That’s kind of how marketing used to work. Teams would invest a certain amount in one channel, maybe more in another, maybe less in a third. Revenue would, hopefully, come out the other end in the form of sales. But no one really knew for sure if a return was heading their way or not.

At SiriusDecisions Summit 2018, held at the glittering Mandalay Bay in Vegas, it was clear that marketers are tired of black boxes. We’ve been giving lip service to improving the connection between marketing activities and sales for years. But if the conversations, vendors, and presentations were any indication, that alignment is a key goal for many of the top marketing teams across the country.

Sales and marketing: Best friends forever?

If you scan the list of vendors who ponied up for SiriusDecisions sponsorships, you’ll see a few key categories: sales enablement (Seismic, Highspot), account-based marketing (6sense, Terminus), and sales readiness/operations (Bigtincan, Brainshark).

Most people I talked to during the event had the same question: How do I improve my sales team’s productivity? Some common symptoms popped up around the fact that teams struggle to train salespeople and keep messaging consistent. As a result, salespeople regularly use outdated assets or none at all, and that activity often goes untracked.

The symptoms seemed to hint at a larger issue—marketing doesn’t trust sales, and sales doesn’t trust marketing. Salespeople think they know how to win each opportunity their own way. Marketers want to scale their content and messaging across a salesforce skeptical of their abilities. Meanwhile, sales teams are overwhelmed by software they don’t use or don’t believe in.

Many vendors are jumping to solve this disconnect. Some want to make content more readily available and intelligent, ourselves included. Some want to make it easier for salespeople to train themselves and prepare for big meetings. Others want to remove salespeople from the equation altogether, replacing roles like SDRs with automated “sales reps” or—in one particularly odd case—female prisoners.

The connection between marketing and sales is obviously weak. A jackpot awaits those who can make marketing and sales best friends or, at the very least, trusting partners.

A few other takeaways

1. Technology is starting to support the customer-centric movement. One of the best keynotes (with the worst name) at SiriusDecisions Summit was “Nurture in a Demand United Waterfall World,” where Sirius analysts discussed the monumental shift occurring in how marketers nurture leads and customers.

In the past, marketers smacked leads over the head with pre-determined paths of content: This quiz first, then this report, then this e-book, and so on. Not surprisingly, CTRs and conversion from this approach are often less than impressive.

Now, many forward-thinking companies are beginning to serve personalized content when it’s needed based on signals from customers. For example: rather than drip content one piece at a time, if the lead is indicating that its suddenly hot, the system will go into overdrive and serve the highest converting pieces all at once.

2. Vendors are really bad at explaining what they do. Almost every booth tagline was some combination of “Leader in Sales Enablement… Leader in ABM… Leader in Marketing Automation… Leader in Content Marketing.” Good luck figuring out the difference between them without grilling a salesperson for 15 minutes.

3. Mandalay Bay is huge. There are 24 restaurants; a wave pool, lazy river, beach club, aquarium, and topless beach; permanent Cirque du Soleil (Michael Jackson ONE), a House of Blues, and 135,000 square feet of gaming; and the 2 million square foot convention center where SiriusDecisions Summit took place. You could spend weeks there and never leave.

4. Contently won an award! We were named a Program of the Year for Brand and Communications.

We could not be more thrilled to accept the @siriusdecisions Program of the Year Award for Brand and Communications! Join us to hear the story of our latest initiatives at 2:40 PST at the #SDSummit: https://t.co/OeJjDL9iMm pic.twitter.com/4OsNvXDZM2

— Contently (@contently) May 9, 2018

Our client, Dell, won an award later that day from Digiday for their content program.

Our team at Dell Technologies won the @Digiday award for the best branded content site! We're honored and so proud of everyone who worked tirelessly to deliver these stories: https://t.co/aDiNeHv70L pic.twitter.com/08MLVa2A6Z

— Contently (@contently) May 10, 2018

5. Vendors need to stop with the gimmicks. Oxygen bars, RC cars, little sloth plushies, free chocolate—you name it, a vendor was doing it. These purely exist so event managers can scan anyone and inflate the number of “leads” to impress their bosses. The click-click-click of a carnival wheel still haunts my dreams.

