eBook

Marketing
Maestros:
Orchestrating
Content that
Moves Buyers
Leaders focus
on campaigns
If you are in sales and marketing, you know
that content is important. You probably also
know from experience that it’s a challenge
to consistently create content that moves
buyers to act.
With the rapid growth of B2B marketing on
the internet, the amount of B2B content
has also increased exponentially. Today’s
prospective buyers are inundated with it.
And businesses are required to produce and
distribute content across a growing number
of channels, continuously, just to remain
relevant to potential buyers.
This race to create content has created
significant challenges for organizations.
Constrained resources make it an ongoing
struggle to build enough content. It’s an
even bigger struggle to ensure that this
content is effective—or measure that
effectiveness in the first place.
That’s why leading businesses are focusing
on the power of campaign orchestration.
They’re led by a new breed of marketer,
the Marketing Maestro, who plays a critical
role in planning, creating, distributing, and
analyzing campaign content. The results
are clear—businesses that are able to unite
marketing and sales teams around common
goals regularly deliver high-performing
content at scale.
Read on to learn more about the content
complexity conundrum and dive deeper into
the four steps that Marketing Maestros take
to address it.
Marketing Maestros: Orchestrating Content that Moves Buyers 2
Challenge: The content
complexity conundrum

There is no getting away from the requirement to produce sales and marketing
content. Practically every business needs content: 91% of marketers globally
report using content marketing to reach customers.

Those marketers produce a large volume of it, too:

62% of U.S. companies 73% of email marketers

with 5,000+ employees send emails at least
produce content daily. once a week.

20 billion WordPress pages are viewed

globally by over 409 million people
62% 73% each month.

Marketing Maestros: Orchestrating Content that Moves Buyers 3

No wonder. There is a clear relationship between the amount of
content a business creates and business success. Just look at blogs.
In 2019, 67% of bloggers who reported strong results posted on a
daily basis. More blog posts correlates to more traffic. According to
Hubspot “companies that blog 15 or more times per month get 5X
more traffic than companies that don’t blog at all.”

Impact of Monthly Blog Articles on Inbound Traffic

600

500
Impact of Monthly Blog Articles on
400 Inbound Traffic for B2B & B2C Companies
Traffic Index

300 800

700
200
600
100

Traffic Index
500
B2B
0 400
B2C
None 1 to 2 3 to 5 6 to 8 9 to 15 Over 15 300

Monthly Blog Posts 200

100

None 1 to 2 3 to 5 6 to 8 9 to 15 Over 15

Monthly Blog Posts

Marketing Maestros: Orchestrating Content that Moves Buyers 4

The struggle is real

Yet, despite its importance, organizations are struggling to create

the content they need. In a Zazzle Media content survey, 60% of
respondents reported finding it hard to produce content consistently.

Budget is one issue. A recent CMO Council report indicated that a

lack of budget is the number one challenge for organizations trying
to develop impactful and effective content.

Coordination between teams is another challenge. Content creators

must create content for product releases, address customer-facing
corporate initiatives, and support events. As a cross-company
service, content creators coordinate with multiple teams and team
members to source information from subject matter experts, ensure
content goals are aligned for maximum impact, and provide the
necessary information for effective distribution. The need to align
these teams on messaging as they create content is critical for
consistency.

Marketing Maestros: Orchestrating Content that Moves Buyers 5

 • Engaging – Static content isn’t enough anymore. You have to
The quality bar rises grab the buyer’s attention and allow them to make the choices
to drive their own journey. That means your content has to be
impressive, interesting, and interactive.

• Consistent – At the same time, your content must remain

In addition to the need to create content at a constant cadence consistent when it comes to brand and messaging. It’s important
despite the challenges of budget and coordination, companies must to reinforce who you are, what you sell, and the value proposition
also make sure that content is great. The quality bar for content across all of your assets.
keeps rising. We know hitting the bar is critical. In fact, 88% of
business buyers say online content impacts vendor selection. • Multi-channel – Buyers today are on multiple channels. You
need to reach them where they prefer to consume content and
engage with them repeatedly. That means promoting content
Partly in response to the quality bar, the nature of content is
through many or most of the available channels and tailoring
changing. We’re moving from Content is King to Experience is King,
each piece to match the best practices for each channel.
with today’s customers expecting engaging, interactive experiences
over static content. With the rise of augmented and virtual reality
and technology like IoT and Near Field Communications, customers
will expect even more sophisticated experiences.

Increasingly, content has to be:

• Personal – In an era where personal recommendations come to

your phone or television, served up by the likes of Amazon and
Netflix, B2B buyers assume they will also receive personalized
content: specific to their industry, their role, their stage in the
customer journey, and even their preferred formats.

Marketing Maestros: Orchestrating Content that Moves Buyers 6

Meeting the quality bar further complicates content creation.
Producing high quality content at scale requires accounting for a
host of factors to address the multiplicity of selling situations.

