How aligned are sales and content marketing teams

Chart of the day: Sales and Content Marketing teams are most aligned on sharing customer questions, but least aligned on personas

Shockingly, the research found that content marketers and sales professionals are least aligned on buyer personas, which would seem particularly important for both parties, as something they should be aligned on.

The study conducted by Content Marketing Institute and LinkedIn Research also found that a stronger culture of alignment would be the best way to increase sales and content marketing alignment.

As you can see, buyer persona sharing is not very aligned compared with other activities the survey asked about. Target accounts, how to use content and when to use content, along with typical discussions around customer questions, are by far the most aligned activities. Content marketing strategy appears to be shared with the sales team, it's unclear how much integration between sales and marketing teams there is when it comes to content strategy and content creative. Judging content effectiveness seems it's pretty much left to the content marketing team for the most part, whilst there is little alignment when it comes to personas.

We have done a lot of research at Smart Insights on our own personas and we've recently involved the sales team to feed back to the marketing team on the personas which came out of the research, it's really important everyone is aligned and agreed, plus the marketing team relies on conversations with prospects to help confirm the personas we think exist as our core audiences.

The research also found content marketing teams which are more aligned with sales team have more certainly about their future content marketing budgets, which sales teams proving the value of content.

• Source: Content Marketing Institute/ LinkedIn Research
• Sample: B2B Content marketers
• Recommended resource: Sales and Marketing Integration Guide