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It’s one thing to put out content…and another to create useful content that drives sales. How do you know if your sales content is effective for both your employees and prospects?
This is where sales content analytics comes in. Content analytics provides valuable insights into what content customers are interacting with and what content your sales team uses the most. The insights gained are useful for identifying and bridging content gaps and optimizing your content roadmap.
In this article, you’ll learn what sales content analytics entails, what content metrics you should track, and how to leverage analytics to optimize your sales content creation and improve content performance.
What is Sales Content Analytics?
Sales content analytics provides a detailed view of how prospects, customers, and sales teams interact with different types of content. It shows insights like how content is performing, the number of times content is shared and on what platforms, which content drives revenue and conversions, and more.
Sales content analytics can provide actionable insights that can help revenue teams adapt and improve sales content processes to fit the needs of your target audience.
Sales content analytics example
Your sales team uses sales content like templates to optimize their sales processes. Let’s say they regularly use this MEDDIC template to assess and prioritize opportunities in their pipeline.
The content in the template should help them to identify and understand customer pain points and provide solutions to them.
Sales content analytics will help you know whether the template is actually helpful. First, it will show you how much the sales team is using it. If analytics reveal they are using the template a lot, that means it's effective, and you can use that template’s format for other sales content.
On the flip side, if analytics reveal they are not using the template, it might be because they don’t find it effective.
Sales Content Analytics to Know
Sales content analytics offers insights in:
Most & Least Used Content
How do you determine whether your content is useful to potential customers and your sales team? The most- and least-used content analytics show which content is viewed and shared the most. It also helps you identify what platforms content performs best on.
This can help you understand what types of content resonate (or don’t) with your target audience so that you can refine such content. This sales content analytics is great for monitoring the relevance of content over the content lifecycle.
Metrics to Track:
- Page Views and Shares: The number of times content is viewed and shared.
- Average Time Spent on Posts: How long website visitors spend reading posts.
- Outbound Clicks: Measures the amount of traffic gotten from ads or links placed within your content.
How Content is Used Across the Cycle
Is your content being posted at the right time during the sales cycle? Monitoring how content is used across the cycle involves ensuring that content is published in a series of progression matching the customer’s journey.
This enables you to identify the optimal time for putting out content.
Metrics to Track:
- Conversion Rates: The number of people who perform a specific action after viewing your content. For example, the number of people who register or purchase a product.
- Bounce Rates: The percentage of people that leave without engaging with your content. It indicates that content may not be relevant to their needs.
- Engagement Metrics: This shows whether content is useful to customers at every point of their journey. Customers engaging with your content means it aligns with their needs.
What Content is Missing
Does your sales team send out content on everything potential customers need to know? Sales content analytics helps identify content gaps, that is, necessary information that needs to be in your content repository but isn’t.
Content opportunities found here are key to improving engagement, conversions, and sales.
Metrics to Track:
- Customer Questions & Concerns: What questions are commonly asked by customers? What important content is your sales team not sending out? Create content to address
- Sales Team Feedback: Ask what questions and objections your sales team regularly encounters.
- Competitor Analysis: What sales content does your competitor have that you don’t?
- Site Search: What information do prospects search for on your site after engaging with sales content sent to them?
Engagement & Conversion Rates
How are people interacting with your sales content? Engagement rates measure how prospects are engaging with content sent to them by your sales team using data like email signups, qualified leads, etc.
For example, if you would normally get 100 leads from a sales copy, but a particular copy generated just 10 leads, it indicates that some prospects didn’t find the sales copy engaging.
Engagement influences conversion rates. Conversions like clicking a link, downloading a file, etc, are typically higher when the engagement rate is high.
Metrics to Track:
- Sales Qualified Leads: Potential customers are highly interested in your product or service and seem likely to purchase.
- Email Signups: The number of people that sign up for your newsletter after reading a post. It indicates prospects who are interested in receiving more personalized information or offers.
- Appointments/Demos booked: Measures the percentage of people who have been convinced to take further action and discuss the next steps on using your product or service.
- Revenue: Sales content analytics shows the amount of revenue a post, content, or webpage has generated for you.
Manually keeping track of all these metrics can be time-consuming and stressful. Fortunately, with a content analytics tool like the Spekit Smartsend functionality, you can automate this process.
With the Smartsend functionality, you can have an in-depth view of engagement metrics, enabling sales reps to track prospect engagement with specific content they share externally.
For example, you can use this feature to determine which case studies or blog posts resonate most with prospects so that you can put out similar content.
Sales Content Analytics Metrics
Monitoring important sales content metrics is important in the sales content process. Doing this helps you identify areas of improvement, offer valuable content, and increase the impact of sales content.
Let’s look at the top metrics you should analyze:
- Content Engagement Metrics: Shows how prospects interact with content that sales teams send them. The metrics to track here include follow-up response, total views, total view time, and pitches (how many times sales reps pitch across social media platforms).
- Content Production Metrics: This metric focuses on the amount of content published across platforms, the content production time, and how often published content is updated. It helps to optimize the content production process.
- Content ROI Metrics: Compares the revenue generated from content against set benchmarks, the forms of content that drive business goals, and the content that increases conversions.