The post 1 Big Takeaway (and 5 Smaller Ones) From SiriusDecisions Summit appeared first on Contently.

-Alejandro, Mexico

Content marketing is a funny discipline. It’s been a major movement for the past six years, but some companies are still just starting to take it seriously. And once they do, marketing leaders panic. They turn to the closest living creature and scream, “We need to do content! Now! Someone start typing!”

That approach doesn’t work out great, because the worst kind of content only exists to check a box. Just creating content isn’t a goal. That won’t do anything for your business. Plus, you’ll waste a lot of money if your content fails to impact some larger pursuit like brand awareness, lead generation, or sales enablement.

Alejandro, without a larger strategy, you’re doomed to fail.

So how do we change your boss’s mind? Here are three great stats that could help you make your case:

1. According to a 2017 Contently survey, 98 percent of marketers believe that “having and following a content marketing strategy is important for content marketing success.”

2. Per CMI’s 2018 B2B Content Marketing Trends survey, 62 percent of content marketers who rated themselves as very successful or extremely successful have a documented content strategy. Conversely, if you don’t have a strategy, there’s a good chance you won’t be successful.

This holds true for B2C companies as well, as we see in CMI’s 2017 B2C report. (The 2018 B2C report hasn’t been released yet.)

3. According to SiriusDecisions, 65 percent of all content that brands produce goes unused. There are a few big reasons for why: content is hard to find, unknown to users, irrelevant, and low quality. All of these stem from a lack of content strategy.

Your boss is going to waste a lot of money if you don’t get the opportunity to put together a comprehensive content strategy. If you want to start mapping out where you need to go, check out our whitepaper Content Methodology: A New Model for Content Marketing, which provides an end-to-end guide for building a content marketing program.

How can you best measure content marketing ROI for content that’s distributed via social channels? What are the best ways to go beyond likes and social shares?

Ryan, Chicago

It’s all about setting up the right conversion pathways so you can follow what folks do after they find your content. Do they sign up for a newsletter? Check out your product page? Ask to talk to a salesperson? Your business goals will ultimately dictate what you decide to track. Regardless of what conversions you’re after, this KissMetrics guide to Google Analytics social reports is an excellent place to start.

What are the differences between a writer’s role and a content marketer’s role? Does a freelancer have to know all the technical marketing jargon, or can they just write?

Kate, Las Vegas

Contently has a network of over 160,000 freelance creatives across the globe that we vet and train to work with brands, so this is a question we’ve thought about quite a bit. If you aspire to write for a brand, you don’t need to be a content marketing expert. (Unless, of course, the topic is content marketing.) Just be a good writer who specializes in a certain topic or industry.

That being said, you do need a basic understanding of marketing terms. Writers should be versed in the foundational elements of a company’s content program. (Which is why we create a content strategy for every Contently client and make it accessible in our platform for every freelancer.) Specifically, you’ll want to know:

Business goal(s): What is your client trying to accomplish with this piece of content? What metrics will determine success?

Audience: Who is the target audience for this piece of content? (You’re going to write differently for a 55-year-old CMO than a 20-year-old student.)

Content pillars: What core topics and concepts does your client focus on?

Target SEO keywords: What target SEO keywords is your client trying to rank for with this piece of content?

Writers have to keep these factors in mind when they’re crafting content, and they need a certain level of marketing fluency to reach that point. Alternatively, if you’re a marketer working with freelancers, you need to make sure they understand this information before you start commissioning work.

Over the past five years, tons of writers have gotten hooked on content marketing after upping their marketing fluency, including me. Who knows? Once you start to geek out on content marketing, it could open up a whole new career.

Joe Lazauskas is Contently’s director of content strategy and editor-in-chief. Ask him your most pressing content strategy questions here, or email him at lazer@contently.com.

His book, The Storytelling Edge: How to Transform Your Business, Stop Screaming into the Void, and Make People Love You, which he co-authored with Contently co-founder Shane Snow, will be published on January 29 by Wiley. Pre-order it here.

The post Ask a Content Strategist: My Boss Wants Me to Write Blog Posts Without a Strategy. What Do I Do? appeared first on Contently.

