Maximize ROI With Marketing Enablement: The Complete Guide
Marketing enablement covers a variety of tools and resources, but one of the most important aspects has to be content creation and organization. Because your sales team relies on marketing content to attract high-quality leads and educate current customers, it’s necessary for these two teams to regularly share data.
Organizing this data and the resulting content is also key to the success of both teams. CSO’s 2022 State of Sales Enablement report found that when enablement includes content efforts, organizations are 27% less likely to struggle when trying to achieve their sales goals.
Content marketing tools like GatherContent offer an ideal solution thanks to templates that can be customized to individual buyer personas, collaboration tools, and workflow tracking. Let’s dig a bit deeper into marketing enablement and how it benefits your entire company as well as how GatherContent gives your content team an advantage.
What is marketing enablement?
Marketing enablement gives your marketing team the information, resources, and tools they need to successfully create content, communicate with sales,and analyze content metrics. By improving your marketing team’s efficiency, you can improve the alignment between your marketing and sales teams.
But why is this alignment important? By collaborating effectively with sales, your marketing team can create a better-personalized content experience.
As a customer- and prospect-facing team, your salespeople have first-hand knowledge of the pain points, needs, and interests that form your business’s buyer personas. When sales shares this information with marketers, they can begin crafting more effective content that appeals to audience members at every step of the customer journey.
In the end, both teams benefit. Your marketing team’s campaigns become more effective and personalized, while your sales team gains more qualified leads and happy customers.
How does marketing enablement work?
Marketing enablement works by gearing your marketing team up with the tools and resources they need to create effective campaigns. This includes content creation, organization, and distribution tools that help streamline processes and boost efficiency. Other resources include sales data, access to marketing automation tools, and customer relationship management (CRM) software.
Additionally, marketing enablement may also involve training your marketing team on how to create effective marketing campaigns as well as how to analyze campaign performance data.
Speaking of data analysis, the ability to dig into content performance is a huge benefit to your marketing team. Analyzing performance metrics helps your team know what content is performing well and may benefit from further distribution. It also helps them know which pieces of content are underperforming and may need optimization to appeal to a target audience.
What are the benefits of marketing enablement?
Marketing enablement has multiple benefits to your marketing and sales teams as well as the company as a whole. Those include:
Better collaboration: Marketing enablement improves communication and data sharing between sales and marketing, ensuring marketing campaigns support the sales team’s goals.
More efficient use of resources: Bringing marketing and sales together allows both teams to operate more efficiently and therefore allows your business to be more cost-efficient.
Increased customer engagement: By boosting the efficiency and effectiveness of your team’s marketing campaigns, marketing enablement results in more engagement and traffic.
Improved customer retention: Marketing enablement provides your marketing team with the tools they need to create a more personalized customer experience, leading to increased loyalty and repeat customers.
Better lead generation: When your marketing team delivers targeted, relevant content to your sales team, they generate more high-quality leads which are more likely to turn into closed deals.
Improved content analytics: Marketing enablement helps you collect and analyze more data, which provides valuable insights for both your marketing and sales teams.
More effective content creation: By providing tools and resources to help with content production, marketing enablement levels up the efficiency and productivity of your content marketing efforts so you can deliver the right content at the right time.
Marketing enablement levels up your content production by adding the right tools so your team can deliver the right content at the right time.
How to build a successful marketing enablement plan
1. Define your goals
Defining your goals is often the first step to implementing an effective process, and for good reason. By defining your goals, you know the reason why you’re creating a marketing enablement plan and can therefore get more specific about who’s involved, the metrics you’ll measure, and what success looks like.
Ask yourself what you’re trying to achieve, then build a plan that supports those goals.
2. Identify your target audience
The next step is to describe who you want to reach. Put together a buyer persona that notes the following:
Pain points
Motivations
Needs
Interests
GatherContent includes customizable templates that can be adapted to specific buyer personas.
Identifying your target audience helps you create content that resonates with them. Using your buyer personas to craft personalized content templates geared toward their specific needs can also give your content a huge boost when it comes to engagement.
Your content marketing strategy leads the way when it comes to your content campaigns. A good strategy outlines what types of content your target audience engages with, such as whitepapers, social media messaging, or email newsletters.
Your content strategy also helps you determine what your content calendar and content creation process look like so everyone on your team knows what steps come next and where each piece of content is going to be published.
Good to know: Without a strategy, your social media messaging, blog posts, and emails are basically shots in the dark that could result in unhappy customers and lost profit. Get a head start with our free template for an effective content strategy.
4. Make a training plan
Marketing enablement also includes training both your marketing and sales teams. Both groups need to know how to use the required tools, resources, and content effectively. Make sure your training plan covers every aspect of the tools and resources included in your marketing enablement plan, including product knowledge and marketing automation tools.
