Are You Creating Content, or Are You Just Producing Media?
A manager told me that you can see how fast you are learning by how far back in time you have to look to realize you were ignorant. I must be learning pretty fast because a couple of weeks ago, I was ignorant. Until last week I didn’t realize that most sales support managers don’t treat and manage media and content separately. Too often the media (PowerPoint presentations, brochures, video, direct mail, sales calls) are used interchangeably with content.
The Sirius Decisions Report: Best Practices in Sales Productivity identifies white papers, brochures and testimonials as content types. What if the brochure was nothing but Donald Duck cartoons? Would it still be defined as content? Obviously not. Content is that which is valuable to sales.
Media Versus Content
The difference between media and content impacts all of the support provided to sales channels. Media is not content anymore than the envelope is the letter. Most sales enablement firms and marketing groups use content and media as synonyms.
Content is the message. Media is the vehicle of the message. There is a difference between a direct mail piece (media) that contains old newspaper shreds (content) and direct mail containing a compelling and believable sales proposal (different content).
Some other examples of content include:
- Customer problem and alternatives
- Bill of materials for addressing
- Evaluation criteria for bill of materials
- Product/service advantage
- Measures for advantage
- Evidence for advantage
- Customer value resulting from advantage
- Measures for customer value
- Evidence of customer value resulting from advantage
- Customer value of addressing the customer problem
Some examples of media include:
- Telephone call scripts
- Sales presentations
- Direct mail
- Proposals
- Industry articles
- Product articles
- Video
- References and endorsements
- Sales calls
- RFP responses
- Advertisements
- Webinars
- Websites
- Executive sales calls
Media and content are both important in delivering compelling and believable messages. Media provides an aspect of credibility and reach. Each medium has different types of content it can deliver, and content and media should be aligned. If content is not evaluated and managed for quality, then the sales enablement material may be not useful to either the buyers or sales channels.
Mismanagement can result in:
“58% of a vendor’s marketing content is not relevant to potential buyers and reduces the vendor’s chance of closing a sale by 45%.”
— IT Buyer Survey, International Data Group, 2008
“62% of buyers said that content is either not relevant or not useful. Buyers said they want shorter buying cycles, but the lack of relevant information to educate them, and all other influencers, is slowing things down.”
— IDC, 2012 Sales Enablement Strategy: Content is King So Why Does Sales Feel Like a Jester?
“When prospects do see your messaging, they only see 10% as relevant to them.”
— Corporate Executive Board (CEB) & IDC 2012
One of the reasons that 80% of all marketing material is not used by sales channels is because it doesn’t help them sell. It lacks content that is compelling and believable.
Unfortunately, many marketers believe they have done their job with the production of deliverables, but it hasn’t been done if the selling effectiveness of the average salesperson has not been improved.
For marketing to better align with sales and contribute to revenue generation, marketing must manage beyond the media and also assess the content being provided. Media is not content, and by not managing the quality of the content, half of the needed resource is not being managed.
About the Author | Bud Hyler
Bud Hyler is the founder of Logical Marketing, a B-to-B marketing firm. He has worked with IBM, AT&T, Microsoft, HP and other brands to champion customer-centered marketing. He can be reached at budh@logmkt.com.
