Your Content Problems Are Actually Messaging Problems

Companies appear to be having problems with marketing-generated lead conversion—what I call the “conversion gap.”

If you believe buyers are 57% or more of the way through the buying cycle, you’re not alone. Seventy-eight percent of marketing and sales leaders agree with the stat, according to a new survey from Corporate Visions.

You might not find that so surprising. But what might surprise you are the responses to a question posed to those who agree with the premise of that stat about what kind of impact it’s had on their messaging and content.

Long story short, it hasn’t had much of one: Only 24% of respondents who agree with the premise of the stat have made major strategic shifts in their demand generation and sales enablement content strategies as a result of it.

Companies appear to be having problems with marketing-generated lead conversion—what I call the “conversion gap”—and some of the struggles suggest companies may need to be making changes and forming a content strategy that covers both sides of the lead handoff. Below are two key challenges the survey identified:

• Only 11% of respondents believe their conversion from content-driven leads to pipeline is “excellent.”
• Nearly half (47%) of respondents describe their lead conversion efforts as “sketchy” or failing to drive trackable impact.

A big part of overcoming these lead conversion challenges is recognizing that your content strategy needs to move further downstream to better enable salespeople to succeed in their first conversation in the field. But just creating sales enablement content to guide field sales conversations and align them to your demand generation messaging won’t make much of an impact if you’re not guiding them in the right way. In other words, what you might think are content problems are actually messagingproblems.

A Messaging Mishap?

Typically, companies create four types of content for their demand generation and sales enablement programs. In the survey, we asked marketing and sales leaders to describe which type of messaging they most often package in their demand generation and sales enablement assets among the following four types:

• Company-centric content designed to promote the company vision and brand promise
• Product-centric content emphasizing competitive differentiation and features and benefits
• Problem-centric content addressing needs identified in voice of the customer research
• Insights-centric content introducing unconsidered needs and a disruptive perspective

The survey revealed that companies most often focus on product-centric and problem-centric messaging in both their demand generation and sales enablement content. (These two categories were a virtual tie). Meanwhile, the creation of insights-centric content finished last in both areas of content production, even finishing behind company-centric content.

The comparatively low deployment of insights-driven content—i.e., content that presents a distinct point of view and introduces unconsidered needs into the conversation—could explain some of the challenges companies are having in the area of lead conversion. In fact, a message in which you identify unconsidered needs and map them to your unique strengths is tested and proven to give you a statistically significant advantage in perceptions of uniqueness and in terms of creating the urgency to change—both crucial aspects of converting your demand generation leads into real pipeline.

Below are three potential fixes companies can make as they look to overcome the conversion gap and realize the pipeline impact they need from their marketing efforts:

• Create more insights-driven content based on “unconsidered needs” that link to your unique capabilities, and package that message in your marketing and sales enablement content, so your provocative messaging runs through your customer conversations in your campaigns and after the lead handoff.
• Develop specific lead “handoff” messaging and content that follows a prescribed framework for better follow-up between campaign leads and first sales calls.
• Establish a common messaging methodology that drives consistency across demand generation and sales enablement content, gives you a repeatable approach to creating sales-ready messages, and ensures marketers and sales enablement pros are well-versed at creating content that aligns to your distinct point of view.