Why Content Operations is Vital to Any Organization’s B2B Content Strategy

6 minute read

Upland Admin

You may have the greatest products and services in the world. But if people don’t know about them, those individuals and businesses won’t be able to buy and benefit from them.

We all know that. It is a well-understood, often-repeated business reality. And it fuels the need for content directors, marketing leaders, and savvy business executives like you.

Getting the message out about a company or product launch is just the tip of the iceberg, of course. Businesses also must reinforce their brands and value propositions throughout the customer lifecycle. Doing that – and aligning the team members and resources to make it happen – is not as easy as it sounds.

As different parts of your organization work to get messages out in a timely manner, cadence and consistency are key – so is making sure you actually use the content you have created:

  • If you don’t stay in front of your customers and prospects with regular and relevant content, they may disengage.
  • If you send out mixed messages about your brand and solutions, it may confuse rather than educate customers and prospects.
  • And if you don’t use your content – and SiriusDecisions reports that 60% to 70% of all content is wasted – you have wasted your time and resources.

That’s why content operations is vital to every B2B organization’s content strategy.

Operationalizing Marketing Efforts Across the Board

Content operations platforms help organizations achieve cohesion in their marketing messages and enable agile teamwork. These platforms fully operationalize organizations’ entire marketing efforts – including the people, processes, and technology required for the successful governance, orchestration, and execution of all marketing responsibilities.

Businesses that use content operations platforms are better positioned to break through the marketplace noise and make a positive – and consistent – impression with their B2B customers.

And they can do it at scale!

Addressing the Need to Deliver Exceptional Customer Experiences

Never before has content operations been more important.

Today’s customers have a wide array of businesses and solutions at their fingertips. That gives them a lot of power to find and employ the vendors and offerings of their choice.

The organizations that win their trust with the right solutions and messaging are best positioned to keep their business and succeed in the long term.

We all know that. We’re living it.

Helping Businesses Move Forward – Right Away and Continually

The 2017 Gartner Customer Experience in Marketing Survey revealed 81% of marketing leaders believed their companies would mostly or completely compete on the basis of their customer experience within two years. It’s now 2019, and the customer experience era is upon us.

So businesses are scrambling to manage the broad mix of marketing channels needed to provide customers with meaningful interactions across their journeys, as Gartner noted in its Marketers: CMO Spend Survey 2018-2019. Gartner added that organizations can’t simply set-it-and-forget-it with their channels of choice. Instead, marketing teams need to continue to adjust to changing content and channel preferences and requirements.

Aligning Efforts and Enabling Consistency

Content operations platforms enable businesses like yours to do all that.

Cross-departmental messaging alignment and consistency in messaging throughout the customer journey allow your business to have more meaningful interactions with customers and prospects. And that makes for better customer experiences, stronger brand loyalty, and increased chances customers will buy again – and more – from you in the future.

Helping B2B companies orchestrate the customer experiences that will help them survive and thrive was a driving force in Upland Software’s recent Kapost acquisition.

Leveraging the Power of AI

Last month we announced our purchase of Kapost and its cloud-based content operations platform, which unites revenue teams and enables them to speak in one voice and keep the conversation going throughout each customer’s journey.

With the acquisition of Kapost, we’ve added powerful technology and built-in artificial intelligence that supports advanced end-to-end content operations. As a result, organizations can drive meaningful interactions and increase revenue and brand loyalty.

AI-based marketing platforms are the wave of the future, as Forrester notes in its Predictions 2019: B2B Marketing and Sales report. The research firm says AI is already a must-have for early- and late-stage marketing and sales engagement applications. But it notes that determining next-best actions, like whether the next touch should be via a call or email, involves greater complexity. And it says by the end of this year, more than 20% of mid-cycle marketing orchestration solutions will employ AI.

Upland Software and Kapost (now Upland Kapost) are ahead of this trend.

Supporting Planning and Introducing Advanced Analytics

Kapost comes with an editorial planning tool that lets users lay out their content strategies and align planned content to budget requirements, personas, and relevant journey maps. It also enables users to connect content strategies to editorial calendars. And it connects content performance to prospect conversion and revenue.

With the Kapost acquisition, Upland also adds new advanced content analytics capabilities. They let users track performance of content against budget, content themes, customer journey stage, personas, and other metadata tags. And marketers can use this data to inform content planning.

Plus, the technology can tap into other marketing content and solutions. That includes audio, marketing automation tools, social media, video, and web content management systems.

Integrating Capabilities and Demonstrating Value

We’re adding Kapost to the Upland Enterprise Sales Enablement and Customer Experience Management solution suites. That means B2B organizations using these Upland software suites can orchestrate all stages of content planning, production, and distribution.

These solutions’ advanced analytics capabilities allow businesses to identify and address what had been hidden gaps in their content strategy. They enable users to track big initiatives, events and project launches; assign milestones and deadlines to keep people and their work on track; and map campaigns and efforts to the regions and verticals they support.

They also measure the return on investment of marketing efforts. That’s important, because as Gartner noted in its CMO Spend Survey 2018-2019, “Marketing leaders must demonstrate the business value of their efforts amid uncertain times” in which “CMOs struggle to align marketing metrics with business priorities.”

Customer requirements and marketing are changing fast. And that can create real challenges for marketing teams and businesses as a whole.

Upland is here to help. We’re committed to providing organizations with the most valuable cloud-based enterprise work management solutions – including content operations platforms.

Click here for more information on Upland’s acquisition of Kapost. Or to learn more about Upland’s Sales Enablement Solution suite, click here.

This article was originally published here.

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