Typical Global Company

3,244,032
unique selling situations

8 16 22 32 12 3
Channels Buyer Roles Languages Products Industries Business Types

The conundrum

Put it all together and organizations are faced with a content

complexity conundrum: the requirements for content keep growing,
but the resources to create it aren’t rising commensurately. Content
marketers are stuck trying to make more and better content to
address increasingly targeted selling situations, but without much
additional budget or resources.

Marketing Maestros: Orchestrating Content that Moves Buyers 7

Marketing Maestros

A new brand of marketers is rising: Marketing Maestros. These

content experts understand that the key to consistently creating
moving buyer experiences is to harness the power of campaign
orchestration. Maestros unite marketing and sales around common
goals and use a campaign-centered approach to deliver quality
content at scale and do so efficiently.

69% of most successful

These masters of marketing know that orchestrating their team’s work
organizations have
around a campaign is a forcing function to put strategy first. The data
documented content
shows us that this approach works: content strategy matters.
marketing strategies

How do you and your team become Marketing Maestros? Follow

these four steps: Organizations that had a
content strategy in place
• Pick a key or theme 69% showed a 27% higher
win rate
• Establish the beat through branding and messaging

• Conduct the project and the campaign

• Gauge success and use data to improve for next time

27%

Marketing Maestros: Orchestrating Content that Moves Buyers 8

 Why it’s important
Pick a key – Campaign Establishing a theme helps
ensure that all the content

theme and strategy your organization produces—

from eBooks to social ads to
display ads—carries the same,
consistent message. That brings
clarity to buyers and sellers.
To be effective your team has to be on the same page. So your first step should be
It means that each piece of
to establish the campaign’s theme and formulate the campaign strategy.
content reinforces the same
underlying message, helping to
Questions to ask: make it sticky and contributing
to brand identity.
• Why are we doing this campaign? (objective)

• What is this campaign about? (theme) A theme also makes sales

enablement easier. Marketing
• What is the message we’re trying to convey, in one sentence? (theme) Maestros understand that
defining clear objectives and
• How will we know if this campaign is successful? (goals)
outlining the path to reach them
• How do we get there? (plan) helps align everyone across
sales and marketing teams. It
avoids randomization and gives
everyone greater confidence.
Another benefit? Rallying
Objectives and goals are for you and your business. They are what
teams around a shared mission
you hope to achieve for the company by doing this campaign.
energizes them and improves
performance and output.
Theme is ultimately for the customer. It’s what you hope to convey via
the campaign. So it has to be something that resonates with and is
valuable to the buyers your business hopes to reach.

Marketing Maestros: Orchestrating Content that Moves Buyers 9

Establish the beat
Four items to include
– Branding and in your messaging
messaging framework
Audience – Be specific about who
you’re selling to.
Marketing Maestros know that the underlying thread running through
a company’s content must be the corporate brand, with the melody
Problem and solution – Your product
being the individual campaign’s message. Your brand is your identity.
is the solution to specific customer
Every piece of content needs to be infused with it. This consistency
in look, feel, and tone helps you stand out from the competition, problems. Be crisp about the problem
draw repeat visitors, and convey the quality of your brand. Make and how your product solves it.
sure your entire team is trained on your brand guidelines and applies
them consistently Pillars – Define three or four
memorable value props for your
Once your team has defined the campaign theme, you need to product, with a description of the
elaborate on it by building a messaging framework. If brand is the
benefits of your product for each
beat, the messaging framework is the melody. It’s the foundation
pillar.
upon which your content team will build materials and the basis for
sales enablement playbooks and training.
Evidence – Get specific with
Maestros consistently create solid messaging frameworks for each evidence. Use data to illustrate the
campaign. Then use that framework to vet content as it’s developed. problem you solve and show the
features or show data to demonstrate
how you solve it.

Marketing Maestros: Orchestrating Content that Moves Buyers 10

Why it’s important
Once the campaign is initiated, many people across multiple teams
will begin creating content. If you haven’t clearly defined the brand
and provided tools that make it easy to apply, unbranded content
such as outdated sales decks and product sheets will dilute your
corporate message. Top notch marketing organizations provide tools
that make it easier for sales people or marketers to create branded
content consistently.

Similarly, without a clear messaging framework, team members will

create emails, ad copy, presentations, and other content that is
off-message and less effective. That could result in losing prospects
due to poor value propositions or dissonant messaging across the
customer journey.

When your team is composed of maestros, you’re playing the same

melody to the same beat, making for truly moving buyer content.

Marketing Maestros: Orchestrating Content that Moves Buyers 11


Don’t stop at the plan
Too often, content leaders create
great plans but fail to ensure they’re
properly executed. With multiple
teams involved at this stage, it’s easy
to lose control. To ensure success:
Maintain a single point of leadership.
Continue to hold weekly cross-team
meetings during the entire length of
the campaign.
Have a project plan or workflow, and
track against it throughout the course
of the campaign.
Conduct successfully – Cross-
team, cross-channel execution
With a campaign framework in place, you can conduct the symphony
confident that everyone knows their part: from creating to
distributing your campaign content.
Maestros know that a plan can look great on paper, but fail during
execution. To avoid that possibility, continue to coordinate across
teams as you manage the content creation and distribution of
content across all your channels.
Single source of truth
Critical to campaign coordination is the establishment of a single
source of truth for campaign information: the campaign plan,
content, tasks, and timelines. This platform should be able to:
• Monitor and manage content creation, always checking back
against the messaging framework.
• Automate content distribution at scale across all of your channels
for maximum impact.
• Enable sales and direct them to the most up-to-date playbooks,
decks, and assets created for the campaign.
Marketing Maestros: Orchestrating Content that Moves Buyers 12
You’ve invested time building the right plan. It means nothing if you
don’t invest the time to ensure it is conducted correctly.

