3 content management system issues you need to address to boost customer engagement

Does your marketing team use a content management system to store, manage, and distribute content? Does the solution you have in place work in today’s digital selling environment?

The majority of the buyer journey now happens digitally. And B2B buyers consume an average of 13 pieces of content before making a purchase. Today, it seems, marketers are holding all the cards. 

As such, your content management system should be more than a content repository. Fix these common issues, and it can become your most valuable tool to engage and convert prospective buyers.

1. Your content management system houses dated, static content

Buyers have changed (again). They’re remote, sick of staring at screens, and distracted. To make an impact, the content you share and present needs to capture their attention. If your content management system contains only static PowerPoint decks and boring brochureware, you will miss a huge opportunity to differentiate your company and offering. 

How to fix it:

1. Audit your existing content. Is it current and relevant? Does it engage buyers? 

Sort your content inventory into three buckets: 

• Keep – This content is heavily used by sales or downloaded online, is proven to engage buyers, and helps move deals forward.
• Optimize – This content needs a refresh. Maybe the content is good, but the design could use some work. Perhaps the content is relevant, just dated. Or the content is good, but the format no longer works, and you need to re-purpose it.
• Archive – This content no longer meets the needs of your buyer. Sales reps don’t leverage it, and buyers rarely download it online.

2. Clean up your content management system. Keep what works, optimize what you can, archive the rest. 

When optimizing, remember:

• Today’s buyers have short attention spans. Stick to short-form content that effectively conveys your message in terms your buyers understand.
• Lead with value. Most buyers find it difficult to differentiate between vendors. Don’t talk about features and capabilities. Introduce the value you can provide buyers early and often. (Our proprietary CLOSE methodology can help with this.)
• 86% of buyers prefer interactive content formats. B2B buyers want the same types of on-demand content experiences (think Netflix or Disney+) they have in their B2C lives. Use animation and navigation to create immersive, self-guided content experiences that allow buyers to go as deep as they want into any given topic at their own pace.

2. Your sellers can’t easily find or share the content they need when they need it

Now that you’ve got a content management system full of rockstar content, you need to make sure it is structured to help your sellers find and leverage the right content with the right buyer at the right time. (Disclaimer: If you use a content repository like SharePoint or Box versus a content management system, that becomes more difficult to do. I get into why in this article.)

If content usage and adoption are challenges for you, accessibility is likely the problem. If your sellers create content because they can’t find what they need or share outdated content because they save old versions to their desktops, again, accessibility is probably to blame.

If sellers can’t access relevant content to support sales interactions, buyer engagement will suffer.

How to fix it:

Think beyond content management to content engagement. Adopt one unified solution that allows marketers to upload, organize, update, and distribute content to sellers in real-time and enables sales reps to search, share, and present content. 

A sales enablement platform can help you ensure sellers always have accurate, up-to-date content at their fingertips, whether online or offline. Many of these systems also use machine learning to make content recommendations, automatically surfacing the most relevant content for a specific account or sales meeting, so your sellers can confidently offer buyers the right content at the right time, every time.

3. Your content management system doesn’t provide insights on what content works

As more companies switch to a RevOps model and more marketers are held accountable for revenue, it becomes increasingly important to understand content performance. 

PSA: Understanding how often your content is shared or viewed does not paint an accurate picture of whether or not your content is successful. 

How to fix it:

Today’s marketers need visibility into how sellers leverage content and how potential buyers consume that content. When marketers can see what content buyers are viewing, for how long, what they’re revisiting and resharing, they can identify the most effective content that moves deals forward. Then, they can budget, plan, and create their strategy for future content accordingly.

With the same data, sellers can duplicate sales success – taking content they know reliably engages buyers at various points in the buyer journey and reusing it to move similar buyers down the path to purchase.

Robust content engagement analytics captured by sales enablement platforms like Mediafly help marketers and sellers align on what content works and what doesn’t. This visibility allows revenue teams to offer buyers an improved customer experience because they receive proven content that resonates at every stage of their buying journey.

Looking to refresh the content in your content management system to better engage buyers in 2022? Check out our on-demand webinar How to Create a Winning B2B Interactive Content Strategy.