- Conversion Metrics: Analyzes conversion rates, such as the percentage of prospects that purchased interacting with content. You can also monitor the number of clicks on a CTA or link on your website content (i.e., Click Through Rate).
- Content Use Rate: This metric involves tracking how the sales team is leveraging content and how other employees (i.e., marketing and revenue teams) are using content that the sales team sends them.
Other metrics to remember are sales pitching metrics and content lifecycle metrics. Sales pitching metrics involve tracking the effectiveness of sales methods used when pitching and the percentage of people who see/respond to pitches. Content lifecycle metrics help you determine when content becomes outdated.
Without these content analytics metrics, your sales team would never know exactly how their content marketing efforts impact the sales process.
Benefits of Sales Content Analytics
More than 50% of businesses want to know how much their content influences buyer decisions. If you’re one of those businesses, here’s how sales content analytics can help:
Messaging Improvement
Most prospects prefer researching before speaking to a sales rep. Sales content analytics helps you understand what type of content your target audience wants to see. Scratch out the guesswork when working out your messaging strategy.
Rather than blindly creating blog posts or videos and hoping they’re effective, you can track metrics like engagement, shares, or conversion rates to discover which messaging resonates most with your customers. Then, you can craft content that precisely speaks to their needs and pain points.
Content Strategy Optimization
Your content strategy should be optimized for different sales process stages. Sales content analytics gives insights into which content is most useful at every stage using content performance metrics that show how prospects move through the sales funnel.
Using the insights, you can formulate a data-driven content strategy that will produce successful sales outcomes.
Identify the Right Conversion Paths
Conversion paths refer to the journey potential customers take on your sales platform. The role of sales content here is to guide prospects from point A to the point where they become leads. Sales content analytics helps you design a compelling conversion path.
It lets you discover which content pieces generate the most conversions at every stage, increasing your understanding of what customers want. This knowledge enables you to optimize your content roadmap and convert more leads in your sales pipeline.
Boost Engagement & Conversions
Personalized content is the pillar of sales content marketing. When sales content is tailored toward customer preferences, it boosts engagement and drives conversions.
With sales content analytics, you see real-time data on customer preferences and gain insights into their engagement patterns. You can generate higher engagement and conversions by leveraging sales content analytics stats to create personalized content that enhances the customer experience.
Sales Content Analytics FAQ
More on sales content analytics:
Sales content analytics tools
Sales content analytics tools are AI-powered software that automates the gathering of sales content data and processes the data into valuable performance metrics for the sales content processes.
They are enablement tools that allow you to visualize data and generate reports showing how to optimize your content for potential customers.
The best content analytical tools help you measure and optimize content performance. They typically have a centralized dashboard that can be customized to show the metrics you want to track. Spekit, for example, enables you to manage the following dashboards:
- Spek Management Dashboard: This dashboard provides a comprehensive view of content, showing the total number of content created, which one needs an update when last each was updated, and which content is most popular.
- Topics Dashboards: Outlines what content you’ve created so you don’t create duplicate content.
- Speks View Dashboard: This lets you view user interactions at a glance. This dashboard is useful for identifying what type of content is most relevant to readers.
- Speks Searches Dashboard: This dashboard shows search queries that help you identify content gaps.
How often should you audit your content?
A content audit involves performing a systematic review of your content repository: content on landing pages, help pages, blog posts, etc. It helps you determine which content is up to date, which is outdated and should be removed, and which to keep as is.
According to research, 61% of marketers keep the frequency of their content audits at 2-3 times yearly so you can equally monitor long and short-term metrics.
How often you do a content audit depends on several factors, such as:
- When content becomes outdated
- The number of times you published new content
- When conversions are down
After performing your content audit, you can easily update sales content using Speks. Speks by Spekit is a content authoring tool that enables you to create and update sales content from wherever you are.
Sales data analytics vs content data analytics
Sales data analytics is a process that uses predictive analysis to identify, collect, and model sales data, trends, and outcomes that can be used to evaluate sales performance. It enables sales leaders to forecast future sales, determine where sales teams need to improve, set goals, and optimize sales and marketing efforts.
The insights from sales data analytics can be on sales team productivity, product, campaign, etc. For example, if you’re a sales manager in a tech company, you could analyze the performance of a new training software across different companies using the software.
The goal of content data analytics is to understand how valuable content is to customers and create a content strategy that drives conversion and enables revenue. An example of how content data analytics is leveraged is comparing the performance of two copies posted on social media using engagement metrics like likes, shares, and comments.
Improve Your Sales Content Analytics
Sales content enables reps to guide customers through their journey, providing a personalized customer experience; compelling and engaging content is necessary to see conversions.
However, simply putting out content doesn’t mean you’ll get as many conversions as you want. Sales content analytics enables you to determine the effectiveness of your sales content and propel your sales content processes.
By leveraging sales content analytics, you can easily design actional strategies for content optimization. Using Spekit Analytics, you can monitor engagements and user feedback and visualize data to find exactly what content drives conversions.
Make data-driven decisions about your sales content processes today.
