The post Content’s Role in Sales Enablement: Close Deals Faster appeared first on Content Innovo.

The post Playbook | Marketing Strategist’s Role in Marketing Automation appeared first on Content Innovo.

The business-to-business (B2B) sales role is shifting. Yes, sales teams need to walk prospects through the many features and benefits of their company’s offering, but the job now requires a broader scope of relationship building, making connections, and thought leadership. HubSpot’s 2024 Sales Trends Report confirmed what we already know—sales professionals say selling has been harder this year than it was before. The report also noted that 82% of sales professionals say building relationships and connecting with people is both the most important part of selling and the most enjoyable part of their job.

As B2B content marketers, we know how targeted content can accelerate the buying cycle, propel prospects to action, and close a sale. A recent report from Prezentor showed that 95% of B2B buying decisions are directly influenced by content, yet 48% of sellers say they struggle with communicating value. This disconnect reflects the ongoing silos that plague marketing and sales teams, especially within larger organizations.

If you’re feeling this divide in your organization, you’re not alone. HubSpot found that only 30% of sales professionals say sales and marketing are strongly aligned at their company. As businesses navigate the labyrinth of B2B sales and marketing, this central issue looms large.

Put simply, sales are achieved faster and more efficiently when the sales and marketing teams are aligned. Marketing can help sales shorten long sales cycles with content that helps solve key concerns for customers, but they need the sales perspective to ensure content resonates and incites action.

Let’s walk through five of the top challenges in B2B sales and how you can overcome them with a strong content marketing program.

Challenge #1:
Generating More QUALITY B2B Sales Leads

Misalignment between sales and marketing teams can most often be seen in the way leads are generated (or not generated, as is frequently the case). We surveyed marketing and sales leaders and saw this impact clearly in their responses—their number one issue was generating enough leads of the right quality to support their sales efforts. This forces sales teams to spend more time hunting and prospecting, instead of starting their day armed with a set of warm leads who are ready to talk.

When the feedback loop between marketing and sales falters, the marketing team loses their ability to effectively generate and vet leads—and this dampens their capacity to empower B2B sales teams. And what happens then? Sales still has to meet their targets, so they take matters into their own hands, often generating content that may not align with the prescribed brand voice and guidelines. According to Prezentor, 76% of sales leaders are planning to invest in content creation. And this further sows the seeds of discord between the teams. Sales is wasting time and effort generating off-brand content, and marketing is wasting time and effort policing the sales team.

Solution: Bring Sales Insights into Marketing Personas

Marketing will attract more quality leads when armed with a robust set of buyer personas—customer “blueprints” spelling out their motivations, challenges, and goals. This is key to any successful content strategy. Marketers build buyer personas using many sources of data, but they don’t always get it right (for example, when incorrectly determining the “job” of a McDonalds milkshake) They need the right insights on their customers and prospects to build an effective persona—and in B2B, key insights are held by the sales team.

The sales team is more directly engaged with buyers on a daily basis. Through their conversations, the sales team learns more about buyer pain points and aspirations and plays a vital role in understanding the ideal customer. In addition, they can relay back important signals when these factors inevitably change and evolve over time.

When marketing and sales teams come together to build (and regularly tweak and refine) detailed buyer personas, they are more likely to get it right, focusing efforts on the correct decision-makers and influencers involved in the buying process. Marketing needs to ask, “What are buyers thinking and feeling?” and “How do we uniquely solve their problem?” Sales teams often hold answers to these crucial questions.

With more effective personas in hand, marketing is empowered to generate better content that draws in the right prospects, qualifies them, and delivers them warm to the sales team.

Challenge #2:
Optimizing the B2B Sales Cycle

B2B sales cycles are long, ranging from four to six months for “easier” sales to as long as 12-18 months for more complex, enterprise-wide solutions. This elevates the need for marketing and sales to work together throughout the sales cycle, rather than engaging in the traditional “handoff” once the lead is generated. The Harvard Business Review even declared that traditional B2B sales and marketing are becoming obsolete. It described an ongoing transition away from that handoff from digital to “human selling,” noting that buyers prefer to spend the majority of their time researching independently, with, on average, only 17% of their total buying time spent interacting directly with supplier sales teams (according to Gartner research).

So, for B2B sales teams to be successful, they need a lot of content, for a lot of stakeholders, for a long period of time to make a sale. And most marketing teams ARE producing a lot of content. Yet, according to Prezentor, 65% of sales content created by B2B organizations goes unused. What B2B organizations need is more effective content.

