You might have great content coverage in the awareness stage, good coverage in the purchasing stage; and zilch at the interest stage. This is not good.
Find out what content you already own, then leverage it and create new content to fill that content marketing gap.
The Audit: Know What You’ve Got
You can hire a company to do a great big content analysis for you, or you can do it yourself. Do a simple gap analysis by sales cycle, which will tell you what pieces you need to fill in.
Once you’re completed your audit and know what you’ve got, you ready to roll.
It’s Miller Time: Filling Those Gaps
Now it’s time to analyze what you have from your content library and match it to your sales cycles and sales goals. Draw your conclusions based on what you know about your own sales cycle and customers, and on your competitors’ resources.
Know your customers’ pain points, where your offerings intersect to solve them, and your market differentiators. Write it all down and match customer needs and sales cycle location to the most relevant content.
Now you can plan your content creation. For existing pieces, you will need to decide to keep it as is, to update it, or to retire it. Also decide if the piece can be leveraged into different pieces. It’s entirely possible that a white paper was great in its time but has aged. You might still be able to leverage parts of the white paper to build new resources.
For example, it’s a pretty good bet that the IT guy who is actively looking to purchase backup software doesn’t need a colorful infographic. He does need case studies, product briefs, and data sheets. But that cool infographic will exactly suit prospects who are early in the awareness stage, because it attracts positive attention. And that business-of-technology white paper suits the interest stage very well, especially since you can gate it for customer contact information. Or if you’re light on the awareness stage, consider creating a SlideShare presentation or a thought leadership article in an industry trade journal.