Learn everything you need to know about content enablement, from discovering the best software to executing a strategy that aligns the whole company.
Content Enablement: Everything You Need to Know
Content is at the core of your business. It’s how your teams highlight your values, underline your mission, sell your products or services, and build rapport with your clients and prospects. But how can you empower front-line teams to deliver winning, on-brand documents consistently?
The answer: an effective content enablement strategy.
In this comprehensive guide, we’ll explore all aspects of content enablement, unveiling its potential to drive business growth and break down walls between departments. If you’re looking to unlock efficiency within your teams’ content workflows, this article is for you.
What is Content Enablement?
Content enablement is the practice of delivering high-quality corporate content, such as pitchbooks, throughout your sales cycle to aid business growth. There are two core pillars within a content enablement strategy:
Content Creation:
Producing valuable content that aligns with your brand’s messaging and graphic charter.
Content Distribution:
Ensuring that winning content is easily accessible to all teams across your business, particularly sales and consulting teams.
When integrated optimally within a business’s framework, content enablement streamlines workflows and facilitates better output.
Who Benefits from an Effective Content Enablement Strategy?
Front-Line Sales Teams
Content enablement ensures front-line, business development teams have up-to-date, relevant, and persuasive materials that can help them close deals more effectively.
Marketing Teams
Leveraging content enablement software enables marketing teams to maintain brand compliance across company-wide deliverables. It also provides the ability to track the performance of different content, which can be used to inform their content creation strategy.
Consulting Teams
The documents that consultants share with clients must remain legally-compliant, brand consistent and accurate. Content enablement tools allow consultants to mitigate risk and retain the integrity of their brand, while still customizing their material to the needs of each project.
The Benefits of Implementing a Content Enablement Strategy
Deploying a robust content enablement strategy within your organization can bring multiple benefits.
Winning More Business
Effective content enablement ensures all client-facing deliverables, such as proposals and pitches, are optimized for maximum impact. This will ultimately help build credibility and support business growth.
Eliminating Inefficiencies
Earlier this year, Microsoft surveyed a number of professionals and found that 62% spend too much time searching for information in their workday. Content enablement software eliminates these inefficiencies, freeing up time for more strategic work.
Strengthening Brand Identity
Implementing a content enablement strategy mitigates the risk of teams sending off-brand, outdated materials to clients or prospects. Providing easy access to brand-compliant content ensures teams will send out consistent documents that safeguard your company’s reputation, regardless of department or geography.
Boosting Global Collaboration
A well-structured content enablement strategy bridges the departmental divide by enabling easy content sharing. For example, different verticals can more easily facilitate cross-selling, allowing clients to benefit from multiple services within your company’s offering, ultimately driving revenue.
Implementing a content enablement strategy can effectively tackle potential roadblocks that stand between your business and its desired targets.
How to Build a Successful Content Enablement Strategy
A winning content enablement strategy revolves around four key stages: planning, creation, storage and optimization.
Here is a breakdown of these critical building blocks:
1. Audit Existing Content
Start by establishing how your front-line teams feel about the existing content and uncover any gaps or room for improvement.
It’s important to meticulously plan your content enablement strategy to ensure you consider everything front-line teams may need for commercial success. Use this time to establish how teams feel about your existing content and uncover any content gaps.
Here are some useful steps you can take during the planning phase:
- Build core objectives for each different content type; for example, setting different goals for your pitchbook templates vs. monthly reporting template.
- Identify your audience’s unique needs; for example, whether you need to factor in accessibility requirements into your content.
- Consider the channels for distribution; for example, whether your team/clients will predominantly read the documents in Microsoft 365, other applications, or if the materials will be printed.
Don’t forget, collaboration is key; you should consult various teams throughout this planning stage to shape your content enablement strategy effectively.
2. Build Best Practice Templates
The next step is building best practice, on-brand templates to embed into the content enablement software.
Look for tools that offer features to help you when creating your gold standard materials
- Automated formatting features in PowerPoint, enabling teams to apply your company branding to charts, tables, shapes and bullet points in one click.
- Slide checking functionality to audit and fix all easily missed errors within the templates, such as incorrect fonts and misaligned objects.
3. Make Your Content Easy to Access
After creating impactful, winning materials, whoever manages content within the business (usually marketing teams) must store it effectively so it’s easily accessible.
We recommend leveraging content enablement tools to manage all corporate materials via a centralized repository. Not only does this make managing content as easy as possible for marketing teams – it also enables teams to access content quickly via their most-used applications (like PowerPoint, Excel and Word).
Investing in document automation software, like UpSlide, will save valuable time for both marketing and sales teams, streamlining content creation across the entire business.