Solution: Map Your B2B Buyer Journey

Just as it’s vital to enhance accuracy in buyer personas, it is important to understand how each persona is involved in the buying journey. Especially in larger enterprises, stakeholders come in and out at different stages to provide input and influence the sales process. Each has individual needs and motivations that a sales team needs to address to secure their support.

When sales and marketing teams partner effectively to map the buyer journey, they gain key insights that help them understand the needs of important stakeholders at each stage. Marketing is then empowered to produce what we call intentional content (versus responsive content that’s created ad hoc to serve an immediate need).

The marketing team can ease the burden on the sales team considerably by creating the right content that supports each stakeholder at different stages of the B2B buyer journey. Or, even better, marketing can develop content that addresses stakeholder concerns before they voice them, thereby creating advocates and champions along the way to reduce friction and shorten the sales cycle.

Challenge #3:
Measuring ROI in a Complex B2B Buying Process

Today’s B2B buying process is far from linear. A complex digital sales cycle has many touchpoints, making ROI measurement difficult. Deciphering which sales or marketing action precisely impacted the warming of a lead or triggered a sale is rarely straightforward. Organizations often become paralyzed with data analysis, unable to attribute conversion to the right activities that influenced the buyer.

Viewing the customer journey through an individual touchpoint is shortsighted. Odds are a customer has touched your brand 30-50 times before you close a sale. The commonly used last-touch attribution model loses any context for what drove your leads (e.g., nurturing touches) to your product or service. What content did the prospect read at each stage in the buying cycle? Gaining an awareness of what the prospect and related stakeholders are consuming outside of direct conversations with a sales team will contribute valuable information to augment the sales strategy.

Solution: Develop Robust CRM That Tracks Cross-Channel Touchpoints

A comprehensive CRM system that tracks prospect and customer touchpoints and content consumption can serve as a playbook for content strategy. Done right, the CRM gathers prospect feedback (both through direct survey and observing their digital behavior) and pinpoints specific challenges that new content can be created against. Businesses can pinpoint where leads hit roadblocks or exit the sales funnel. Marketing teams can then create content designed to address prospects at risk of exit and instead advance them toward conversion.

With CRM data in hand, B2B content strategy can be fueled by the right key performance indicators (KPIs), that is, those that align sales and marketing objectives. These enable the organization to gauge return on investment (ROI) while assigning success to collaborative sales and marketing efforts. Most importantly, this strategy allows the organization to understand what’s working (and what’s not), optimizing valuable resources. Marketing and sales teams need to establish a shared understanding of these KPIs to ensure that quality leads are continuously entering and moving through the pipeline.

And don’t forget to use qualifying questions and surveys to gather insights along the path. Test often, and repeat tests periodically to ensure you’re attuned to ongoing changes in the market and buyer behavior.

Challenge #4:
Getting Heard in a Noisy B2B Market

Standing out in a crowded B2B marketplace is no small task. Whether you’re a new kid on the block or the industry standard, getting in front of buyers is harder than ever before. On the bright side, sellers often have a greatly expanded market opportunity. No longer are you tied to a fixed radius around your local office. Remote work, video conferencing, and collaborative work tools mean you can sell to anyone around the world with less effort and cost than it used to take to sell to someone a few cities over. BUT so can your competitors. And there are a lot of them.

Most B2B buyers today are faced with hundreds to thousands to tens of thousands of options for any given purchase, so the decision-making process is daunting. In the martech space alone, the landscape has grown from around 100 tools to more than 11,000 in the last decade (Chief Martech). B2B buyers are overwhelmed with choices and are often left in decision paralysis from the herculean task of selecting the right solutions for their business needs. The only thing worse than losing a sale is no sale at all because the buyer gave up.

Traditionally, B2B content focused on facts, figures, statistics, and specs. When buyers are faced with making a final decision between two or three options, these details still matter. However, to get on that important shortlist, you need to rise above the pack long before those final decisions are made.

Solution: Deploy Effective B2B Storytelling

In the end, your buyers are just people—and people are moved to action through emotion. Content that causes your prospects to feel something is what makes all the difference. Effective storytelling not only communicates how customers can solve a problem but helps them to see that a problem exists in the first place, creating feelings of urgency or necessity.

