If You Don't Plan to use RevOps, Then You’ve Planned to Fail
Have you ever tried planning a vacation without knowing the modes of transportation you would be using? Probably not. It would be quite difficult to plan activities without having a clear idea of how long it may take to get somewhere. For example, aligning a schedule of first day plans would be quite different if there was a two hour plane trip as opposed to a nine hour car ride.
This can be a good way to think about content creation. Sure, you could just blindly plan social media, blog, and podcast content. But should you? In the same way that it would be impractical to plan a vacation without a clear idea of how you would be getting from point A to point B, it’s very difficult to correctly outline content plans without the context that Revops can help provide.
Whether it’s proper alignment, analytics considerations, or creating buyer personas, think of RevOps as the vehicle that will help determine the plans of your content strategy!
But First…What Do These Terms Mean?
What is RevOps?
RevOps is key in helping to understand how to properly plan content creation. But what exactly is RevOps? If you want a longer explanation, click here.
If you want the TL;DR version…
RevOps is the science of sustainable revenue growth. It seeks to accomplish the following:
- Replicate and repeat revenue growth
- Uncover the process of how revenue teams can teach, measure, repeat, improve, explain, and apply growth strategies to the full revenue cycle
- Identify tools and behaviors that show how you’re collecting, synthesizing, and disseminating revenue data from multiple sources
What is Content Creation?
In the marketing world, this refers to the process of developing and sharing various types of content (e.g. blog posts, infographics) which provide information and engagement opportunities to a target audience.
The goals of content creation are the promotion of your brand/product and the creation of valuable, relevant, and consistent content that can help build trust, increase brand awareness, generate leads, and drive sales.
Examples of How RevOps Helps Cultivate a Winning Content Creation Strategy
The Alignment of Marketing, Sales, Customer Success Teams
One of the end state goals of revenue operations (RevOps) is to break down silos and align teams. The obvious result is much clearer communication between sales operations and marketing operations regarding leads and hand-offs.
Another benefit, though, comes in the realm of content creation. When there’s misalignment, you can usually bet on inconsistent messaging from departments. However, a standardized content creation process ensures input from sales, marketing, and customer success. Proper alignment results in content being created with the customer in mind, and guarantees it is aligned with revenue goals, such as increasing website traffic or generating leads.
Collaboration and alignment also help facilitate the creation of content that is tailored to the needs of different customer segments. For example, if there is a concerted effort within your organization to sell to a younger audience, appropriating more resources towards podcasts and less towards white papers is a common mindset/goal all departments should be aware of.
Developing Buyer Personas
Content should not be made blindly, but rather with your ideal customer in mind. RevOps can help to identify common traits among your best customers by analyzing data on website traffic, lead generation, and customer behavior. By analyzing this data, RevOps teams can identify the common traits, pain points, and needs of their customers and create personas that reflect these insights.
This can then be used to create targeted content that speaks directly to the needs of ideal customers. The result? Better engagement, increased conversion rates, and more revenue.
Developing Content Based on the Buyer’s Journey
The buyer’s journey is not a straight line, and at each stage potential customers will have different needs, and by extension, different information requirements. RevOps can be used to optimize content for the buyer's journey by providing teams with a holistic view of the customer journey, from lead generation to customer retention.
When the buyer’s journey is broken down into stages, it becomes much easier to assess which type of content is best suited for the current problem or decision facing the customer.
Awareness Stage
Here, potential customers are typically looking for educational content that helps them understand a problem or opportunity. By analyzing customer data on website traffic and engagement, RevOps can identify what topics are most popular with potential customers at this stage of the journey. This information can be used to create more effective customer centric, educational content, such as blog posts, ebooks, and webinars.
Consideration Stage
During this stage, prospective customers are often looking for more detailed information about potential solutions. By analyzing data on lead generation and customer behavior, RevOps can identify what types of content will be most effective. In the consideration stage, it’s usually case studies, product comparisons, and demos.
Decision Stage
In this last stage, potential customers are typically looking for information that will help them make a final decision. By analyzing data on customer behavior and conversion rates, RevOps can identify what types of content are most effective at this stage of the journey. This information can be used to create more effective decision stage content, such as customer reviews, testimonials, and pricing information.
Tracking Content Performance
Creating content is important. Creating good content is more important. Creating content that produces results is the most important. RevOps can be used to track content performance and effectiveness by establishing a standardized set of metrics and data points that can be used to measure the success of your content strategy.
How so?
Tracking Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
RevOps teams can work with content creators to define KPIs that align with the organization's revenue goals. KPIs could include metrics such as website traffic, customer engagement rates, conversion rates, lead generation, and revenue generated.
Customer Feedback
RevOps teams can analyze customer feedback, such as product reviews, customer surveys, and customer support interactions, to gain insights into how content is impacting the overall customer experience and loyalty.
Content Audit Process
Not every blog you write will be great, and not every social media post will go viral. Regularly auditing your content can help you identify content that is performing well and content that needs improvement. RevOps teams can work with content creators to establish a content audit process that includes criteria for evaluating the effectiveness of content, such as relevance, engagement, and conversion rates.
Optimizing SEO
It’s crucial to have an understanding of how and to what extent customers are interacting with the content you’re creating. RevOps data can be used to optimize SEO for content creation by providing insights into customer behavior, search trends, and content performance.
Keywords
RevOps teams can use data from search engines, keyword research tools, and customer feedback to identify relevant and high-impact keywords for different stages of the buyer's journey. This can help content creators prioritize keywords and create content that resonates with target audiences.
Link Building
RevOps data can help content creators identify opportunities for link building, such as guest blogging, influencer marketing, and social media engagement. By building high-quality links to their content, organizations can improve their search engine rankings and drive more traffic to their website.
Website Traffic
Here, RevOps data is vital to monitoring and analyzing website traffic to identify trends, patterns, and opportunities for improvement. It’s then easy to see which content is performing well and which content needs improvement.
RevOps Optimizes Content Creation
Right now, RevOps is all the rage-and for good reason. Not only is it a one-way ticket to driving revenue growth, but it’s key to creating valuable content. While some companies choose to randomly fire off social media posts and blogs without having a clear direction or reason as to why, those in the know use RevOps data to align the goals of their teams, develop buyer personas, and track content performance results.
