Go beyond simple delivery: The essential guide to effective content distribution

Is your content distribution working? Do your customers have the content they need, right at their fingertips, the moment they need it? Today’s customers are doing their own research during the buyer’s journey, and it’s critical that you provide the information they need to evaluate your solution and make a decision. B2B buyers say 70% of the content they study before making a purchase decision isn’t provided by a sales rep — instead, they’re finding it on their own. In this article, you’ll learn the top strategies and technologies you can use to deliver timely, relevant, compliant content to your target audience, so you can increase conversions and build brand loyalty.

What does “effective content distribution” mean?

Effective content delivery has three core components: delivering the right content, for the right customer, at the right time. Your customers need useful information that addresses their specific needs and preferences, and the timing of your content delivery plays a part in maximizing engagement and conversions. Effective content is:

• Personalized to resonate with individual customers and shaped to their unique characteristics, preferences, and pain points.
• Relevant to the customer’s current interests and requirements.
• Timely, so it aligns with exactly where the buyer is in their purchasing journey.

Every sales organization needs to consider all three of these requirements when they’re building a content distribution plan.

4 powerful strategies for effective content distribution

Customer preferences are increasingly leaning towards digital channels over in-person sales interactions. B2B buyers dedicate a mere 17% of their total purchase journey to sales reps, and with multiple suppliers involved in the average deal, a sales rep receives only about 5% of the customer’s total purchase time. With so little time available for face-to-face or remote interaction with reps, powerful content distribution is more important now than ever before. Let’s look at the top 4 content distribution strategies you can use to adapt and succeed in our increasingly digital marketplace.

Create seamless customer experiences through omnichannel content distribution

Omnichannel selling — and providing a consistent customer experience across channels — is now a critical part of B2B sales. When you’re considering content distribution, think about creating a unified and coherent message that caters to the specific needs and preferences of each customer, regardless of the platform they choose to engage with your brand. This holistic approach not only strengthens customer relationships but also maximizes the impact of your content. Your customer will interact with your content — and your reps — at multiple touchpoints. Whether they connect via social media, email, remote or in-person meetings, or on your website, the omnichannel approach ensures they receive a consistent experience that aligns with their individual needs. Sales enablement tools can help you implement a successful omnichannel strategy by making it easy to:

• Create and upload omnichannel content with drag-and-drop features, so you can save time and money while keeping your marketing collateral up to date.
• Convert content to a wide variety of formats, including Powerpoint, Keynote, PDF, AVI, WMV, MP4, Wav, and HTML5 — so your customers get the content they need in the format they need it.
• Set up user groups for content delivery.
• Manage user permissions.
• Assign end dates for content use.

Harness AI and data analytics for smarter content distribution

Artificial intelligence (AI) and data analytics can seriously elevate the effectiveness and efficiency of your content distribution. These advanced technologies can provide you with invaluable insights and capabilities that help you deliver highly personalized and timely content to your target audience. With AI-driven predictive analytics, you can identify trends and patterns in customer behavior and anticipate the needs and preferences of your prospects and customers. These insights will help you create and distribute content that is more likely to resonate with customers and generate engagement. Sales enablement software with guided selling capabilities can provide sellers with recommendations for the best content or action for specific customers at particular points in the buying journey. The sales enablement platform analyzes similar selling situations and uses machine learning to make the best possible suggestions so sellers can bring in more conversions. With AI algorithms, you can also identify the most effective channels and touchpoints for reaching particular audience segments. This targeted approach ensures that your content is distributed through the most appropriate channels, so you can reach the right customers at the right time.

Navigate compliance and consent in content distribution

If you’re in a highly regulated industry, you must also consider compliance and consent management as part of your content distribution strategy. With stringent legal requirements and regulations for content in these industries, you must ensure the content you share is accurate, approved, and compliant with all relevant laws and industry standards. And of course, obtaining customer consent for content delivery is crucial for maintaining trust and protecting customer privacy. Sales enablement tools can play a significant role in helping you adhere to compliance requirements and manage consent effectively. Some key ways these tools can support compliant content delivery include:

• Establishing centralized content repositories: With a sales enablement platform, you can provide a centralized location for storing and managing content, so you can maintain control over the material that is distributed to customers. This will help you ensure that only approved and compliant content is accessible to sales representatives and shared with customers.
• Streamlining approval: With sales enablement’s built-in approval workflows, you can streamline the process of reviewing and approving content before it is distributed. These workflows can help ensure that content meets compliance requirements and adheres to company guidelines, minimizing the risk of sharing non-compliant material.
• Managing consent: Sales enablement platforms can also assist with consent management by tracking customer preferences and consent statuses. By integrating these tools with CRM systems and other data sources, your sales and marketing teams can maintain up-to-date records of customer consent, ensuring that content is only delivered to people who have provided their permission.
• Tracking content and providing reports: To support compliance efforts, sales enablement tools can provide audit trails and reporting features that track content distribution, approvals, and customer interactions. These insights can help you identify potential compliance issues and make adjustments to your content distribution strategies as needed.

By leveraging these capabilities, you can minimize compliance risks and maintain trust while delivering accurate, relevant, and approved content when and where your customers need it.

Measure content performance

Tracking the success of your content distribution efforts is crucial for understanding the effectiveness of your strategies and identifying areas for improvement. Monitoring key metrics and KPIs will give you valuable insights into the performance of your content and help you make data-driven decisions to optimize distribution. Sales enablement platforms that provide built-in analytics and reporting can play an essential role in measuring content distribution success. With sales enablement, you can track and analyze performance metrics and evaluate the effectiveness of your content across a wide variety of distribution channels. Here are some relevant metrics to consider when measuring the success of your content distribution strategies:

• Engagement stats, including click-through rates, time spent on content, and content shares. High engagement rates indicate that your content is relevant and valuable, and that it is effectively capturing the attention of your customers.
• Conversion rates, including the number of leads generated or deals closed. These metrics can provide insight into the direct ROI of your content.
• Content performance by channel, which can help you identify the most effective platforms for reaching your target audience. You can use this information to optimize channel selection and resource allocation for future content distribution.

Sales enablement: The future of effective content distribution

By delivering the right content to the right customer at the right time, your reps can build stronger relationships, improve the customer experience, and drive higher engagement — ultimately leading to more sales. Sales enablement platforms that help you optimize delivery can significantly improve your organization’s content distribution efforts. These tools don’t just make the whole process smoother; they also give you valuable insights and analytics, empowering you to make data-driven decisions and fine-tune your content game plan.