The impact of storytelling has long been known and practiced in B2C marketing (just think of any TV commercial you’ve ever seen!). However, did you know that B2B buyers are even more emotionally connected to their vendors and service providers than consumers? A recent Google study found that most B2C brands have emotional connections with 10-40% with their consumers. Meanwhile, more than three-quarters of the B2B brands studied surpassed the 50% mark.

This isn’t so surprising when you consider that most consumer products are easily returnable, so the stakes are low. For B2B, your ability to purchase the right products and services could mean the difference between a promotion or a pink slip. High stakes + high price = stress. And that means the B2B seller needs to make sure the buyer feels good about the purchase and is well supported throughout the buyer journey. A seller that can make the buyer look good to their peers and superiors wins the sale—and that seller is the one who told a better story.

Organizations that break through a crowded marketplace understand which platforms their buyers use and experiment with many storytelling formats (blog posts, videos, podcasts) to engage and delight their target audience. Success stories are the most common form of B2B storytelling, but some brands are really winning by bringing these stories to life. Some great examples of B2B storytelling are BLP’s Cautionary Tales or Norton’s The Most Dangerous Town on the Internet.

Decision-makers want to see brands taking the time to understand them as human beings, so the way B2B brands reach out to customers should engage them as people. Good storytelling establishes trust and authority, drawing in new customers and retaining existing ones by demonstrating deep understanding of your customer. The best storytellers draw on buyer needs and emotions to engage, inspire, and make their brand part of the customer’s narrative.

Challenge #5:
Enabling Ongoing Social Selling

LinkedIn confirms that 75% of B2B buyers use social media to make buying decisions. And although brands can effectively leverage social channels to connect with buyers, social tools are about connecting people. Just compare the LinkedIn followers for any “business celebrity” with their associated business

• Simon Sinek: 7.8 million followers/The Optimism Company: 3 million followers
• Adam Grant: 5.2 million followers/The Wharton School: 580,000 followers
• Brené Brown: 4.3 million followers/Brené Brown Education and Research Group: 82,000 followers

 

People listen to people. Social selling is not just about adding new contacts to your sales list. It’s about forming in meaningful social interactions and framing the people representing your brand as trusted sources to solve the buyer’s problem.

But social channels require compelling content that supports ongoing interaction and engagement to grow a following. When sales teams are not armed with a plethora of good content, they will resort to creating their own (see Challenge #1 above!).

Solution: Create an Accessible Content Archive and Regular Amplification Prompts

The best way to get a sales team to engage in social channels on behalf of your brand is to give them a lot to say. We already established above that much of the content B2B marketers produce goes unused. Often this is because it isn’t easily accessible when sales teams need it.

The first step in addressing this issue entails having a good content archive that is both accessible to the sales team AND easily searchable. The sales team is on the front lines and uniquely positioned to deliver targeted content during active conversations with prospects and customers—but they need the capability to find that content easily.

The second key to successful social selling is effective prompts. Marketing regularly pushes content out through social channels and expects its teams to automatically amplify that content. But marketers often end up disappointed by dwindling reach or resorting to costly promoted posts and paid ad options. However, if you create a process where you regularly ask your sales teams to share key content (and draft options for them to include in their comments!), you’ll find most are thrilled when you make it easy for them to share engaging content with their networks. It elevates their individual profile as a leader in your industry and builds the effectiveness of their connections. And most importantly, it boosts sales. 

According to HubSpot, sales pros who use sales enablement content in their role are 58% more likely to be performing over goal than those who don’t use it—and 79% of them say that content is important to making a sale. By partnering with the marketing team, the sales team can amplify marketing output, build their individual profiles, and focus efforts where real opportunity exists.

Bottom Line: Good Content Drives B2B Sales, But Creating It Is Not Easy

If you build a strong content strategy, you will no doubt end up with hundreds of good ideas about content you want to produce and disseminate. You know great content will help you bring in and convert customers. But continuously, quickly, and easily producing such content is a huge mountain to climb for any marketing team—especially if your products or services live in a highly specialized niche.

This is where we can help. At Content Innovo, we serve as a seamless extension of your marketing team. Our seasoned writers, marketers, strategists, and content creators are carefully matched to your business based on their highly specialized backgrounds across B2B sectors—including financial services, fintech, technology and digital services, healthcare, and the public sector. From start to finish, our 80+ content marketing strategists, creators, and storytellers will help you reach, engage, and convert your audience.