In a book I co-wrote with Contently founder Shane Snow that’s being published early next year [note]We’re still figuring out the title and release date with our publisher, but be on the lookout soon.[/note], we write about Netflix’s foray into original programming. In 2011, Netflix did something unprecedented for a technology company—it invested $100 million in a show called House of Cards. Even though famed director and producer David Fincher was attached to the project, most people thought Netflix was crazy. But they didn’t know the company had a secret weapon: data.

Netflix knows everything about how its users watch video. What they watch and for how long. When they rewind. When they skip. What they watch next. And Netflix knew three things: People who watch Kevin Spacey movies love Kevin Spacey movies. People who watch David Fincher films watch all David Fincher films. And people binged hard on the original British House of Cards.

Netflix wasn’t crazy. What was House of Cards besides a David Fincher project starring Kevin Spacey based on the original British House of Cards?

Compared to the blind bets that most TV execs make based on vague Nielsen data and statistically insignificant focus groups, Netflix’s decision was incredibly informed and logical. According to analysis by The Atlantic, the $100 million bet paid off in three months based on new subscribers. It’s a formula the company has repeated with original series like Orange is the New Black and Stranger Things, which is a big part of why Netflix shows get renewed at twice the rate of network programming.

I love this story because it illustrates how we need to think about content strategy. At many organizations and agencies, strategy is as outdated as how TV networks green light shows. Insufficient inputs inform decisions—a few user interviews, some misguided assumptions (“millennials hate Facebook!”), a bloated content audit, and a helping of overpriced “creative brainstorms.” Given all the powerful data and tools at our fingertips, this is a total waste of resources.

Finding your inner Netflix

Content audits are the absolute cornerstone of content strategy. It’s hard to get your content program on solid footing without a sense of all the assets at your disposal. Then once you find everything, you can start asking important questions. Is your content optimized for search? For UX? Is it any good? Or are some piece of content actually detrimental to your brand?

Unproductive, low-quality content will kill your brand. This slide from SiriusDecisions sums up the situation perfectly:

Most organizations are plagued with a lot of content rot. According to SiriusDecisions, 65 percent of all B2B content goes unused, either because it’s undiscoverable, irrelevant, or bad. You need to identify those pieces and figure out how to use them (if they’re high-quality and relevant) and fix or eliminate them (if they’re not).

However, marketers often fall into a trap at this point. We start to believe we’re Netflix. After spending dozens—or hundreds—of hours conducting a content audit, the numbers in those spreadsheet become sacrosanct. We get tunnel vision and have conversations like:

Marketer A: Our white paper on millennial investing trends got 400 views.

Marketer B: Our white paper on AI and the future of robo-investing only got 100 views.

Marketer A: Wow, that’s 4x for millennial investing trends! Let’s make that a core focus for next year.

Don’t make strategic decisions purely based on the past performance. Your content accounts for a fraction of a fraction of what your target audience looks at. As we explained recently, there are millions of readily available data points that tell you what type of content your target audience is engaging with—down to the format, topic, length, and channel where they find it. Much like Netflix, we can analyze this data to find powerful cross-sections of opportunity.

Adopting this data-driven mindset goes beyond the echo chamber of your own historical performance. We often see similar faults with other cornerstones of content strategy:

Audience personas can get sidetracked based on false myths and assumptions: Facebook doesn’t work for B2B. Pinterest is a more important social network for millennials than Facebook. High-skill professionals and the C-suite prefer white papers. Time and time again, data-backed content trends contradict the persona work driving brand strategy.

The buyer journey can also be improperly mapped. For instance, articles and infographics are seen as pure top-of-funnel formats, yet, per SiriusDecisions research, they have almost the same impact in each stage of the buyer journey. And case studies—typically considered mid or bottom funnel—actually have a huge impact in the education phase when they’re geared towards a specific problem, not product features.

I could go on. Content strategy is one of the hottest disciplines in marketing, but we can’t just rely on the same old tactics. We can’t keep missing out on an opportunity to gain deeper insights. We’re rebooting another version of Criminal Minds instead of creating our own Stranger Things. We’re making our audience miss out on a chance to binge.

