Content development and distribution plan (Example)

by: Scott Swanson

To help convey my thoughts, I’ve used an example from a past client (with permission) who sells supply chain software to enterprise customers. The following questions are we what attempt to address in this document:

• What business outcome are we optimizing for?
• What do we want prospects to do to accomplish that goal?
• What is the customer journey?
  • What tactics would we use and when?
  • What supporting assets would we create and how do they map to the customer journey?
  • What media and channels would we use to cause specific action?

Situation

Self-healing, control towers, and real-time knowability have been goals shared by procurement and supply chain operations since the industrial revolution. The technology has never been able to deliver on these promises and attempts to deliver have almost universally failed. Legacy vendors are perceived as cumbersome, unwieldly, and tied to multi-year role outs costing tens of millions of dollars, or more.

Marketing campaigns for well established players focus on high-end promises rarely delivered by the feature set. Alternatively, they focus on features that are not translated into business outcomes.

The fundamental promise is that stakeholders including channel managers, logistics managers, operations focused executives, retailers, and customers should be able to collaborate around a procurement and supply chain solution. This requires a common data set, real-time analytics, business rules, and administration. When these elements come together with Company and AI, collaboration graduates from abstract to tangible because predicting, reacting, integrating, analyzing, and healing are intrinsic behaviors of the Company system itself. All enabled by differentiated technology and AI.

This presents an opportunity for Company to differentiate itself. Company has a better solution. Using cutting edge AI and predictive analytics, Company is bringing the right tool to the job and may, in fact, disrupt an entire industry. To do that, Company must convince potential customers that after nearly 250 years of failed attempts, now is the time to risk their career and reputation on a new solution.

Prospects, who are already hungry for AI, can be made to understand that AI and analytics aren’t just nice to have elements in a procurement suite, but rather essential ones that their competitors are already adopting, and the competitive advantage AI brings will favor the early adopters. Once these prospects understand what’s at risk, then they’ll learn how AI and data analytics are a core and differentiating element of the Company offering.

Messaging and positioning

The best marketing and sales conversations present the customer with a compelling story about their business first (you’re buying things today, but could be doing it better), teaches them a new perspective (data and AI are essential), connects this with their reality (your competition is already doing this), and then leads to how it can be realized via unique differentiating capabilities (early adopters will gain the competitive advantage).

With smart procurementas the differentiator in this case, I see an opportunity to address the broader market as a whole, explaining why AI in procurement is important, and leading to how Company does it better than anyone else:

• Deliver strategic value and meet rising expectations. Procurement must better leverage the large data sets available to them within their own systems and the market.
• Technology now brings actionable insights to Procurement & Supply Chain leadership. To enable smart Procurement and realize the full value of data, companies must both address the underlying data quality issues and adopt the latest AI/machine learning and other technologies.
• Only Company empowers leaders with both the latest AI applications and the data foundation that power smarter procurement.

Measurable business outcomes (MBOs)

Improve conversion and velocity through the revenue funnel, from inquiry through closed won stages of those accounts who participated in the campaign vs. those who did not.

• Marketing Qualified Lead to Sales Accepted Lead
• Sales Accepted Lead to Opportunity
• Opportunity to Closed Won

Timeframe

A 6-12 month test, running until the campaign no longer yields the desired return on investment.

Audience

• Procurement & Supply Chain leaders at companies with revenue of $500M+
• Industries that rely heavily on data in their supply chain and procurement process
• US, Canada, SE Asia, Mexico, Brazil, UKI, DACH, Nordics, France, Italy, Spain, UAE

Elements of the Go-To-Market make the end-to-end customer journey better

Awareness

I’m having an issue with some day-to-day aspect of my current supply chain software, but unsure what it is or how to fix it.

Interest

I require greater visibility into my supply chain data to reduce costs and gain efficiencies.

Consideration

Is my problem unique, or are there other people having the same issue? How did they fix it?

Intent

Of this limited list of companies that I’ve uncovered in my research, which best addresses my unique problem? How do I sell this to my management chain?

Evaluation & Decision

I’m convinced this is a problem I have, that I need to solve it, and that Company is among the best suited to fix it. Tell me why I should I pick you?

Owners, stakeholders, resources

• Chief marketing officer is the project sponsor, will periodically provide as-needed tactical resources, and will act as the liaison between the campaign and the c-suite
• Corp marketing is responsible for all process and execution of this campaign and will act as the campaign manager to ensure steps are being followed and the desired outcome is being achieved.
• Product marketing will be responsible for the generation of required content, partnering with field marketing, and outside agencies as needed.
• Field marketing will support the effort through the use of informing content, coordinating direct mail campaigns and handling returns,
• Inside sales will be responsible for qualifying leads, executing call scripts, ensuring CRM database quality is maintained, and being the voice of the customer.
• Account executives will be responsible for validating messaging and positioning assumptions, support the development of objection handling content, and supporting on-the-ground localization and customization efforts.

All parties will be expected to attend regular oversight meetings and provide constructive feedback based on observed behaviors and outcomes. When evaluating this feedback, data will be prioritized over intuition.