No matter the complexity of a deal, there is a library of checks that need to be done—and one that is often overlooked is social media. With marketing due diligence, you need to be prepared for every discipline that contributes to day-to-day operations to be evaluated.

While you might not be active on every social media channel—or give a hoot about posting in general—this is the one time you should care about your business’s public face. 

Why Care About Social Media in Due Diligence?

According to a study, more than “94% of all businesses with a marketing department use social media as part of their marketing” (strategy). Not to mention how this marketing channel is used to identify target companies for potential partnerships. Deloitte shares that “more than half of corporate executives use social media for target identification.”

If social media carries a lot of weight with regard to brand reputation—why is it so low down on the DD priority list? Be it a lack of resources or priority, you cannot ignore the impact it has on your brand image. Much like historical numbers can sway decisions, one problematic post can harm a transaction. A due diligence team can use social media to raise any concerns about inappropriate, unethical content that could jeopardize both reputations.

Additional ways social media contributes to due diligence:

1. Reputation in the market: share of voice or data on brand mentions is publicly available online. It’s become easier than ever to compare company performance and monitor how competitors position themselves in the same field. You can also use social media to analyze the personality of a company and its values. 
2. Customers and industry: by looking at the type of people who engage with your social content, you’re able to analyze your customer profile and see how it aligns (or doesn’t) with the rest of your marketing. To add, you can make better judgment calls on competitor activities when you’re competing against the same audience. 
3. Perception of the brand: commonly, people base their perceptions on what they see online. Fortunately, for marketers doing their due diligence, you can really tap into user reviews and comments to review unfiltered thoughts on a brand.
4. Financial feasibility: social media should be considered a growth driver. Next to a website that drives traffic and conversions, a healthy social presence and online media perception can prove business stability and enhance future prospects. 

How to Prepare Your Social Media Channels 

Before the reputation analysis begins, review your content so that you’re well-equipped to comment on any feedback. Here is a short checklist to vet your social efforts in advance:  

• Scrape posts across channels to ensure there is no social media material that could impact another organization, person, or community in a negative way.
• Review past content and remove grammatically incorrect, irrelevant posts.
• Acknowledge follower engagement and count, and how it affects your positioning.
• Remove any content that poorly reflects your brand or undermines your credibility.
• Be familiar with any negative reviews or commentary that your brand has, or had.
• Highlight content that is (or isn’t) aligned with your target audiences and vision.
• Identify any posts where you’ve ignored compliance regulations or violated rules.
• Monitor what your staff are saying about your brand or management online. Identify influential employees and how their content resonates with your values.

During the deal stages, you can guarantee the marketing due diligence team will ask you a handful of questions before going in and investigating. Prepare for similar questions: 

• Who manages social media, and how do you manage this day-to-day task?
• Who manages GDPR or data privacy, and who instills regulations for posting?
• Which employees have access to these accounts, and where are the login details?
• How many channels do you have? And are these channels used for paid ads?
• Do you work with an external agency to create content and monitor performance? 
• What social media tools do you use, and when do those contracts end?
• In your social team, what are the roles and responsibilities of each member?
• How do you govern your social presence? Provide processes, guidelines, etc. 
• What areas of social media are lacking, and what are your current challenges? 

As you can see, social media research and analysis is a beast of its own. All of these steps contribute to a smooth transaction and post-acquisition or merger experience. 

Post M&A Conclusions 

Integration is a big undertaking. It’s a lengthy process, too! From content marketing due diligence to technical SEO and more, a strict series of events needs to follow in tandem. 

After the sale, the transition kicks in. The onboarding period tends to take longer than expected, but you’ll be off to a speedy start when everything is organized and well-documented. 

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to marketing due diligence. Some companies have a foundation in place, while others need to start various activities from scratch. Regardless of your stage, workflows will need to be married, tech stacks defined, and strategies developed. When you have a designated team of specialists like saas.group at your side, you can rest assured that every area will get the attention it needs. We work to ensure a seamless integration where teams are aligned and working towards the same goals.  

Read about other due diligence planning, M&A best practices, case studies, and more on our blog. 

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The first couple of months of transitioning can be disruptive for those involved. But it’s during this time when it’s vital to establish a go-forward plan and a way to unify content operations. 

