Focus on the Customer

If alignment is central to a positive content experience, all customer-facing teams—marketing, sales, customer retention, and so on—must have a shared goal. In the Age of the Customer, that shared goal must be the customer. Now more than ever, buyers are in control—and that's only getting more apparent as marketing becomes more of an education center to engage prospects pre-sales.

According to our research, only 61 percent of marketers reported that their organization has adopted a customer-centric approach to marketing. Interestingly, 72 percent of sales thought that their marketing organizations had a customer-centric approach, which begs the question: Are marketers following through on their strategy?

Regardless, these numbers show we're largely behind the curve with transitioning away from product-centric to customer-centric content.

A stellar content experience starts with tailored content, which means your product, service, or whatever it is that you're selling isn't the focus. Instead, the needs of the customer are the core of what content should be targeted for. Sure, your solution might come up or become relevant as you educate readers about how to better their own lives. But all content must be strategized in order to appeal to the customer. And, despite what you might hope, the likelihood that your product itself is what a prospect wants to hear about—especially higher in the funnel—is quite low.

Develop a Cross-Functional Team to Own the Experience

When we asked our survey respondents about who owns the customer experience, answers were all over the board. Significantly, though, marketing and sales had very different opinions.

Sales, perhaps unsurprisingly, were most likely to declare themselves owners of all things customer experience. Marketers, however, did not follow suit: They were most likely to choose a cross-functional group with representatives from multiple departments.

Marketing: 1, Sales: 0. Coming from a marketer, perhaps that doesn't mean much—but let me explain why.

Regardless of what single department tried to manage the customer experience, lack of input from other teams will be your downfall. Marketers know what's happening in the general landscape, salespeople have an entire library of anecdotes about what goes on for your actual buyers, and customer success knows what organizations are successful with your offering. Can you imagine relying on only one of those data points in planning a customer's content experience? Hopefully not, but it's more likely that it's your reality.

Establishing this—and carrying it out with regular content planning and analysis meetings—is central to a positive content experience.

Prioritize Alignment at Scale

Aligning key stakeholders only gets more difficult as an organization grows. But, regardless of size, alignment comes down to one thing: communication.

One in three survey respondents reported that sales and marketing don't have a regular meeting. Unfortunately, in companies of 5,000+ employees, that statistic jumps to one in two. As can be expected, this lack of communication translates into problems that inevitably hurt the content experience.

Companies with over 5,000 employees were 15 percent less likely to have visibility into how sales uses content and 14 percent less likely to know whether internal stakeholders agree that inconsistent messages have a negative effect on customer experience compared to their smaller counterparts.

But, as more players come into the back end of the content experience, it becomes even more important to stay aligned. Not only must organizations prioritize interdepartmental consistency, but also intradepartmental consistency! Keeping even the largest team aligned comes down to breaking down silos and keeping process around content centralized in a tool that enables sales and marketing alike.