Shameless Plug: We’re looking for data-driven strategists with experience building breakthrough content strategies inside enterprise organizations. Check out our open roles here.

The post Emergency Alert: We Need to Rethink Content Strategy appeared first on Contently.

Let’s create an infographic to show off our recent study, says the ambitious manager.

Sounds good, says the eager junior marketer.

Even though the project begins with the best intentions, challenges start to get in the way. Deadlines are pushed, messaging changes, another stakeholder doesn’t like the project. Things go wrong, and the once promising infographic dies in development. In large organizations, it’s even possible for completed content to sit unused because of bad communication.

At some point, your company will create content that never gets used; that’s a fact of business. That wasted content may even be out of your control.

But teams shouldn’t be complacent about content projects gone wrong. Every hour spent on a wasted piece of content adds up. When you account for the time of all the employees involved, the cost of software used to create the content, and the opportunity cost of not doing something else more productive, wasted content can be a massive weight on a team’s budget.

According to B2B analyst firm SiriusDecisions, 65 percent of content never goes public because it is either unusable (37 percent) or unfindable (28 percent). If you dissect these numbers to try to understand what’s causing these issues, the pie chart looks something like this:

Source: SiriusDecisions

There’s one buzzword at the root of most of these problems: alignment. Somewhere along the way, the creative process breaks down because of organizational silos. Perhaps the content team doesn’t understand customer pain points, so they create sales enablement content that doesn’t fit with what salespeople need. Or the content team produces an article for customer success, but customer success doesn’t have an easy way to access it.

This lack of organizational alignment is endemic. Seventy percent of senior marketers describe their content process as “middling” or worse, according to a recent Contently survey. SiriusDecisions reports that enterprise B2B organizations spend roughly twice what they think they do on content. When you consider that roughly 30 percent of a brand’s marketing budget goes toward content—and that these brands are producing more content than ever to meet digital demands—it’s clear that marketing teams are making a very costly mistake.

In its study “Establishing and Enriching the Content Supply Chain,” CMO Council summed up the issue well: “While content is the backbone of nearly every aspect of the customer journey, organizations are still failing to give it the attention it deserves.” Seventy-five percent of marketing teams don’t have a formalized approach to the content ecosystem. And while 98 percent of marketers believe “having and following” a content strategy is “important for content marketing success,” only 37 percent have a documented strategy.

Teams shouldn’t be complacent about content projects gone wrong.

So what’s the solution to avoiding wasted content?

For one, enterprise companies need to consider changing the way they create content as part of their organization’s larger digital transformation. Producing work ad hoc on Microsoft Word or Google Documents won’t cut it.

Teams also need to develop a framework for creating and distributing content to the right audience, both internally and externally. That means setting data-driven goals, consistently reviewing what works and what doesn’t, and using an agile approach to strategy. If you’re producing sales enablement content, for instance, you’ll want to track what content leads to converted opportunities. You could also refresh evergreen content so it’s readily available for quick and easy updating should your strategy change. Most of all, teams need a centralized location to manage every facet of their content process.

Some companies may struggle to adapt to this new reality. But for savvy businesses to get ahead, now’s the time to stop wasting time and money on unused content.

The post The Problem That’s Quietly Sabotaging Your Marketing Budget appeared first on Contently.

“I have to admit I’m Twitter stalking you because I’m intrigued that this conference has you turned into a tween at a Harry Styles concert,” she wrote. “You’re suddenly VERY EXCITED about things like demand waterfall. Or, intervention? Anyway def going to pump you for cliff notes.”

It’s true. Over last few days at the SiriusDecisions Summit, I’ve tweeted about marketing and content strategy like a deranged Directioner. I attend a dozen marketing conferences every year, and SiriusDecisions is by far the most intense one I’ve been to—a constant barrage of intriguing frameworks that have my head spinning.

The attendees are almost all marketing leaders, and as a result, you get a unique look into the future of the industry. You know what that means: It’s time for a prediction piece! After spending three days trapped inside a conference hall in the middle of the Las Vegas strip, here are five predictions I have for the future of marketing.

1. Collaborative measurement dashboards are going to be mandatory

On Tuesday, I was sitting in a case study on digital attribution. Dan Roden, Domo’s senior director of product advocacy, asked us to raise our hands if we went to too many meetings.

