About a month ago, we were working on a sales opportunity, and were in the throes of launching a Social Selling project. Suddenly, the prospect’s marketing team (who were doing due diligence in learning about Social Selling and its benefits) asked me the same question three times within a 30-minute meeting: how often should we publish content to have an effective demand-generation machine?
I told them that they were asking the wrong question.
The wrong question?
You see, every company’s buyers are different. And to get to the answer, you have to reverse-engineer this from a sales-quota attainment perspective. You need to recognize that the whole reason you create a blog is not to have your voice in the market, but to create a scalable lead generation machine that can help the sales professional achieve their quota.
First it’s about the production factory itself. There are three variables to your insights factory: volume, velocity, and probability.
Volume
How much content should you actually create? I want you to think about producing content as if it was a Model-T Ford. You don’t create cars unless there’s enough demand for those cars. It’s the same with the volume of your content. If your buyers are consuming your content and as a result, that content is sparking relevant sales conversations, you can make the case for scaling the volume for that specific type of content.
Velocity
At the same time, knowing which content drives ROI will help you define the velocity at which your content will be scaled and its publishing frequency. You will also have to consider what resources you’ll need to complete the process. Using our car factory analogy, if your factory assembly line is done by hand-crafting building Ferrari’s, you will never be able to build Ford F-150 pickup trucks at the volume the market needs. If you have a manual process of creation, because you haven’t “factorized” this process, you may only be capable of limited output.
Probability
How likely are prospects to find value, engage and convert from your content? If the probability of conversion is low, you might have a leaky funnel.
And we’ve had to massage ours. We found out that we had a massive subscriber base to our blog, but our ideal customer persona wasn’t reading our blog. So we had to make a shift in our content creation.
Linking how often you publish to quota attainment
If you’re ever asking yourself how often you should be creating content, you haven’t done an evaluation of the most important piece of the puzzle: you need to identify what portion of your activity is going to have a direct correlation to quota attainment.
To scale content, you must determine which assets are driving the most conversions to each stage the sales funnel. This is not a single-touch attribution model, it’s a multi-touch attribution model.
Customers are leaving their digital fingerprints all over your website through consuming your content. When your digital assets are in the right hands, this creates opportunities for multi-textual conversations. It creates velocity and allows people to move much more quickly through the sales process. You can then reverse-engineer the content consumption story of your past sales opportunities to determine what type of content they consumed, where they were in the decision process to develop ways of helping the buyer along their journey.
You have to keep working backwards to understand what an average asset yields every week, month, and year. That’s how we at Sales for Life optimized our insights factory.
Sales for Life: How often we publish content
We plan this publishing schedule based on our multi-touch attribution model. We know that webinars and online events drive the majority of new leads but we also know that infographics, eBooks and blogs are great for nurturing them later in the funnel.
Bottom line
You need to change the mindset of how you look at your insights factory. If you’re concerned about how often you should publish content, you really haven’t thought about why you publish in the first place: to fuel your sales team with the right content and to develop ways of helping your buyer along their buying journey.
[contentblock id=2]
