Watch this quick video to hear Stephen talk about his vision for enterprise content management, ideas around how to measure content marketing initiatives and also how his team and other groups at Microsoft leverage Content Cloud to programmatically deliver amazing customer experiences.

The post Thismoment in Content Marketing with Microsoft’s Stephen Bury appeared first on Thismoment Content Marketing Blog.

“The problem with marketing is that they don’t know what content we really need in the field, and 90% of the time I don’t have what I need for a specific customer.”

Anonymous Salesperson

“The problem with sales is that we produce a crazy amount of content for them, but we have no idea what they find useful, what they’re sharing with customers or what’s really moving the needle on deals.”

Anonymous Marketer

There’s a growing chasm between marketing and sales

Marketing creates content for the field. Sales teams need content but can’t find it, and don’t have what they think they need for their deals. The feedback never makes it to marketing. Marketing keeps creating more content that is off the mark. Sales keeps getting more and more frustrated. Deals stall. Rinse, recycle, repeat.

It’s a constant cycle that I’ve seen first-hand. And, no amount of phone calls, Salesforce notes or feedback process can fix this problem. It needs technology to make the cycle more transparent, the content more accessible and relevant, the feedback loop more evident and the salesperson more effective at moving deals along with the help of situationally-perfect content.

That’s why we created Spark

Spark is a mobile tool that gives sales teams the content they need to help them close deals – when they need it, where they need it. It’s the newest addition to our portfolio of solutions built on top of our widely-adopted Content Cloud content marketing platform. And, it’s game-changing for our customers who want to arm their sales teams with content on demand to help them close deals.

Spark is the next step in an evolution of sales enablement solutions

We purpose-built Spark to solve big content problems in sales and marketing organizations. We were of course aware of all the sales enablement solutions that came before it. It’s a hot category because of the high demand for better systems to distribute content to the field, and it’s a very expensive problem if that content isn’t accessible.

What we’ve found, however, is that almost all the solutions available today are just solving a fraction of the foundational problems that organizations face when it comes to enabling their sales forces with content. They help solve the accessibility problem by making content available on mobile devices, but they don’t begin to solve the bigger problem – ensuring that salespeople have the right story for any customer situation. Not just the right piece of collateral, but the most effective story to move the deal along.

Spark is a comprehensive solution for companies who want to tackle all the problems that make sales enablement such a tricky and expensive challenge. It is what we believe to be the next generation of solutions built to empower large sales organizations. Here’s a brief history of sales enablement solutions, which will help you to understand why we think it’s such a big deal.

• 1959: The Xerox machine creates efficient content distribution

This amazing invention solved the problem of distribution of content. For the first time ever, marketing teams could create sales material and give to their sales people en masse. The sales binder was a huge step forward in the industry!

• 1984: The Laptop computer brings portability to content

When the laptop first arrived to market (well, actually years later once the graphics became more sophisticated), salespeople finally had a digital way to present material. Combined with the projector (which arrived much later in the 90’s), they could more easily support new content when they received quarterly content updates on floppy disks from marketing.

• Early 1990’s: The VPN creates content accessibility

Giving employees in the field access to firewall-protected content stored on the company’s file servers was a big deal (and still is for many companies who haven’t adopted newer cloud-based technology). Although clunky and not user friendly (ever tried to log into a VPN with a key fob?), this new tech made content more accessible in the field and began to create a stronger connection between marketing updates and sales utilization.

• Mid 2000’s: Cloud storage systems make content convenient to store and access

Box, Dropbox, Google Drive – all amazingly powerful cloud-based systems for companies to store their content. And, for many companies, they represented freedom from the clunky VPN, and more convenient access to files through user permissioning. Cloud storage systems provide high value to organizations as they shed their expensive server infrastructure, but have been bastardized to become sales enablement systems for many. But, really, they aren’t solving the sales enablement problem, and were never really meant to.