Why it’s important

Maestros know that centralized operations and information allows
teams to better collaborate and successfully complete their tasks.
You’ll ensure your team has visibility into their teammates’ tasks
and the big picture. Because everyone knows what is happening
and how the campaign is progressing, they can play their roles
confidently.

When you conduct the campaign effectively, it serves your buyers

too. It creates a surround-sound effect where buyers hear your
message across multiple channels, have ample opportunity to
encounter your content, and sense a powerful online presence
around your business. That’s the sign of a successful campaign!

Marketing Maestros: Orchestrating Content that Moves Buyers 13

Gauge the success – Analyze
and optimize
Set goals, measure KPIs
True maestros are always learning and improving. So remember that
even when the campaign is officially over, your work isn’t done. Effective
You will have goals for your
marketers don’t just move on to the next campaign. They assess the
campaign performance. Take the time to gather performance data campaign, such as generating a
and compare it with the key performance indicators (KPIs) and goals specific number of MQLs or raising
you established at the onset of the campaign. In particular, as a team, brand awareness by a certain
measure the impact of your marketing and sales content. percentage.

Hopefully, you saw real impact through your campaign and met or To get KPIs, identify steps required
exceeded its goals. Either way, there’s always room for improvement.
to meet the goals and that you can
As a leader, it’s your job to determine what content worked and
actively measure. For example,
where, and what content didn’t work. Then, use that information to
determine how to improve your evergreen content and shape future
people first have to see your content,
content creation plans. What will you create more of? What can you then view or download it, and then
revise and improve? What content should sales share most? request a demo.

As Marketing Maestros, your team will also proactively identify Finally, specify the metrics that you
learnings to apply to the next campaign. Take the time to document: will measure as key performance
indicators (KPIs), such as page views,
• Tactics to repeat in the next campaign
form fills, etc.
• Approaches that should be left behind

• New ideas to test before or after the next campaign

Marketing Maestros: Orchestrating Content that Moves Buyers 14

Once you’ve established that source-of-truth campaign platform,
you can use it record your learnings in a way that is both shareable
and actionable.

Why it’s important

Maestros continuously learn and improve—it’s how they remain
the best performers. Plus, everybody on your team benefits from
knowing that the work they did matters the work they did matters. By
establishing KPIs before the campaign begins, you set a goal post. By
measuring against them after the campaign, you get a sense of impact.

But remember that the purpose of this assessment isn’t to tell people
whether they did well or not. It’s to identify gaps and successes so
individuals can take that knowledge and improve their performance to
create an even more successful campaign next time.

Ultimately, the work you do in this final phase will benefit your buyers,
because it enables the content experiences you deliver to get even
better. Continuous improvement in campaign processes means better,
more relevant, more interesting, and more useful content for your buyers.

Marketing Maestros: Orchestrating Content that Moves Buyers 15


Conclusion
Organizations are challenged more than
ever to produce high volumes of high quality
content—with limited resources. To scale
effectively, you need to produce content with
a purpose, by organizing around campaigns.
The new breed of Marketing Maestros are
using technology to enable that campaign
orchestration. Platforms like Percolate by
Seismic are purpose-built to provide a single
source of truth. Teams of Marketing Maestros
who have defined campaign goals and
objectives, can use this combined solution to:
• Plan their campaign strategy and the
content to support it
• Create that content and manage it
through the entire production process
• Distribute content efficiently across
multiple channels at once
Marketing Maestros: Orchestrating Content that Moves Buyers
• Analyze content performance against
the campaign goals, with insight into
everything from content production
costs to content engagement data
By embracing the Marketing Maestro
mindset, you can bridge the gap between
sales and marketing, raise content quality,
and increase content quantity—all while
maintaining operational efficiency.
Marketing Maestros using Percolate by
Seismic have seen:
• 126% ROI
• 10% annual savings on asset creation
• < 6 months to payback the investment
Want to know more?
Learn about the Percolate by Seismic
Marketing Orchestration Solution or
request a demo.
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About Seismic

Seismic is the industry-leading sales enablement and marketing

orchestration solution, aligning go-to-market teams while
empowering them to deliver engaging buyer experiences that
drive growth. Seismic’s Storytelling Platform™ delivers innovative
capabilities for marketers to orchestrate content delivery across
all channels, and for sellers to engage with prospective buyers in
a compelling, resonant manner at every step of the buyer journey.
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