Shockingly, the research found that content marketers and sales professionals are least aligned on buyer personas, which would seem particularly important for both parties, as something they should be aligned on.
The study conducted by Content Marketing Institute and LinkedIn Research also found that a stronger culture of alignment would be the best way to increase sales and content marketing alignment.
As you can see, buyer persona sharing is not very aligned compared with other activities the survey asked about. Target accounts, how to use content and when to use content, along with typical discussions around customer questions, are by far the most aligned activities. Content marketing strategy appears to be shared with the sales team, it's unclear how much integration between sales and marketing teams there is when it comes to content strategy and content creative. Judging content effectiveness seems it's pretty much left to the content marketing team for the most part, whilst there is little alignment when it comes to personas.
We have done a lot of research at Smart Insights on our own personas and we've recently involved the sales team to feed back to the marketing team on the personas which came out of the research, it's really important everyone is aligned and agreed, plus the marketing team relies on conversations with prospects to help confirm the personas we think exist as our core audiences.
The research also found content marketing teams which are more aligned with sales team have more certainly about their future content marketing budgets, which sales teams proving the value of content.
By Robert Jones
Robert Jones is a specialist in CRO, UX Research, insight and digital Marketing. He is CRO Analyst at Enjoy Digital. He has a Psychology Masters of Research, has run large digital marketing campaigns to build research panels and worked in insight roles for Vision Critical, ASDA and WhatUsersDo. He also managed all of Smart Insights member resources and published several guides including "How to conduct Persona Research" as well as contributing over 100 blog posts to the Smart Insights blog. When he isn’t working on marketing campaigns he is most likely eating authentic Italian food or planning his next short trip. You can connect with Robert on LinkedIn or follow him on Twitter.
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