• Early 2010’s: “New” school sales enablement tools improve mobility of content

According to chiefmartec.com, in the past two years alone, around 20-30 new “sales enablement” startups have emerged. In looking at them, almost all are focused on solving two primary pain points: 1. Make content easier to find in the field; and 2. Allow salespeople to use their tablets and mobile phones to access content. These solutions have advanced the field considerably, and are a huge step forward from cloud storage systems. But, they all fall short of solving the really expensive, deeper and more foundational problems that Spark now solves.

• March 26, 2015: Spark makes content more powerful, more accessible, more measurable and more effective

Spark has an incredibly rich feature set that connects marketing and sales teams in a way that other solutions do not. The reason for this is our roots in content marketing and our focus on building technology that fundamentally helps our customers to engage with their customers in unique and meaningful ways. Spark builds on that history, and provides amazing benefits to organizations looking to see meaningful performance improvements across their sales and marketing organizations:

• Better content ROI transparency: CRM integration for personalized experience and content-to-close analytics
• More well-prepared salespeople: Internal-only content for training and meeting prep
• More effective content for any sales situation: Marketing-curated content “playlists” for the most common sales situations
• Greater flexibility for solution sellers: Sales-curated, marketing-controlled playlists for unique sales situations
• More shared learnings in the field: Trending playlists for transparency and collaboration amongst reps
• Better informed salespeople: Curated news feed and UGC to keep the field current on industry current events
• More immediate value for prospects: Native email and texting for instant delivery of content to prospects

Learn more about Spark here. In the meantime, enjoy this 2-minute video that brings the new tool to life.

The post Meet Spark: A Content-First Approach to Sales Enablement appeared first on Thismoment Content Marketing Blog.

I said those very words in a meeting recently and half the marketers in the room laughed and rolled their eyes. Yeah, I like my acronyms. The other half got it; a UGC (user-generated content) hashtag campaign without ROI (return on investment) is indeed DOA (dead on arrival).

Is UGC just a trend? Are marketers piling on the UGC hashtag bandwagon because it has the “cool factor”? And if so, does that mean that at some point it will simply be replaced by the next shiny object?

Or, does the growing use of UGC imply there is increasing value for businesses? Certainly, it means there is growing perceived value. But, how does that translate into enterprise return on investment?

That’s a question that I believe marketing teams should be asking themselves more and more, as they consider how to best consider using UGC in their marketing efforts. At Thismoment, we see a lot of trends come and go. It kind of comes with the territory of being in a very hot part of the technology boom – content marketing. It’s buzz-worthy, to say the least. And it’s much more than a passing phase.

UGC, It’s More Than a Phase

When the world’s biggest brands adopt a marketing trend, it often moves from flash-in-the-pan to tried-and-true. For instance, over the past 3 years the use of hashtags in Super Bowl commercials has increased 38X. The marketers who make these ads are the best in the world, if they are doing it, we should watch. And learn.

UGC is a very powerful tool to incorporate authentic user-voice elements into your marketing and brand storytelling initiatives. What brand wouldn’t love photos of fans streaming in from Instagram, Twitter and Facebook? Or having them post entertaining videos from YouTube and Vine? Tweets? Posts? This type of brand advocacy is the stuff of which marketing dreams are made.

And, sometimes these efforts yield great value for brands looking to create fun, engaging and unique campaigns.

Like this one from Levi’s:

Or, this one from Intuit:

Or, this one from Dreamworks:

But, mostly, these are short-lived and ephemeral in nature. UGC hashtags are, after all, typically a “moment in time” captured as a photo or video or quick text. The ROI of these UGC efforts are mostly tied to the overall performance of the brand marketing campaign to which it was anchored.

• Increased number of views of campaign
• Increased reach of campaign within target audience
• (Loose correlation) between campaign air dates and product sales

Moving From Brand ROI TO Direct ROI

No doubt brands will continue to want to leverage UGC hashtags in their brand marketing campaigns. It helps to tell the story they want in a more fun, engaging and overall authentic manner. But, without proof that UGC is actually producing sustained value, I believe we will soon enter a phase where UGC ROI is questioned more. And rightly so.