Learn More

The post Top 5 Challenges in B2B Sales and How Content Marketing Will Help You Overcome Them appeared first on Content Innovo.

At Content Innovo, we believe in something we call Intentional Content. Too often, marketing teams create responsive content. The CMO wants a blog post on one topic. The SEO strategist found a keyword they think you should pounce on. There is a conference next month you should likely create a white paper or other sales enablement material for.

In the rush of creating all that content, you never stop to consider whether what you’re creating is hitting all the right customer journey B2B touchpoints. The customer journey for B2B can be complicated – especially with more customers doing research online these days and the increasing complexity of buying teams.

Are you creating content for the lines of business that you’re strategically looking to grow? Is your content aligned with the right personas? Did you write that white paper for the conference at the right buyer’s stage? And if you get top of funnel interest from it, do you have other content created to help draw prospects through the funnel?

Creating Strategic Content for the Buying Journey for B2B Customers

If you’re asking yourself those questions, you need to go back to first principles: your content strategy. Ideally, you should have a content strategy that you’ve created as a marketing team with the input of senior executives, sales, and other key stakeholders in your organization. It will integrate your key messages, your content pillars, your personas, your business goals, and a strategy for how to position your business as a thought leader.

It should then have clearly defined critical/buying events, pain points, and opportunities for each of your lines of business and personas. It should also have content suggestions for each of your buying stages for every pain point, buying event, and opportunity.

That can be as few as three or as many as 11, but typically companies can collapse some of their customer journey B2B touchpoints into three to six stages. Your job is then to prioritize from that list which pieces of content are needed the most and create those.

That’s what we mean by Intentionally Content — that the majority of your content should be created in a strategic and methodical way focused on meeting key business priorities. Not just responding to the urgency of the moment.

It’s okay if you don’t have that in place just yet. We’re going to walk you through how to get there.

A B2B Buyer Journey Example

You might be wondering what a full-funnel content strategy looks like. Let’s say you’re a fintech company selling banking services to start-ups. One big pain point your customers experience is that they aren’t able to get the type of one-to-one service they need at a big bank.

You’ll want to create content for all stages of the buyer’s journey for that pain point. It might look like this:

Awareness

Here you could write a blog post about the banking challenges of startups around a keyword that CFOs might search.

Education

You could then write a white paper about the ways startups can leverage customized banking services to run their companies more efficiently and save money.

Enablement

Finally, you could write a case study that features happy startup customers who have benefited from more personalized and customized services.

Your prospects then might start their journey via a Google search and get value from reading your blog. You might then retarget them with a link to your white paper on LinkedIn. Finally, after you have gathered their email and contact information when they read your white paper, you can send them an email with a link to your case study.

You’ve just created a content flow that has intentionally drawn a prospect further along in their B2B buyer’s journey.

Mapping Your Full Customer Journey for B2B with Content

Now that you have an example, you need to implement it across your company and lines of business. That takes time and strategic thought.

Here are some steps to get the process started:

1. Start at the Top: Consult with senior leaders at your company to understand what the business goals are for the next couple of quarters. Which lines of business are they looking to grow? Which new industries are they looking to target.
2. Create a List of Pain Points: Rank your pain points according to which are most troublesome to your buyers. Unsure how to rank them? Talk to your sales staff to see what they hear from customers.
3. Create content ideas for your top pain points or opportunities: This is where you get into the full funnel part of your strategy. You want to make sure that your content map coheres with your journey. If there are more than three key parts, make sure to create content for each.
4. Create a content calendar and plan: This is where you figure out what’s possible. You want to create all this content eventually, but what will that timeline look like? How much will you do this year, this quarter, this month?
5. Be flexible: Intentional content is content created with a strategy. But sometimes strategic pieces of content come up that absolutely need to be written. Build flexibility into your B2B buyer’s journey content map. You should be able to take on extra pieces without compromising your calendar or cadence.  

Get Support with Your Intentional Content

Creating a plan for intentional content that maps to your buyer’s journey can be a complex process. You’ll need to involve multiple stakeholders and senior decisionmakers involved to do it well. Then you’ll have to validate and socialize your strategy to get approval.

This can be done internally but many companies find that getting outside expertise to help them talk through these issues and come up with a content strategy is helpful. It provides an impartial ear and helps flatten hierarchies so that you can get to the best strategies. Experts in content strategy can also help the process go faster because they already have all the templates created and know how to get to the core of the matter.