Foundations to Set

There’s always a lot of excitement looming—and unspoken expectations—but the quickest way to get everyone on the same page is to start with a systematic approach. Setting the following foundations will align content production and get everyone working towards the same goal/s.

Communicate Priorities Up Front

Once onboarding has ended, hold kick-off meetings. This way, everyone gets a chance to ask their questions and clear the air on any uncertainties from the marketing due diligence process.

During this time, the in-house team will explain the general procedures to establish a middle ground supporting collaboration and efficiency. Next, the new (acquired) team will share their existing content strategy and workflows. Together it will be fleshed out from an objective standpoint. However, if nothing was in place before, a strategy will be created from scratch. 

Evaluate Content and Tools

You will want to get an understanding of what has been happening; the type of content being created or distributed, the frequency, the channels used, the challenges, and more. You will need to view the existing boilerplate about the company and its messaging and take a deeper look into bread and butter clients, tools, etc. This information can be helpful before an audit is done, as it gives the in-house team an idea of how the brand sees itself versus what they’re putting out. 

The most important elements of content audit are to identify legacy money-makers (high-converting content) as well as high-traffic content that has the potential to be more. Next, you’ll look at gaps and opportunities for improvement, while analyzing the channels and marketing tactics used. 

When it comes to tools, think long-term. You need to have a clear idea of the content marketing metrics you’re measuring, the goals (or objectives) you’ve set, and the budget you’re working with. The tools you use will need to streamline processes and offer the right features to grow with you. 

Assign Resources Where Skills Lack

The beauty of an M&A integration is that you get more hands on deck. This can be taken literally—multiple resources to execute tasks—or from a skills perspective. In contrast, M&A works differently in every company, saas.group’s specialist marketing team acts as a consultancy. No matter your size or market positioning, we act as an extension of your team and fill the gaps. 

For team collaboration to be as effective as possible, we recommend doing a skills and capacity analysis with the new team. Evaluate strengths and weaknesses, and outsource where you lack. 

Another side to this is learning. When new people enter the mix, it’s a great time to engage with experts and learn from others. Make the most of these connections by facilitating training. 

Implement Data Governance

Managing large volumes of scattered data leads to inaccurate marketing decisions. And with more people touching on data, it can become a nightmare. By centralizing systems, you can prevent people from working in silos, maintain transparency, and monitor compliance. It’s important to enforce security on data access and establish a process that is both flexible and scalable. 

Update and Optimize Workflows

Once you’ve taken steps to communicate with relevant stakeholders, understand past processes, and strategize new ones, it’s time to update workflows. Define and map a production workflow, and discuss ways to automate elements. Identify past bottlenecks and redundancies in projects, and visually document a solution for all teams to be aligned. 

By the end of these discussions, you should be able to build a trackable content workflow. Depending on your needs, it should have a task-based or project-based approach, including the stages of content creation to objectives, roles and accountability, quality control, tools needed to execute a task, content types and distribution channels, etc. 

Wrapping Up

Integrating content initiatives is never plug ‘n play—it depends on the deal structure discussed beforehand. You will always need to be prepared for changes and bumps in the road, but having a foundation will guide you from the starting point. By using these five steps, you’ll be able to hit the ground running and set the tone for collaborative success.

The post How to Integrate Content Initiatives after an Acquisition appeared first on saas.group.

Finding a buyer can be daunting and tedious, whether you’re a seasoned seller or a novice. Sure, it might only be for two years from now (or sooner), but due diligence is a reality. And marketing performance is key when evaluating commercial propositions.

First, What is Marketing Due Diligence?

Marketing due diligence is a way to analyze the inherent value of a product or service. It is a standard process for any merger, acquisition, or investment partnership, and essentially, it is an evaluation that identifies gaps, opportunities, and risks associated with a business.

During this procedure, it’s natural that a seller will try to communicate ambitious numbers—apart from using other smart tactics—to enhance the value of the deal. But regardless of the conversations held, due diligence is non-negotiable. It’s a point of order to ensure buyers are making responsible, data-driven decisions for both parties’ futures.

In-house teams will always ask for account access to validate numbers. This request can be up to two years’ worth of information and will include a thorough content analysis.

What is the Role of Content in Marketing Due Diligence?