I raised both.

Roden pointed at me. “You know why you’re going to too many meetings, Kevin? ” he yelled, before clarifying that he was calling me Kevin because I looked like a Kevin. “You’re going to too many meetings because you don’t all have the same data. Nancy and Jim have different data, and you have meetings to talk about data.”

Roden presented an alternative: What if we were all aligned on our metrics, had real-time dashboards, and could just message each other instead of wasting valuable time building PowerPoints to advocate for the the work we’ve already done?

It’s a compelling argument, and dashboards that can quickly and elegantly aggregate metrics from different sources have become crucial in the dizzying era of big data. Domo is going all-in on enabling collaboration within those dashboards via commenting and chat features. For people who are sick and tired of going to meetings, that kind of software sure is tempting.

2. The backlash to big data is coming

We have too much data flowing at us right now, and we’re looking at too many metrics without a sense of which ones matter. You can feel a backlash to big data brewing.

I was talking to one of SiriusDecisions’ senior researchers this morning. I’d attended one of her measurement dashboard sessions, and she had explicitly given attendees about 10 metrics they should be measuring, no questions asked. She didn’t want to talk about measurement in broad strokes and simply give people the tools to figure it out on their own. She realized that we were in an age where people needed to be told exactly what to measure; otherwise, we’ll drown amidst hundreds of possible KPIs. (Check out yesterday’s post for more about how Sirius is thinking about measurement.)

I’d wager this is the next big marketing movement—marketers need to pick five to 10 metrics and get back to work.

3. The winner of the predictive intelligence war is going to be a super unicorn

What is a super unicorn? I’m not really sure. But here’s what shows up when I search “super unicorn” on Giphy:

Well, I’m not sure any of us can unsee that.

Point is: One of the most sought-after technologies is predictive intelligence that can pinpoint buyers who are starting to search for a solution like yours. But judging from the reviews on G2 Crowd, no one has really cracked the code on that yet. But if someone does? There’s nothing marketers want more, and that company will make billions upon billions.

4. Account-based marketing won’t be adopted universally until the 2020s

Account-based marketing (ABM) is the new kale. At least 10 percent of the sessions at SiriusDecisions involved account-based marketing in some way (for content, for sales, for operations, for grandmas!). The sessions were packed. People want to figure out how to do it right. I’m one of those people.

At several ABM sessions, audience polls and questions quickly revealed that most people aren’t using ABM effectively. There’s still a lot of confusion as to what ABM really means. A lot of folks think it means making content and messaging meant for one specific company. But SiriusDecisions has defined it as creating content that appeals to buyer personas inside common target accounts. Think creating content to appeal to leaders inside Fortune 100 financial service companies, not just Bank of America.

Account-based marketing is getting a lot of hype right now, but it’s going to be a few years before most organizations can implement it successfully.

5. Marketers will run out of metaphors

So far this trip, I have seen presentations built around the metaphors of waterfalls, turbines, Fibonacci sequences, seashells, skyscraper architecture, and many more. While this is all very majestic and industrial, let’s slow down people. We’re going to run out. Let’s save some for next year.

The post 5 Predictions From the World’s Most Intense Marketing Conference appeared first on Contently.

What was it? Beyonce? Bono? Michelle Obama? The Pope? No. To the crowd of marketers at Day 2 of the Sirius Decisions Summit in Las Vegas, it was something far more exciting: a new SiriusDecisions Demand Waterfall.

By the 10:20 networking break, the new waterfall was the topic of nearly every conversation I heard. It set the theme for the day: next-level marketing frameworks that have the potential to transform the way you work.

Here are the biggest insights you need to know about.

1. The New SiriusDecisions Demand Waterfall

Ever since it was introduced in 2006, the Sirius Decisions Demand Waterfall has been the bible for thousands of B2B marketers.

The waterfall is basically the funnel on steroids—a much more sophisticated way of thinking about lead management. Sirius hadn’t updated it since 2012, so the new framework was big news to the point that it quickly trended on Twitter in Las Vegas.

And people were hyped. Real hyped.