It may also be necessary to integrate your sales and marketing technology (martech). By consolidating your tech stack and having both teams share the same tools, your company becomes more cost-effective and productive.
5. Choose what metrics to measure
Step one asked you to define your goals, and by doing that you should have more than an inkling as to what metrics you should measure. These metrics may include sales revenue, customer satisfaction, or engagement rates.
A best practice is to ensure the metrics you choose align with the goals you set in step one—and choose metrics that are measurable.
4 Best practices for aligning sales and marketing
While all the benefits we just covered make sales enablement seem like a magic remedy, it’s still only as good as the effort you and your teams put behind it. Here are four best practices to make your marketing enablement plan more effective.
1. Communicate regularly
Communication is a two-way street—and listening is just as important as speaking clearly. It’s important to schedule regular meetings and check-ins with your marketing and sales teams to ensure everyone is aligned and working toward the same goals.
2. Use shared data
Sharing customer data that’s collected by both teams ensures everyone is able to create targeted campaigns and sales pitches. This, in turn, improves customers’ experience.
3. Work on content together
Collaborating on content ensures all assets meet the expectations of your sales and marketing teams.
GatherContent’s collaboration tools allow your sales and marketing teams to work on content together in real-time—both in the editor and through comments.
By using a content production tool like GatherContent, you can include a sales team sign-off in the workflow. And real-time collaboration tools allow both sales and marketing to work on the same piece of content at the same time—no need to wait on a Slack reply or walk over to someone else’s desk.
4. Measure performance regularly
Measuring and analyzing your content’s performance on a regular basis provides essential data for both teams. And data drives success—88% of organizations surveyed in Experian’s 2022 Global Data Management Research Report said data helps their sales and marketing teams stay on top of market trends and customer needs.
But don’t limit your analysis to customer-facing marketing initiatives. Take a look at which assets are most used by your sales team and which ones tend to lead to successful deals. This can help your teams pinpoint the highest-quality content in your library and potentially even optimize it further.
Tackle your marketing enablement with GatherContent
Though sometimes overlooked by companies, marketing enablements are a critical aspect of a successful marketing strategy. By empowering your marketing team, you also empower your sales team. And when both teams work together effectively, your whole company reaps the benefits.
GatherContent’s full suite of content tools can help you implement a successful marketing enablement plan. Use customizable templates to create content that’s personalized for your target audience. Track statuses with the custom workflow and easily access content both new and old in the library. Collaborate between teams with built-in communication tools and real-time editing.
Organizing this data and the resulting content is also key to the success of both teams. CSO’s 2022 State of Sales Enablement report found that when enablement includes content efforts, organizations are 27% less likely to struggle when trying to achieve their sales goals.
Content marketing tools like GatherContent offer an ideal solution thanks to templates that can be customized to individual buyer personas, collaboration tools, and workflow tracking. Let’s dig a bit deeper into marketing enablement and how it benefits your entire company as well as how GatherContent gives your content team an advantage.
What is marketing enablement?
Marketing enablement gives your marketing team the information, resources, and tools they need to successfully create content, communicate with sales,and analyze content metrics. By improving your marketing team’s efficiency, you can improve the alignment between your marketing and sales teams.
But why is this alignment important? By collaborating effectively with sales, your marketing team can create a better-personalized content experience.
As a customer- and prospect-facing team, your salespeople have first-hand knowledge of the pain points, needs, and interests that form your business’s buyer personas. When sales shares this information with marketers, they can begin crafting more effective content that appeals to audience members at every step of the customer journey.
In the end, both teams benefit. Your marketing team’s campaigns become more effective and personalized, while your sales team gains more qualified leads and happy customers.
How does marketing enablement work?
Marketing enablement works by gearing your marketing team up with the tools and resources they need to create effective campaigns. This includes content creation, organization, and distribution tools that help streamline processes and boost efficiency. Other resources include sales data, access to marketing automation tools, and customer relationship management (CRM) software.
Additionally, marketing enablement may also involve training your marketing team on how to create effective marketing campaigns as well as how to analyze campaign performance data.
Speaking of data analysis, the ability to dig into content performance is a huge benefit to your marketing team. Analyzing performance metrics helps your team know what content is performing well and may benefit from further distribution. It also helps them know which pieces of content are underperforming and may need optimization to appeal to a target audience.
What are the benefits of marketing enablement?
Marketing enablement has multiple benefits to your marketing and sales teams as well as the company as a whole. Those include:
Better collaboration: Marketing enablement improves communication and data sharing between sales and marketing, ensuring marketing campaigns support the sales team’s goals.
More efficient use of resources: Bringing marketing and sales together allows both teams to operate more efficiently and therefore allows your business to be more cost-efficient.