The post How to Match Your Content to the B2B Buyer’s Journey appeared first on Content Innovo.

A study of financing content marketers by Brandpoint in 2021 found that reaching a targeted audience and building a brand’s relationship with its customer is one of the biggest benefits of content marketing.

That makes content marketing in financial services an extremely cost-effective way to get in front of hard-to-reach decision makers at institutions and businesses — and to build relationships with their existing customers in order to cross-sell to them.

All financial services companies currently have some kind of a content strategy. But given the impact content can have on the sector’s results, companies should be asking if their current strategy is the right one. Are they doing enough?

We’ll break down why financial services marketing departments should be investing much more in content and what can be done to ensure that content marketing strategies in financial services firms are optimized for the increasing importance of content in the future.

The Future of Content Marketing in the Financial Sector

Enterprise technology company Pega recently released their Future of Marketing report titled 7 Trends Changing the Status Quo. Based off a survey of 750 global marketing executives, the report found that content is expected to drive business results in the future.

Companies are shifting from short-term and transactional marketing key performance indicators (KPIs) like immediate revenue and website visits to more long-term term relationship based KPIs like customer lifetime value and customer cross-sell.

The catalyst for this radical shift is martech applications that can finally optimize for and track these important metrics. This presents a great opportunity for financial services since the sector’s greatest revenue potential comes from long-term relationships with customers and serving them across multiple lines of business.

Pega found that content played a key role in delivering lifetime customer value. Companies who create quality content that connects with readers across their buying lifecycle will be more likely to see a financial services firm as a trusted partner and return to them for their next capital or investment related need.

Content marketing in financial services should therefore play a crucial part in the sector’s future marketing strategy. Firms that aren’t working now to refocus their marketing investments towards content are likely to fall behind as customers come to expect more from financial services.

Why Your Financial Services Content Strategy Needs an Upgrade

On average, B2B buyers are now reading eight pieces of content before they reach out to a company. That’s a shift from the relationship-based banking practices that have made many financial services firms successful.

With this new digital buyer’s journey, companies might be missing out on business opportunities because of substandard content and not even know it. That’s why a financial services firm needs to be overperforming when it comes to content.

A great financial services content strategy is focused on these key pillars:

1. Engaging Content

Dry bank brand voices aren’t cutting it anymore. Both B2B and B2C readers will put down content or navigate away if it isn’t engaging right from the opening sentence. There is no room for filler.

 Financial service content strategies should include updated brand voice guidelines with a more approachable and even potentially humorous voice.

• Intelligent Content

Do you quote your subject matter experts in your articles and white papers? If you don’t, you should be. You want to be providing a unique perspective on the issues that matter to your customers.

Both B2B and B2C also like data-driven content. Leverage your company’s data to tell a unique story about how people or businesses like them are dealing with common financial issues. Entry-level explainer content is good to have but high-level thought leadership is often what closes a sale or builds a deeper relationship.

• Personalized Content

Personalization is the future of marketing. But how do you do that with content? Don’t be afraid to include industry specific content in your B2B financial content marketing strategy. For B2C, feel free to create content aimed specifically at certain demographics.

Both types of content can tell key demographics that you understand their specific business and financial challenges. That builds trust and presents your firm as the perfect partner.

• Frequent Content

You can’t skimp on either content quality or frequency these days. Having a stream of content coming out consistently is key. Create industry specific or life cycle specific newsletters to remain in weekly or monthly contact with core groups.

One best practice is to create series of articles that are all focused on various customer pain points but speak to different points of the buyer’s journey. You can then use that content to create a digital journey that pulls readers further through the sales funnel.

Financial Content Marketing Done Right

So, just what does financial content marketing done right look like? A comprehensive financial services content marketing strategy could include things like

• SEO evergreen content for searches with buyer intent
• SEO evergreen content for searches connected to your product offerings
• Short form thought leadership
• Long form thought leadership
• Time-sensitive content
• Industry specific content
• Content for specific demographics
• Annual research reports
• Infographics for complex financial data
• Videos
• Webinars
• Podcasts
• Case studies or customer profiles
• Content for major campaigns
• Newsletter content for demographic specific segments
• And more

Which deliverables are right for your financial services content marketing strategy will depend on a company’s target customers. But a key part of the strategy has to be how all those things work together and are deployed via omnichannel or personalized interactions with customers.

