Sometimes it can be nice to romanticize the marketing process. We can imagine marketers, wired on caffeine at ten at night coming up with some crazy idea, some gut feeling and dialing up the prospect on a whim and getting that magical conversion as if it simply fell from the sky. Of course, reality is far less exciting, which is why every marketing department, no matter large or small, needs some sort of marketing proofing process.
This process sees a piece of content or information from creation to delivery and when optimized, it can make the sales process more transparent, efficient and effective. It isn't glamorous, but it's necessary. What the proofing process itself requires:
Back-End Prospect Information
First off, the process must coordinate the foundational components of your inbound marketing strategy: back-end prospect data and prospect-facing content. Organizations must determine 1) Who owns this content? 2) Who creates the content? 3) Who can access/edit the content? and 4) Who delivers the content?
Let's look at the first piece of the equation: back-end prospect data. This information is not customer-facing, but rather vital in-house data that will influence the kind of content the prospect will see. Examples include:
- Prospect dossiers. These should be consistent across the department and include things like demographics, activity logs and obstacles to conversion. Naturally these things will be tracked in your CRM system.
- Marketing plans. You'll write up specific deliverables based on where the prospect is in the sales cycle. For example, if the prospect is at the "top" of the customer funnel -- the "awareness" phase -- content like white papers, ebooks, and how-to videos are applicable. If they're towards the end of the funnel, you'll assign deliverables like free trials, live demos and consultations. This schedule should be consistent and trackable.
Ownership and Editing of Prospect-Facing Content
Now that you have a process-oriented approach towards unique prospect needs, you need to coordinate these efforts with the deliverables themselves: the customer-facing content you create, content like the aforementioned white papers, ebooks, etc. This component should define who creates, coordinates, and edits the following:
- Editorial calendar creation.
- Blog, white paper, eBook writing.
- Content approval process (e.g. marketer agrees to send a prospect a specific eBlast).
- eBlastcreation and sending.
- Comment solicitation (e.g. if a marketer finds the content unconvincing, how does this process play out).
The key element of this step, once again, is the editing of the content itself before it goes to be proofed. The editor will suggest tweaks, thematic concepts, visual ideas, tighten up the data, etc. They will not do the actual proofreading; that's the final step.
Who Proofs the Content?
The best advice here is also the simplest: have an experienced in-house proofreader to check all content before it goes out. Proofreaders will check the content for grammatical and formatting errors, misspellings and proper punctuation. Also make sure to have an in-house style guide that the editor can work from.
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