What does it really take for marketers of today to effectively track and enhance their content marketing performance?  Christian Lund, Co-Founder at Templafy shares some insights:

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Welcome to this martech chat Christian, tell us more about Templafy? What inspired the platform?

Templafy is a content enablement platform that helps users create high-performance business content more efficiently. Our company was founded in 2014 with the vision of making the workflow infrastructure easier for users and enterprises alike. We were seeing businesses spend too much time on the content process – from the template to approvals to simple information gathering – and knew there had to be a better way forward. We wanted to create a platform that better manages content throughout an enterprise so it can drive business results. Over the past seven years, Templafy has grown to become this platform, that is pioneering the category of content enablement with a first-of-its-kind infrastructure that actively accelerates business performance with connected content. We believe that employees deserve a solution that enables them to do their jobs more efficiently and connected content solutions are the key to making this a reality moving forward.

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How are you seeing content enablement platforms change the game for marketers today and what are some top features and trends that you see shaping up the future of these technologies? 

Content enablement platforms can be true game changers for marketers. Marketing departments often find themselves facing issues around enforcing brand standards and ensuring consistency, making sure content/assets are easily accessible to other departments and wasting their own time creating one-off presentations or assets. The implementation of a content enablement platform solves for many of these issues by simply connecting content throughout an enterprise. A connected-content ecosystem allows for an entire workforce to better align on brand standards and consistency by making the content marketing teams create easier to access. It also encourages automation which reduces the need for manual work by helping employees build standardized and compliant business content fast. In turn, allowing for marketers to focus on the value-added aspect of content creation and trust that these pieces of collateral will be utilized to their highest potential across the enterprise. 

What does it take for marketers to enhance their content performance in today’s largely content heavy digital marketing world? What can they do differently?

To enhance content performance today, marketers need to make sure their content is easily accessible to the rest of a company. A major problem in today’s ecosystem is that marketers are creating all this amazing content for departments like sales or customer success to use to their advantage, and the content isn’t making its way to those individuals. Marketers need to be advocates for creating company-wide workflows that are driven by connected content. This not only will allow for the content they create to get into the hands of those who need it, but it will also increase efficiency across the board. Instead of searching for information, details or the latest version of a slide, employees (and marketers specifically) can get time back to work on the meat of content. 

What are some of the key content metrics that you feel today’s marketers (and even salespeople) don’t measure or track effectively enough?

The actual performance of content – what resonates with the recipient, what doesn’t and how that can be improved – often gets overlooked. A lot goes into the making of a document or presentation, and while we spend so much time on crafting and delivering it, we also aren’t tracking how it did and what can be improved the next time we work on something similar. We created a new product, Engage, earlier this year to help solve for this problem. Engage follows business content beyond the desktop and gives users real time tracking and analytics, in turn creating a sightline into how a piece of content is performing. Tools like this are crucial for the future of work: there needs to be more transparency around analytics and insight, so marketers know how a document performed, and use that information for future improvements. 

A few predictions on the future of martech?

As more companies transition to a hybrid work model, the value of solutions within the business enablement category will continue emerge. Business enablement is a tech stack that empowers people to work more efficiently, ultimately creating a more thoughtful approach to the technology used in the workplace; by emphasizing connectivity, businesses will find themselves needing less software that does more. This will benefit not only the marketing department, but the entire organization. Pre-pandemic, companies were already leveraging countless workplace tools; the more software adopted, the more disconnected workflows became. This has been especially pertinent as we’ve adapted over the last year to being fully virtual, and it will continue to be important as we transition into a hybrid work structure. The business enablement tech stack will support the future of hybrid work by encouraging more connected technology that will allow for better productivity and collaboration across teams.

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A few takeaways for marketing leaders and CMOs/CEOs in 2021: top factors they should keep in mind as they plan for the rest of the year, innovate and expand their teams?

Throughout 2020 and early 2021 companies invested in a lot of technology to function better in a remote setting. What this exposed, however, is that tech stacks are lacking connectivity and simply haven’t been built efficiently. Employees are spending too much time navigating between different tech tools and thus become overwhelmed by the amount of technology they need to use to get the job done effectively. Recent research we did at Templafy found that over a third of employees use 3-5 different applications a hour to do their job and over a quarter feel exhausted from going back and forth between applications all day. 

Simply put, CEOs and CMOs need to prioritize re-working their tech stacks as they plan for the rest of the year. This starts with looking at all the tech solutions currently being used and finding a way to incorporate them into a tech stack that’s more connected in order to enable better workflows company-wide. And beyond just being better connected, the business enablement tech stack is built with the user in mind – it’s easy to use and intuitive, just like everyday consumer applications. Finally, it’s also crucial for the tech stack to be horizontal, used by all departments and employees company wide. Crucial content-elements and information should be able to be accessed by everyone, not just the marketing or sales department. Altogether, the business enablement tech stack promotes easier workflows, and a connected and cohesive workforce.

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