As a results-driven CMO, your team KPIs and campaign-specific goals extend beyond building brand awareness. You want quality leads within your ideal customer profile (ICP) that are ready to talk to sales. While you know content is integral to your lead nurturing strategy, you need more tangible results from your content marketing teams.

When you work with your content team, you want to align your team goals across functions. Are the demand generation marketers working hand in hand with content? Are the product marketing team members informing the team about new features, product lines, or versions in time for a promotion plan to launch? Is your brand’s messaging and positioning woven into all communication? After all, your brand narrative is an integral part of storytelling in content marketing.

To generate leads and gain alignment between every function within your department, it’s essential to define your goals for each quarter and year. When you disseminate this information to your teams, you want to ensure their plans align with the marketing objectives and the overarching business goals.

Your content team is responsible for building a seamless narrative that naturally nurtures readers from the top of the marketing funnel throughout their buyer’s journey. The end goal? They are qualified prospects ready to buy and willing to talk to sales. Keep in mind this process can take much longer in the world of B2B marketing—months or even years—compared with B2C.

You probably know how challenging it can be to convert your readers from awareness to actual interested prospects. But leveraging an end-to-end service like Contently—where strategy, ideation, planning, creation, distribution, and analytics are done in a single platform—can help your team get the job done.

Generating Leads with End-to-End Content Platforms

So how can a comprehensive content marketing platform (CMP) help your content teams align with all key stakeholders and scale their production? With a CMP like Contently, CMOs can know that their content teams have everything they need to plan, create, scale, review, distribute, and measure their content programs. Here are a few ways a CMP makes end-to-end content marketing seamless.

Make Sure Your Strategy Includes Lead Generation

A good content strategy grows your lead funnel, starting at awareness and pulling the prospect through the consideration and decision stages. To develop a results-driven strategy, your content team needs to understand what type of information (and what content formats) your audience craves and what your competitors have already published. When discussing content strategy, explore what content distribution would be a good fit. Choosing the right channels can improve your ROI because your audience doesn’t have to dig it up to find it.

An end-to-end CMP keeps everything you need in one place. Your strategy is readily accessible so that you can align your content production with your content pillars. This is particularly useful if you receive content requests from across your organization and need to decide which to pursue.

Contently can help you build an effective multi-channel framework, placing strategy, creation, review, SEO analysis, editorial calendar, and measurement under one roof. Within the same platform, you can immediately analyze what’s working and what’s not, then adapt your strategy accordingly.

To dive even deeper, Contently’s Channel Analysis tool helps content teams understand what channels the target audience depends on for relevant content. Once your market research is complete, users can identify freelancers who specialize in creating content for those specific channels.

With the Contently Accelerator solution, you can identify the topics and content formats most likely to resonate with your audience. Then, build a specialized team to execute your strategy from ideation to distribution.

Identify and Address Audience Needs with SEO Tools

Once you’ve identified the topics you’ll be chasing, it’s time to refine them. While traffic is important, not all traffic generates leads. Your content team needs to identify how to attract the right people and publish content that drives action.

An end-to-end CMP helps your team identify the topics, questions, and keywords your target audience commonly searches for to inform ideation for editorial and sharpen SEO rankings. And using the right keywords in your top-of-funnel educational content makes you more likely to convert a reader into a lead.

That’s because you are solving a problem or addressing a specific challenge they face. By developing yourself as a thought leader, the prospect will spend more time reading your company’s content when they have a question and hopefully convert or refer their friends to you when they need it. Optimizing mid-funnel landing pages for SEO can also help you generate leads, as members of your target audience can quickly and easily find your product or service.

Contently’s Content Value Tracker estimates the impact of your organic search traffic on your digital marketing spend by showing how much you would have to spend to run an ad to get the same traffic you get organically by using a quality SEO piece. You can assess how effective your efforts will be in growing your lead funnel by tying predicted dollar outcomes back to your lead and revenue goals.

In addition, Contently’s SEO Story Ideas tool generates story concepts that are more likely to rank on Page 1 of Google and align with your full-funnel strategy. Using this functionality, your team can create content primed for SEO performance and keep tabs on what pieces performed best.

Develop Workflows for Relevant, Quality Content

An end-to-end CMP can help your content team streamline workflows and stay organized from content ideation to creation to measurement. When your team’s goals, KPIs, style guides, and editorial processes are available in one place, your content team spends less time focused on the process and more time creating lead-generating content.

A robust workflow can also help you maintain consistency in your voice and tone. Contently’s Tone Analyzer helps ensure your writers use the right style and voice to engage your audience. In turn, you increase trust in your brand—and the likelihood that prospects will convert into qualified leads.

This workflow is essential because different employees may create content for each stage of the buyer journey. When you deploy a platform showcasing editorial steps within the calendar view, it encourages free information flow throughout the organization. With end-to-end workflow tools, your content team can clarify goals for each piece of content to everyone involved and find the right freelancers to support your efforts.

For each project, you can attach your style guide, content briefs, personas, and more to scale your content creation, onboard new writers faster, and get a solid draft back the first time around. Greater efficiency means sending readers down the marketing funnel more quickly.

And in times when we have to do more with less, a tool like Contently’s Content Command Center allows you to understand the bandwidth of your content team. You can identify team members’ individual workloads, content production time, and delivery estimates, so you can make adjustments as you need it.

Leverage Data Analytics Tools to Drive Your Decisions

When measuring the success of long-form content assets like white papers, eBooks, and case studies, Contently builds heat maps and gathers page-by-page analytics to see where readers are looking and drawing their attention, so you can make changes or optimize accordingly.

With an end-to-end CMP, CMOs can grow the lead funnel with content. This investment creates an immediate impact, enabling companies to scale content faster and help keep your team focused, on budget, and increase the prospects you receive through your marketing funnel.

Schedule a Contently demo today To further explore how the end-to-end platform can help you generate leads and execute a content strategy.