterations of a customer marketing system, with the final version integrating
into the company’s Salesforce CRM deployment. Like the customer marketing management
system at Sun, these provided sales and marketing (and any other employee) with
the ability to search for and find Customer Marketing content assets per
various segments (several thousand Customer Marketing assets had been completed
for 750+ customers and partners when my team and I left).
However, while all Customer Marketing content assets could
be found and retrieved in virtual real time, all other types of content assets
(e.g., thought leadership reports, blog posts, magazine articles, white papers,
data sheets, etc.) were scattered across websites, intranet sites, and flat
files. And though admittedly before the availability of today’s SaaS-based
content libraries and syndication systems, we tried several times to get a
green light to proceed in the organic development of a Web-based content asset
library. But as this was outside of the team’s charter and responsibilities, we
never able to get budget nor a green light to proceed.
At LivePerson, where I served as the head of Customer and
Content Marketing for about a year and a half, we turned to Boulder Logic
(recently acquired by RO Innovation) for a customer marketing
management system. In addition to a centralized content library and Salesforce
integration, the solution also made intelligent reference recommendations—both
content and peer-to-peer references within the Salesforce Activity History of
each prospect-customer record in Salesforce. Further, business development
representatives and account executives could send relevant content directly
from the Activity History in Salesforce. We also were able to generate metrics
for “content usage” per content asset, advocate-reference account, as well as
per opportunity.
Yet this only addressed Customer Marketing-related content.
A solution for all content marketing assets was needed. And while we acquired
and implemented Kapost
for content
marketing management, Kapost was just in the process of releasing its Content
Gallery product at the time. Hence, while marketing finally had centralized
visibility, access, and management of content marketing assets, sales and other
groups without administrative or editorial privileges were still relegated to
time-consuming and sometimes ineffective searches of our employee intranet.
Before launching TIRO
Communications, I spent a year as the head of Marketing at PRO Unlimited
where we implemented Kapost’s Content Gallery. Our 150-plus content assets were
tagged and stored and could be searched and retrieved by any employee, thus
saving countless hours of time-consuming searches by business development and
client services staff. Additionally, leveraging the analytical capabilities
within Kapost, we had an array of metrics to the granularity of individual
campaigns as well as content asset such as number of times used, influence in
areas such as qualified leads, etc. These analytics enabled us identity what content
types and even individual content assets performed well, and which ones did not
(across all channels—sales and client services to the website and marketing
campaigns) and make determinations on future content and campaign creation.
Despite our success, the “content enablement” narrative was
still incomplete—at least from the standpoint of sales. While Kapost captures content
and campaign analytics vis-à-vis its Salesforce API connection (e.g., MQLs
generated, SQLs produced, opportunities created, etc.), it does not produce
dynamic, intelligent content recommendations within the CRM (as is the case
with the customer marketing Boulder Logic-RO Innovation solution we deployed at
LivePerson).
Further, the content enablement is not predictive, providing
sales and consultants with intelligent recommendations to help them to target
content to their prospects and customers that resonate and produce optimal
results. The upside for content strategists and marketers is the advent of a
new breed of content enablement solutions such as KnowledgeTree, Seismic, Docurated,
among others that begin to address these requirements.
But the possibilities are broader than just content
personalization and intelligent targeting; rather the next stage of content enablement
also encompasses the integration of machine learning (or artificial
intelligence), whereby content recommendations are made based on predictive and
prescriptive analytics. The content an account executive or consultant uses is
based on elements such as market segment, persona, journey stage, and past content
performance in each of those areas. As more information passes through the
system, the more intelligent it becomes. While some of the above solutions are
beginning to explore artificial intelligence, much work remains to be done.
It truly is an exciting time for content strategists and
marketers. Transformation in content marketing over the past decade and a half
offers substantial business possibilities, and vast opportunities are still to
be discovered and leveraged. Of course, a great content enablement approach is
just one lynchpin in an organization’s broader content strategy. All of these
different pieces need to be in alignment to generate optimal results. Contact
us
today for help in navigating between the varied options that exist.