For example, you can automate event-based actions that include content. Did a customer read an article on your site about small business loans? Retarget them on LinkedIn with ads for a research report you published last month on the state of business lending. Content has the potential to be a core driver of conversion, if deployed right.

How Do I Create a Winning Strategy for Financial Services?

Creating a winning content marketing strategy for financial services requires significant strategic thought and research. Here are just a few of the steps:

1. Start with your personas. What do you know about them from internal or external research? Create a guide for what kind of content each persona would be most likely to respond to. What distribution method is most likely to reach them? Create a guide for how to create optimized content for each persona.
2. Do more research. How are other financial services firms doing content marketing? Do a research report on their content production to better understand their best practices and missed opportunities.
3. Create a content strategy for each persona in line with customer persona pain points and your business objectives. Make sure to plan out content for each part of the buyer’s journey for each pain point. 
4. Optimize your content distribution. How does your content strategy fit in with your martech capabilities, other marketing spend, and current distribution method? Plan around with strategies to get the optimal results from 
5. Get external help, if needed. A financial services focused content marketing agency can help you quickly develop a winning strategy with much less work for your team. They’ll also be more plugged into emerging best practices.

How Do You Choose the Right Content Marketing Agency?

Hiring the right financial services content marketing agency is important. Reach out to a number of agencies who specialize in financial services and ask for an initial consultation. Make sure they understand where the future of content and financial services are headed. You want to make sure you’re getting a content strategy that will work now, not one that worked two years ago. Ask for references from past clients to ensure that you choose the right partner.

The post Why Content Marketing in Financial Services is the Key to Growth appeared first on Content Innovo.

Businesses that aren’t taking action or are focused on greenwashing and bandwagoning will falter as common standards emerge to measure and compare ESG performance. The next decade has widely been called the Climate Decade – but it will also be the ESG Decade. Expect diversity and governance concerns to gain in importance at the same time companies are pressured to adopt net zero goals.

The organizations that thrive? They won’t just be those making the right investments, creating the right culture, and empowering people of all backgrounds to thrive. It will be the companies doing that – and also communicating their impact effectively.

Here’s the bottom line: if your ESG marketing efforts stop once your annual ESG report is released – you’re doing ESG marketing all wrong.

Why You Need an ESG Marketing Strategy

Everyone is an ESG stakeholder these days. 99% of millennials are interested in sustainable investing and 73% of them made changes to their investment portfolios because of social justice issues, according to a 2021 study by Morgan Stanley. The broader population of investors isn’t trailing far behind — 79% are interested in sustainability and 50% shifted their portfolios.

And it’s not just investors companies have to consider. A 2021 report by PWC, found that 83% of consumers think companies should be leaders in ESG best practices and 91% of business leaders believe their companies should act on ESG issues. 86% of employees would also prefer to work for companies that care.

How to Use Your ESG Report in Your ESG Digital Marketing

But, you might be thinking, you invest a lot in your ESG Report. Does that mean it’s not important? Absolutely not. Your ESG Report will only become more important as companies and investors increasingly turn to it to make buying and investing decisions. But you need to stop seeing it as a stand-alone product. Instead, see it as a jumping off point to create the material that you’ll be integrating into all your other marketing messaging.

Use it to create an interactive and engaging web page where you talk about your company’s commitments. Leverage it on your social channels. Create content that expands on some of the themes in your report or interviews experts in your company or organizations that your company supports on your corporate blog or podcast. The CTAs for that content? Your normal pitch but this time also include a link to your ESG Report to learn more. Your job is to call attention to all the ways your organization is leading on ESG. 

Create a Multi-Channel ESG Campaign

So, how do you integrate your ESG marketing strategy into marketing campaigns that include the right amount of ESG messaging?

1. Revisit your personas. Start by looking at your existing buyer and stakeholder personas. What are each of their ESG concerns? Use research studies to help guide you. Targeting the CEOs of startups? Find a study that examines their ESG concerns. You might need to make some additional personas to represent new potential buyers or stakeholders. The goal is the better understand how ESG is motivating each of your key segments and what ESG messaging they might need at each stage of their buyer’s journey.
2. Tweak your sales collateral. Now that you know what’s motivating each of your segments, you need to check if your current sales collateral is addressing their ESG pain points. No? Find ways to integrate your company’s ESG value proposition into those pieces in callout boxes or within the messaging itself.
3. Renovate your digital channels. How often do you talk about ESG on your social, email, and web channels? Not much? Time to change that. Find opportunities to share your brand’s values driven story across all mediums. Make sure that your channels are also optimized to be accessible and inclusive.
4. Update your content calendar. Your content calendar could use an ESG refresh. Think of reports, thought leadership, infographics, articles, interviews, videos, or podcasts that would show that your company cares and is leading on ESG issues. Check your site to see if your images and video reflect your company’s diversity. Does everyone look the same? Do you not have captions or transcripts? Time to shift your strategy and update old content.

