{"id":63147,"date":"2016-11-09T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2016-11-09T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rockcontent.com\/blog\/how-to-align-content-marketing-and-demand-generation-teams\/"},"modified":"2025-09-10T23:18:37","modified_gmt":"2025-09-11T02:18:37","slug":"how-to-align-content-marketing-and-demand-generation-teams","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pingback.com\/en\/resources\/how-to-align-content-marketing-and-demand-generation-teams\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Align Content Marketing and Demand Generation Teams"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">I&#8217;ve previously shared insights on how important it is for content marketers, like myself, to work closely with product marketing [<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/pingback.com\/en\/resources\/2016\/11\/02\/why-a-content-marketer-needs-to-buddy-up-with-their-companys-product-marketer\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">read that blog post here<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">]. Now, I&#8217;d like to discuss the relationship between content marketing and demand generation.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The two teams generally have the same goals \u2013 make things that build awareness, demand, and pipeline. In fact, 85% of B2B content marketers say that their most important goal is lead generation. But, more often than not, content marketing and demand generation teams operate in silos. The culprits are generally the same across marketing teams:<\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">One-off, ad-hoc projects with custom KPIs that are limited to either just content marketing or just demand generation\u00a0<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Lack of visibility into content ideation, planning, and scheduling<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Emphasis on the creation of top-funnel, awareness-building content and a huge gap in lower-funnel content that is critically valuable to demand generation <\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Misalignment on which themes and topics to focus on<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">So, what can content marketers and demand generation do to build and sustain alignment? It&#8217;s not as simple as creating a running list of things that demand generation needs from content marketing \u2013 and vice versa.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The two teams need a plan, a marketing roadmap, that unifies content creation with demand generation programs. A plan will help the two teams work together, identify what works and what falls flat, scale, and iterate. Below, are tips to help you establish a shared plan between the two teams.<\/span><\/p>\n<h2><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Establish <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">One<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Mission; Plan Initiatives Under It<\/span><\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is an obvious one \u2013 but in order to break down the silos that separate content marketing and demand generation, both teams need to work towards the same mission together. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is the step\u00a0that comes before metric-oriented goals like &#8220;generate x amount of revenue in Q1.&#8221; A mission describes what the teams will accomplish together. Growing sales pipeline and optimizing customer\/purchasing experiences are examples of overarching missions. These will help define what each team and their respective roles\/functions are responsible for, and where they need to rely on each other to ensure that the mission comes to fruition.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Once a shared mission is established, key initiatives can be planned. Working towards one mission helps bridge the gap between what each team will be tasked with \u2013 creating content, running programs, etc. Each initiative should be built into your overarching roadmap and be visible to all stakeholders.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Honestly, sometimes people gloss right over the mission and rush into tactical stuff. It&#8217;s tempting when deadlines are looming, but skipping this step will trip you up later. Teams start second-guessing priorities or working at cross-purposes, and it all adds up to work that feels&#8230; disconnected, for lack of a better word. Slowing down just enough to align on the mission saves way more headaches (and Slack threads) down the line.<\/span><\/p>\n<h2><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Create Content with Purpose<\/span><\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Content teams want to create content for every stage of the customer journey, and demand generation wants high-quality content to fill every stage, too. The disconnect between the two happens when content marketing doesn&#8217;t have a clear understanding of the funnel that demand gen is working with, or when demand gen can&#8217;t decipher where a piece of content fits within a lead nurture track.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">You&#8217;ll notice the friction when teams deliver assets that don&#8217;t quite fit\u2014say, detailed case studies landing in a top-of-funnel campaign, or fun explainer videos getting lost at the end of a sales sequence. Everybody\u2019s putting in the work, but the impact isn\u2019t there. Sitting down to define the intended purpose of each asset, before creation even starts, can really cut down on this kind of misfire. By looping in both perspectives early, you turn guesswork into an actual strategy that helps fill the funnel where it\u2019s leakiest.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">So, an easy way to combat this is to assign purpose and intent to each piece of content. Together, the two teams can identify which topics and formats work for top, mid and lower funnel content. They can also identify gaps and where content is needed the most.<\/span><\/p>\n<h2><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Build Cross-functional Workflows<\/span><\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Building and defining workflows that cross team lines, from content marketing to demand generation, will keep projects and people on track. It&#8217;s likely that content marketing and demand generation have both waited on each other for things like landing pages and copy. A set of workflows that map out step-by-step ownership and deadlines \u2013 from creating a piece of content to building a campaign around it \u2013 and deadlines will help avoid bottlenecks.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">With so many moving parts, project management is key to keeping content marketing and demand generation on the same page. It&#8217;s extremely helpful to designate one person as a project manager to create standard workflow templates for the programs that both content marketing and demand generation will be involved in \u2013 like the launch, promotion, and post-nurture of a big rock whitepaper.<\/span><\/p>\n<h2>Takeaways<\/h2>\n<p>Alignment between content marketing and demand generation really comes down to communication, visibility, and accountability to each other. Working towards the same mission, creating content that clearly fits into a customer&#8217;s journey and project management all contribute to breaking teams out of silos that can prevent success for marketing as a whole within an organization.<\/p>\n<p> }}<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The two teams need a plan, a marketing roadmap, that unifies content creation with demand generation programs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":54274,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,122],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-63147","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-marketing","category-news"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v25.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>How to Align Content Marketing and Demand Generation Teams - Pingback<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Content marketing and demand generation need a plan, a marketing roadmap, that unifies content creation with demand generation programs.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/pingback.com\/en\/resources\/how-to-align-content-marketing-and-demand-generation-teams\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"pt_BR\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"How to Align Content Marketing and Demand Generation Teams - 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