We’re a big believer in prioritizing your spend on customer content and this includes efforts put toward social media activities that generate “customer-sourced” content. We found a kindred spirit in Galen DeYoung, Managing Director of Proteus SEO. In a recent post titled A Six-Step Content Marketing Check-Up For B2B Marketers he offers some useful advice including these specific steps from his checklist:

Map Content to the Buying Cycle

Understanding how Sales uses the content your customer reference program generates/manages and ensuring you’re providing good coverage is a hallmark of an effective program. Within Galen’s post is a link to Ardath Albee’s 7 stages of a sales cycle. This is a little different and worth taking a look at as you map your content. Her stages are:

The 7 Stages of the Buying Process

• Status Quo:  Prospects have not yet recognized the problem as one they need to solve.
• Priority:  The problem has been recognized but prospects are unsure which route is best for solution.
• Research:  Prospects are now actively engaged in learning what they need to know, building confidence.
• Options:  Learning about solution sets that will best fit immediate and future needs is underway.
• Step Backs:  Something has arisen that’s made the prospect return to an earlier stage to verify beliefs.
• Validation:  You’re on the short list and now the prospect wants to know if you can deliver on promises.
• Choice:  The decision to buy must move from intent to reality with the purchase and implementation.

Point of Reference Commentary: We encourage all clients to “tag” all the content in their library to 1 or more stages of the sales/buying cycle and even provide features to make finding and using those stage-appropriate collections in ReferenceStor, our reference management system (RMS), super simple and painless. As it should be.

Review your content analytics

Analytics can be great, but too often we fail to actually learn from them.Take a look at last year’s numbers for the content on your site.

• What was the most popular content?
• What did these visitors do?
• What were the conversion rates?

Point of Reference Commentary: Our technology solutions have been capturing answers to these questions for 7 years now. And most importantly, we capture what prospects are responding to, not just what was sent by sales users. When it comes to conversion rates, we associate opportunity IDs with the content accessed so our clients can show Revenue Influenced relative to won deals.

2010 promises to be an interesting, probably a see-saw sort of year economically. It’ll be a year of spending only on what makes sense and making sure the sales team doesn’t miss a beat in meeting each prospective customer’s needs at each stage of the sales cycle. Here’s to a more efficient use of your content dollars in the new year!