The Era of ESG Has Arrived — How is Your Marketing Meeting The Challenge?

A savvy ESG marketing strategy integrates ESG marketing throughout an organization’s marketing strategy, customer acquisition, and customer retention lifecycles. That includes:

• Values and purposes-based branding
• Social and community marketing that centers ESG
• ESG-related thought leadership
• ESG sales collateral messaging
• ESG product marketing strategies
• Integration of ESG into recruiting material and internal communication
• Cause marketing
• Accessible and inclusive digital marketing
• ESG Influencer and SME marketing
• And more! It’s time to think of your company’s ESG investments as central parts of your brand story rather than just something you talk about once a year. Then build an ESG marketing strategy from there.

It’s time to think of your company’s ESG investments as central parts of your brand story rather than just something you talk about once a year. Then build an ESG marketing strategy from there.

The post Why Your ESG Marketing Shouldn’t Stop at Your ESG Report appeared first on Content Innovo.

There’s much to be gained by positioning your firm as a thought leader – but doing so is not always straightforward. Financial services firms must overcome the challenges experienced by all companies undertaking content marketing, while also facing certain sector-specific hurdles.

In particular, they have to tackle the following issues:

1. Creating compelling content. As in other sectors, engaging experienced content experts, achieving a consistent tone of voice and overcoming budget constraints are crucial when it comes to developing content.
2. Navigating different channels and formats. In addition to traditional formats such as articles, thought leadership, white papers and research reports, firms are also using videos, blogs, infographics, social media content and webinars to distribute their content. Making strategic decisions about which formats to focus on – and repurposing the same content for different channels – is essential when it comes to making content stand out in an increasingly crowded space.
3. Overcoming compliance hurdles. Financial services firms also have their own sector-specific challenges to overcome – not least of all the difficulties associated with regulatory compliance. It can be tempting to be overly cautious in such a regulated climate, but a clear understanding of the relevant constraints can enable firms to produce insightful material with confidence.
4. Measuring value. Firms may struggle to measure the value and effectiveness of the content they produce. Many metrics are available, including conversion rates, website traffic, customer feedback and sales – but firms often lack confidence when it comes to tracking ROI.

Financial services firms may face challenges where content is concerned – but by adopting a clear content strategy, firms can overcome the challenges and create compelling and effective content. We will explore these topics in more detail in future articles.

The post Content Strategy: Harnessing the Benefits for Financial Services appeared first on Content Innovo.

Covid-19: Changing Business Practices.

Covid has forced us to connect online with clients, partners and prospects more than we would like.  Do you agree? 

I was raised on the maxim that you don’t truly make a connection in business until you have met a person 3 times.  Content Innovo is in a growth phase; we need to reach out to as many prospects as possible.  How do we make a meaningful connection when face to face meetings are unvavailable? 

I don’t have a definitive answer to that question, but what I can report is I’m not the only one.  We’re all in this together.  Whether you are trying to sell something, or logging on to a webinar because you want to learn more about your next business-critical purchase, or you’re connecting with prospects or vendors, there seems to be a great acceptance that the current method of communication is not perfect.  There seems to be an acceptance that we’re all trying to do our utmost to represent ourselves and our businesses in the best light.  

And we’re all failing misearbly.

The Good Old Days?

I remember 20 years ago when you would go to someone’s offices to present your idea, and the advent of technology meant you could use powerpoint to provide amazing visuals.  You would ask the person you were meeting to book a boardroom and give you access to a big screen and the wifi code. 

Those were the days, because you a had a stunning visual presentation on your laptop — life was good.  This presentation was not only going to blow their socks off, it was going to seal the deal — but —  if your presentation didn’t load instantly and on command… that was it. You were done.  That client would never speak to you again.  You would instantly lose credibility. 

In the new reality, technical difficulties are the norm.  