4. Iterate and Optimize
A successful content lifecycle doesn’t end once the materials are published. You must continuously question, test, and improve the content so that it remains best practice and relevant.
Some content enablement tools enable client-facing teams to provide feedback via PowerPoint to ensure content remains gold standard.
For example, your reporting team might notice some misalignments in your quarterly report template and could leave suggestions directly on the document within PowerPoint.
Then, the content administrator can choose whether to issue the suggested changes to teams within seconds, enabling everyone in the business to access their best-quality content.
Choosing the Best Content Enablement Software
There are many content enablement tools on the market, some specific to different use cases:
- UpSlide: for enterprise content management in Microsoft 365
- WordPress: for managing website content
- Bynder: for Digital Asset Management (DAM)
There are many content enablement tools on the market, some specific to different office suites (for example, UpSlide optimizing Microsoft 365) and others tailored for particular use cases (such as using WordPress for website content management).
Before investing in a tool, conduct an internal investigation to define your selection criteria and expectations.
Step 1: Assess Current Content Processes and Workflows
Begin by taking stock of your existing content processes and workflows, which includes evaluating how your teams create, manage, distribute and use content.
Five questions that will help you understand your workflows better:
- Who is responsible for creating content?
- How this content is stored and accessed?
- Are there any bottlenecks or challenges when it comes to distributing and using this content across the business?
- Which teams regularly distribute content to clients or prospects?
- Which software do your teams use at the moment?
This assessment will give you the valuable insights needed to create your selection criteria and evaluate software against your needs.
Step 2: Analyze the Content Enablement Tools on the Market
Identify the different content enablement tools on the market using comparison sites like G2, Capterra, GetApp. Alternatively, speak to your team directly to hear about the tools they’re aware of already or that your peers are using.
Refine Your Selection Critera
Screen different solutions against your selection criteria, questioning:
- Which features are included?
- How user-friendly is the software?
- How much does it cost?
- Which third-party applications does the tool integrate with?
- Does the company have a proven track record of implementing software for businesses like yours?
Once you’ve compared each tool on the market with this selection criteria, you’ll be able to work out which content enablement software will be the most appropriate for your team.
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Step 3: Test and Adapt the Strategy
Before embarking on a company-wide rollout, consider running a pilot test with a handful of teams to test the compatibility of the tool.
After six months, assess:
- How quickly have teams been able to adopt the tool?
- Has it solved the initial bottleneck issues pinpointed during the assessment stage?
- Have your teams reported qualitative or quantitative success, for example, time-savings during the content creation process or feedback from their clients?
If the results aren’t what you were hoping for initially, reach out to your dedicated customer success managers or implementation specialists to help you increase adoption rates. If it’s still not successful, then maybe it’s time to consider another tool or strategy.
Once all the kinks are smoothed, it’s then prime time to roll your content enablement tool out company wide.
Case Studies: Successful Implementations of Content Enablement Tools
Many innovative businesses are using content enablement to achieve their strategic objectives. Here are a few examples:
How Clarksons Continuously Strengthen Their Global Brand Identity with Content Enablement
The marketing team at global shipping firm, Clarksons, used to spend hours ensuring that all client-facing documents were brand compliant.
They implemented content management software to give employees the tools to achieve brand consistency independently, saving each user over 21 hours a month.
How Singer Capital Markets Create Winning Documents with UpSlide
Investment banking boutique, Singer Capital Markets, had a big problem maintaining brand consistency across their client-facing materials. Pitch decks varied across teams, making it challenging for the marketing team to ensure homogeneity.
Since using UpSlide to automate workflows, their teams are producing high-quality, branded documents faster, ensuring accurate data and the creation of more impactful content.
UpSlide is by far the best software that we’ve experienced; not only is it so user-friendly, but the sophistication of the software is far beyond what we’ve come across previously. It’s refreshing to use features that are so bespoke to financial services.
Content Enablement: Key Takeaways
As we look towards the future, businesses need to constantly adapt and evolve with the market shifts to stay competitive.
Establishing a content enablement strategy will enable companies to provide their teams with the necessary tools to generate high-quality documents – ultimately facilitating business growth and credibility.
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TL;DR
Content enablement is the practice of creating, distributing, and optimizing corporate content to empower teams, drive business growth, and maintain brand consistency.
Effective content enablement ensures teams have easy access to on-brand, impactful materials, eliminating inefficiencies, strengthening global collaboration, and ultimately winning more business.
To implement your strategy: audit current content, create best-practice templates, centralize storage, and continuously iterate for improvement.
Tools like UpSlide can be leveraged to streamline the creation of gold standard documents, such as pitchbooks or proposals, in Microsoft 365.