As CMO, I ask the following questions about any of our investments:

• What’s the near-term benefit to the business, measured by early funnel indicators?
• What’s the longer-term value we’ll reap, measured by revenue?
• How does it make our overall organization stronger, through integrations?
• How does it make us more efficient at our jobs?

If I can’t answer these questions in a very real and material way, I think twice about making the investment. And, I’d expect the same of my cohorts at large brands who are considering leveraging UGC hashtag marketing.

A few companies indeed are considering the direct ROI of their UGC campaigns. They’re using UGC, which is traditionally considered to provide only ephemeral value, as a more “green field” and essential part of their marketing and merchandising strategy. Like Sephora:

Or, like ESPN is doing:

What started out as mostly experimental and loosely defined enterprise value, UGC is now proving to be much more than just a fad. But, like any other marketing channel, technology platform or tactic, if not applied strategically – with specific KPIs in mind – it can very well be a wasted effort. If treated as a strategic tool with more evergreen applications and enterprise benefits, UGC could very well be one of the most important arrows in your quiver.

The post Where is a UGC Hashtag Campaign w/out ROI? DOA… appeared first on Thismoment Content Marketing Blog.

TMP Worldwide Advertising & Communications, LLC, a global, tech-enabled talent acquisition company, today announced that it has entered a strategic partnership with Thismoment to offer employers a best-in-class user generated content and experience management solution to enhance their employer brands and ensure they attract right-fit talent.

As competition for qualified workers continues to increase, organizations must leverage the tools and best practices that enable them to stand out from the crowd and to be seen as an employer of choice. Through this partnership, TMP’s and Thismoment’s extensive list of joint customers will benefit from TMP’s talent acquisition expertise and TalentBrew platform, combined with the power of Thismoment’s Content Cloud experience management software to help companies showcase their unique employee experiences and improve the talent acquisition process.

The partnership will provide clients of TMP with a turnkey employee generated content (EGC) and experience tool that can be used by employees across devices to create content that conveys the organization’s employer brand authentically. The solution enables brands to improve employee engagement and permits their current workforce to participate directly in talent acquisition efforts while elevating the brand as a true innovator in the recruitment marketing space.

“What’s exciting about EGC is that it involves our employees and increases engagement,” said Chris Hong, vice president, Talent Acquisition for ESPN. “EGC allows us to tell ESPN’s true employment brand more personally and effectively through the use of employee generated photos and videos. We can showcase to an external audience, where in my early career experience, EGC was on a company intranet only and not accessible to the outside. To me, EGC is so in line with the current times, where employer transparency is the new and expected norm. I mean, who better to exemplify our employer brand than our employees themselves. Talk about being authentic!”

“We are excited to partner with TMP, the market leader in employer brand and talent acquisition, to bring the power of user generated content to the talent acquisition vertical,” said Vince Broady, founder and CEO of Thismoment. “Employee generated content leverages the knowledge, creativity and connections of the brand’s entire workforce to promote their culture and drive job seeker engagement.”

“TMP’s TalentBrew software platform pushes jobs and content directly to candidates, giving them a true understanding of a company’s culture. Likewise, a company’s current employees are often the best sources for conveying the work culture and employer brand of an organization,” said Michelle Abbey, president and CEO of TMP Worldwide. “Through our partnership with Thismoment, we can help our clients project the voice of their employees to enhance the recruitment process. We look forward to working closely with Thismoment to develop innovative solutions and to innovate and improve the way brands engage their employees and recruit the best talent.”

About TMP Worldwide
TMP Worldwide is a global, tech-enabled talent acquisition company that leverages software, advertising and creativity to develop and deploy our clients’ employer brands across digital, social and mobile platforms to connect candidates with employers.
This strategic mix of talent and technology allows us to serve a global client base that spans virtually all sectors of private, public, and government employers, and positions us as the organization to define the standard of measurable and cost-effective solutions to the human capital management community.

The post TMP Worldwide and Thismoment Announce Strategic Partnership to Enhance Talent Acquisition Processes appeared first on Thismoment Content Marketing Blog.