Increased customer engagement: By boosting the efficiency and effectiveness of your team’s marketing campaigns, marketing enablement results in more engagement and traffic.
Improved customer retention: Marketing enablement provides your marketing team with the tools they need to create a more personalized customer experience, leading to increased loyalty and repeat customers.
Better lead generation: When your marketing team delivers targeted, relevant content to your sales team, they generate more high-quality leads which are more likely to turn into closed deals.
Improved content analytics: Marketing enablement helps you collect and analyze more data, which provides valuable insights for both your marketing and sales teams.
More effective content creation: By providing tools and resources to help with content production, marketing enablement levels up the efficiency and productivity of your content marketing efforts so you can deliver the right content at the right time.
Marketing enablement levels up your content production by adding the right tools so your team can deliver the right content at the right time.
How to build a successful marketing enablement plan
1. Define your goals
Defining your goals is often the first step to implementing an effective process, and for good reason. By defining your goals, you know the reason why you’re creating a marketing enablement plan and can therefore get more specific about who’s involved, the metrics you’ll measure, and what success looks like.
Ask yourself what you’re trying to achieve, then build a plan that supports those goals.
2. Identify your target audience
The next step is to describe who you want to reach. Put together a buyer persona that notes the following:
Pain points
Motivations
Needs
Interests
GatherContent includes customizable templates that can be adapted to specific buyer personas.
Identifying your target audience helps you create content that resonates with them. Using your buyer personas to craft personalized content templates geared toward their specific needs can also give your content a huge boost when it comes to engagement.
Your content marketing strategy leads the way when it comes to your content campaigns. A good strategy outlines what types of content your target audience engages with, such as whitepapers, social media messaging, or email newsletters.
Your content strategy also helps you determine what your content calendar and content creation process look like so everyone on your team knows what steps come next and where each piece of content is going to be published.
Good to know: Without a strategy, your social media messaging, blog posts, and emails are basically shots in the dark that could result in unhappy customers and lost profit. Get a head start with our free template for an effective content strategy.
4. Make a training plan
Marketing enablement also includes training both your marketing and sales teams. Both groups need to know how to use the required tools, resources, and content effectively. Make sure your training plan covers every aspect of the tools and resources included in your marketing enablement plan, including product knowledge and marketing automation tools.
It may also be necessary to integrate your sales and marketing technology (martech). By consolidating your tech stack and having both teams share the same tools, your company becomes more cost-effective and productive.
5. Choose what metrics to measure
Step one asked you to define your goals, and by doing that you should have more than an inkling as to what metrics you should measure. These metrics may include sales revenue, customer satisfaction, or engagement rates.
A best practice is to ensure the metrics you choose align with the goals you set in step one—and choose metrics that are measurable.
4 Best practices for aligning sales and marketing
While all the benefits we just covered make sales enablement seem like a magic remedy, it’s still only as good as the effort you and your teams put behind it. Here are four best practices to make your marketing enablement plan more effective.
1. Communicate regularly
Communication is a two-way street—and listening is just as important as speaking clearly. It’s important to schedule regular meetings and check-ins with your marketing and sales teams to ensure everyone is aligned and working toward the same goals.
2. Use shared data
Sharing customer data that’s collected by both teams ensures everyone is able to create targeted campaigns and sales pitches. This, in turn, improves customers’ experience.
3. Work on content together
Collaborating on content ensures all assets meet the expectations of your sales and marketing teams.
GatherContent’s collaboration tools allow your sales and marketing teams to work on content together in real-time—both in the editor and through comments.
By using a content production tool like GatherContent, you can include a sales team sign-off in the workflow. And real-time collaboration tools allow both sales and marketing to work on the same piece of content at the same time—no need to wait on a Slack reply or walk over to someone else’s desk.
4. Measure performance regularly
Measuring and analyzing your content’s performance on a regular basis provides essential data for both teams. And data drives success—88% of organizations surveyed in Experian’s 2022 Global Data Management Research Report said data helps their sales and marketing teams stay on top of market trends and customer needs.
But don’t limit your analysis to customer-facing marketing initiatives. Take a look at which assets are most used by your sales team and which ones tend to lead to successful deals. This can help your teams pinpoint the highest-quality content in your library and potentially even optimize it further.
Tackle your marketing enablement with GatherContent
Though sometimes overlooked by companies, marketing enablements are a critical aspect of a successful marketing strategy. By empowering your marketing team, you also empower your sales team. And when both teams work together effectively, your whole company reaps the benefits.
GatherContent’s full suite of content tools can help you implement a successful marketing enablement plan. Use customizable templates to create content that’s personalized for your target audience. Track statuses with the custom workflow and easily access content both new and old in the library. Collaborate between teams with built-in communication tools and real-time editing.
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