Grace Under Pressure

Content Innovo was recently part of an accelerator program called Beyond Boundaries, put on by the Halton Region Innovation Centre, Haltech, and part of the Canadian government’s push to empower women entrepreneurs.  Halfway through the program, everything shut down because of Covid-19 and we had to go online.  No problem. We all agreed to meet at the appointed hour and click the link to participate.  

The presentation for our first fully online session was hosted by an accountancy firm.  A firm that had a vested interest in sponsoring the program and engaging its participating members in the highest quality format and presenting themselves in the highest quality way. 

But guess what? As bizarre as it sounds, the mac users couldn’t see the shared content when the pc users could, and vice versa.  And that situation went on for 10 minutes.  

But here’s the thing, no one left.  Our host, to her credit, taught me a lot in that very moment about staying calm under pressure. And the fellow participants taught me a lot about accepting that this is not an ideal situation for anyone.  Everyone was understanding, and had likely been through similar situations, themselves, in recent weeks.

I have loads of examples of bizarre things that happen when trying to organize a video call with multiple participants —Zoomwobble, anyone? — and I would love to hear your tales.  I also have loads of examples of hosts and participants dealing with these problems in real time, in a way that wouldn’t have been acceptable 6 months ago.  But we’re all in this together. 

The post Zoomwobble: The Challenges of Hosting Video Conferences appeared first on Content Innovo.

As the US Senate Committee on Small Business & Entrepreneurship noted, there is still a disparity in access to capital and entrepreneurial development opportunities for minority-owned firms. “Though minorities make up 32% of our population, minority business ownership represents only 18% of the population.”

Minority entrepreneurs face a unique set of challenges in navigating the path to business success. Three minority entrepreneurs in Calgary, Alberta, shared their advice in a recent article in the Calgary Journal.  Eddie Richardson, president of Genesis Basketball; Joyce Okunsi, CEO of Joyce’s Closet; and Beni Johnson, founder of 10at10 media platform have all launched successful businesses in the face of discrimination and financial barriers.

1. Don’t let stereotypes define you

“Whenever I was given a job or a task I would always try to be the most educated on it.” said Johnson. “People were racist in their ways. If something does not look like you, people get afraid of it, so it was a combination of many things.”

1. Don’t let barriers stop you

“In fashion, I faced many barriers. I had to work twice as hard to prove my credibility as a stylist. Because I am a black woman, I was excluded from many things that I should have been a part of.” said Okunsi.

1. Don’t forget that your experiences are valuable

“I’ve worked through a lot to get to where I am and I still have a lot ahead of me,” said Richardson. “I hope that my story inspires others to never settle and to push through adversity because anything is possible.”

The post 3 Tips for Success from Minority Entrepreneurs appeared first on Content Innovo.

• While the appeal of online banking continues to expand, with 49% of all millennials using online banking for routine transactions, companies like Trailhead Credit Union are also aware of the impact the consumer experience at their physical locations is crucial to connecting with their audience. Having “transformed its look and messaging to connect with the urbanite spirit of Portland”, they’ve seen record-breaking growth in their customer engagement thanks to its commitment to appealing to their consumers.

• By analyzing their consumer base and re-evaluating their content strategies, respected firms like Liberty Mutual and Santander Bank are providing targeted, curated content with the intent of educating certain demographics on relevant services that are available to them. For example, Santander recently focused on its millennial demographic, and aimed to connect with potential customers who may be closing in on a point in their lives when they need a loan. By providing them with a wealth of valuable information and drawing traffic into their core banking site, they were able to attract new customers, gain their trust, and gain further insights about their audience.

• Innovation is impossible to achieve without experimentation, which is why America First Credit Union opened their innovation center in Salt Lake City. Designed from the ground up to be an interactive experience for customers, it also functions as a space to provide live demonstrations of new technology to the public, who can provide instant feedback and help expedite the development process with their input.

Ultimately the need for a personalized, targeted approach to delivering outstanding customer experiences continues to serve as a driving force for experimentation in the field of consumer-facing financial services, which a growing tribe of innovative firms capitalizing on the trend and proving that no matter how convenient your service may be, a certain human touch is necessary for facilitating the personal connection between you and your audience that sets you apart from the competition.

For more in-depth info on engaging with your audiences, click here.

For tips on improving your own digital content strategy click here.

The post 3 Ways Financial Institutions are Closing the Gaps in Customer Satisfaction appeared first on Content Innovo.