That moment when the newest #demandwaterfall is revealed to a room full of marketers #SDsummit pic.twitter.com/MqT0mUFra3

— Stephanie Guttman (@saas_stephanie) May 17, 2017

There’s a lot to unpack in the new waterfall—Andrew Gaffney of DemandGen report has a great summary here. But the simple yet powerful idea at the center of it is viewing opportunities as buying groups, not as individuals. That’s because very rarely does the decision to buy a B2B product come down to only one person.

These groups are “demand units,” and the theory is that viewing them as such enables you to qualify opportunities better and market to them accordingly. This, in turn, boosts sales efficiency and enables you to measure conversion rates more effectively. For instance, if 10 marketers from the same group come inbound, and you sell to one, your conversion rate should be 100 percent rather than 10 percent. Viewing disconnected teams within large organizations as different buying groups has huge benefits as well. Dig into Gaffney’s write-up for more details.

2. Content marketing software is now “non-negotiable”

One thing I love about SiriusDecisions is that the company is not afraid to put its stake in the ground on key marketing issues.

On Day 1, content strategy researcher Phyllis Davidson’s did just that by defining content marketing as ToFu (top-of-funnel) inbound marketing. (A logical opinion that I don’t necessarily agree with and will tackle in an article soon.) On Day 2, Davidson, along with research director Christine Polewarczyk, made the bold declaration that content marketing software is now non-negotiable.

.@christine_mktg: Content mark software is now a prerequisite. Evaluating options? Here are 10 Qs to ask #SDsummit https://t.co/lzsIu4WR3X pic.twitter.com/WC0H6fUOxc

— Contently (@contently) May 17, 2017

According to Davidson and Polewarczyk, content marketing software is central to solving two problems. First, you need a central platform to help you access the 60-70 percent of content that goes unused. Second, you need to measure both production and performance metrics in one place. That’s the only way to have a true view of how your content is performing.

The presentation also featured live polls through the SiriusDecisions app. Fittingly, attendees ranked the lack of content marketing software as their biggest pain point. (I couldn’t help but shill Contently’s solutions page.)

#sdsummit attendees pinpoint content marketing software as their biggest pain point. Check out @contently! https://t.co/RL2YeSgBBb pic.twitter.com/nHJCcC65eV

— Joe Lazer (@JoeLazauskas) May 17, 2017

Lastly, when the presentation showed several different dashboard set-ups, I wanted to stand up and scream AMEN. Simple dashboards like this will definitely be the key to the rapid and continuous optimization of content marketing programs:

3. The gated content backlash is coming

This vibe was palpable throughout several sessions at SiriusDecisions. We know that most B2B buyers conduct extensive research before raising their hand and becoming a lead. We know that less than 10 percent of our potential market is going to raise their hand and become a lead. And we know that B2B buyers hate filling out forms. So then why the hell do we keep our best and most useful content hidden behind a wall?

Yep. Biggest problem in B2B marketing. #SDSummit pic.twitter.com/3GU31q3PSo

— Joe Lazauskas (@JoeLazauskas) May 17, 2017

Over the past six months, I’ve grappled with the pros and cons of gated content. (So have a lot of other marketers.) On one hand, I’ve created nearly 100 different gated e-books, webinars, and interactive features at Contently, and it’s certainly delivered a ton of inbound juice for us. But on the other hand, I hate filling out forms and abandon content all the time because I don’t want to do so. Deep down, I believe that the best long-term strategy should focus on making it as easy as possible for your target audience to engage with your content.

We’ve been shifting strategies at Contently and gating a lot less content this year. As we move through the rest of 2017, don’t be surprised to see a growing anti-gating wave.

The post The New Demand Waterfall, and Other Next-Level Marketing Insights You Need to Know appeared first on Contently.

Contently’s mission is still the same as when I joined in 2013. We’ve always wanted to help brands create content by giving them powerful content marketing technology and connecting them with the most talented storytellers on earth. But as we’ve grown to nearly 150 employees across four offices on two continents, our business has matured. So has the way we help brands reach their marketing goals.

And guess what? Our own content marketing changed right along with it.

Stage I: The plucky startup days (2013-2014)

What Contently was like: We resembled the kind of startup you’d see on Silicon Valley. A dozen hoodie-monsters crammed into a single room, spanning every generation from “young millennial” to “old millennial,” doing 37 things at once.

We had meeting rooms, but I never remember using them. We would just turn around our chairs and yell at each other. Our VP of product sat across from me and criticized my articles, paragraph by paragraph, uninvited. His crisp German accent made the feedback sound both less and more harsh. In turn, I would nitpick every flaw in our platform. It was one of the most mutually beneficial relationships of my life.

What that meant for our content marketing: Content marketing was an incredibly new discipline just gaining momentum, and there were a couple of other content marketing platforms out there that had launched before us and raised more money. As a result, I had one primary goal: build awareness.

Our content marketing operation was extremely top-of-funnel focused because we wanted to establish ourselves as the leader in content marketing. As I detailed in this piece from late last year, we focused on our audience’s biggest pain points, took advantage of the fact that there weren’t a ton of other content marketing resources out there, and grew our audience from 14,000 readers to over 100,000 in that first year.

We built an audience, but as we raised a $9 million round and grew rapidly, our content marketing goal was destined to change.

Stage II: Fast growth and feeding the sales machine (2015-2016)

What Contently was like: Between December 2013 and December 2014, Contently grew six-fold as we won dozens of clients. We were literally knocking down walls and taking over the offices of other companies. It was like a giant VC-funded game of Risk.

I remember walking into work the first day of January 2015 and feeling a sense of urgency. Our sales team had changed from two people into a half-floor operation. By the time I finally figured out what an SDR was, we already had 10. We started maturing as a business to identify our ideal clients: enterprise companies—most commonly in finance, B2B, tech, travel, and real estate—as well as fast-growth mid-market brands. We built new tools and capabilities for our platform with those clients in mind.

We were in fast-growth mode, and we needed strong marketing to fuel our growth and feed the sales machine.

What that meant for our content marketing: Contently didn’t really have a marketing team until the end of 2014. Content was our marketing. But that’s not sustainable; content needs to fit within a larger marketing framework. So we began to make key marketing hires and figure out how our content could better feed the sales machine.

As our approach evolved, we still remained focused on transparently creating content that helped our target audience—we just operated a little more strategically. We published “big rock” e-books and webinars that generated leads. We ramped up programs with content partners like HubSpot. We dedicated more resources to case studies, one-sheeters, and other key sales enablement resources for our sales team. We integrated lead scoring and marketing automation. We helped Contently continue to grow at a rapid pace, and along the way, we were named the Best B2B Content Marketing by The Drum and the Best Brand Publication by Digiday.

By the end of this period, we started to ensure that our content served all parts of the funnel.

Stage III: Full content marketing maturity (2017 and beyond)

What Contently was like: Contently entered 2017 in a great place. We were #508 on the Inc 5000, had hundreds of clients, and were named one of the best places to work in New York by Crain’s and Ad Age.

But at the beginning of 2017, something truly exciting happened: We hired our first CMO, Kelly Wenzel, and started the process of reaching full content marketing maturity. (If you want a sense of her marketing strategy chops, just read this piece.)

What that means for our content marketing: Over the next few months, we’re embarking on a content marketing journey. We’re partnering with SiriusDecisions to rethink different aspects of our marketing. That means reimagining our content strategy and how it’s woven into the fabric of our brand.

Along the way, we want to document that journey right here on TCS so our readers can learn how to build—or rebuild—a content strategy that completely aligns with business objectives. In a series of posts, I’ll analyze our successes and challenges, and tie the lessons we learn back to tips for our readers.

Our lessons will include:

• Improving our brand strategy and messaging.
• Establishing our product marketing and key foundational elements: personas, journey maps, differentiators, etc.
• Ramping up our inbound marketing and improving conversion from top-of-funnel to mid-funnel and bottom-of-funnel.

Like anyone who works in digital marketing and hopes to have a job in three years, I’m excited to learn something new. Contently may no longer be a Silicon Valley parody, but we’re committed to evolving like all good startups should.

If you’re interested in following our journey over the next few months, sign up for our newsletter here to ensure that you get those posts in your inbox.

The post The Content Marketing Journey, in 3 Stages appeared first on Contently.