The purpose of analyzing content marketing is to measure long-term growth.

To refresh: content marketing refers to paid or organic strategies used to boost brand awareness and lead generation. It is content (written or visual) that is created and distributed via multiple channels and shared in various formats: long-form SEO blog articles, social media posts, videos or other multimedia assets, podcasts, and more.

With this type of marketing, it is important to note that there is no fast track to success.

It’s an ongoing investment.

Why Should You Care About Content Marketing Performance?

Content, in any format, speaks volumes about consistency and performance.

If we’re being honest, content quality is often a last resort. Many sellers inflate their frequency for the lead-up to a sale, thinking it will suffice. At face value, these short-term results might look good (as any immediate ROI technique would), but this does not portray the full story.

By visualizing results over a longer period of time, you can determine a brand’s true health.

Your content marketing is a direct reflection of your brand

Share of voice and visibility can influence a brand’s longevity and the value of a transaction.

Let’s look at it from a content perspective: if you’re sitting with outdated, poor-quality content, you’re not building authority. This, eventually, translates to little or near-zero conversions.

Another example is from an inflated standpoint: you’re getting a 1M traffic injection from irrelevant countries on the wrong keywords. It might look good on a report, but the reality is, those people are never going to buy either. So, think about the reputation your business reflects now.

Your content marketing can impact revenue (positively or negatively)

Organic has the potential to drive inbound sales without having to consider outbound or big paid budgets. When you show up on search engine results pages (SERPs), it’s clear that your content has been indexed, and search engines see you as a trustworthy, relevant source.

The due diligence evaluators will be able to pick up on your approach to sales through historical data, and they will see the effectiveness of your content on your bottom line. If, of course, you’re committing black hat SEO or paying for success, they can flag it as a risk to discuss.

Your content marketing is a long-term opportunity for growth

As mentioned above, buyers with strong marketing backgrounds will overlook impressive short-term results when making decisions. The proof is in the pudding, and there truly is no shortcut to achieving content marketing success. Show the evaluation team how you’ve adopted this channel, or how you foresee sustainable growth based on historical patterns.

What Are Content Marketing Evaluators Looking For?

When preparing, it’s important to have an idea of what an evaluator will look at. You don’t have to be a specialist presenting a 5-page strategy, but you do need to have a basic understanding of what’s going on. Here are some common questions that’ll be explored:

• Does an agency handle your marketing, or is it done in-house?
• Is it clear what market is being served—and do the results support that?
• What marketing channels are currently being used, and how frequently?
• Do you consider content marketing as part of your overall strategy?
• Do you use content marketing to drive brand awareness or lead generation?
• How important has proactive marketing been for your business thus far?
• What kind of content have you created in the past, and what is the outcome?
• Who do you rely on to create and distribute content for the business?
• Are you relying on search engine optimization (SEO) or paid advertising?
• How will an acquisition affect or improve the dynamic of current efforts?

5-Step Plan to Prepare For These Questions

1. Prepare supporting documentation in advance

If you’re working with an agency, ask them to share their reports and strategies with you in advance. This way, you can fully understand the commercial value your business brings. If you’re a small team that does everything in-house without professional processes to date, sit down and prepare information around common marketing questions, operations, resources, and more. Always put yourself in the buyer’s shoes and think about what you would like to know. These answers can act as supporting documentation to show that you’re prepared and serious about the acquisition.

2. Track your performance in a reporting format

Every business should be tracking its performance in some way, and the same goes for content. When you have an inclination that you might want to sell, stay on track with your results by merging this information in a report. Some of the metrics that will add value for your evaluators are your year-over-year (YoY) and month-over-month (MoM) results. For example, traffic fluctuations, click-through rate (CTR), rankings, conversions, downloads, social media engagement, and more. Considering that you will need to be prepared to discuss and prove these numbers, there is no harm in tracking them in advance. When you can visualize it, you’ll be more confident in sharing the good, the bad, and the ugly up front.

3. Perform some form of a content audit

If this is not your strength, you’re not expected to pull out all the stops. However, a small inventory with the necessary information will go a long way as a supporting document. By creating an inventory of your assets (exporting website’s URLs, newsletters, social media updates, videos, etc., into a spreadsheet), will help you visualize everything you’ve done on your website for content marketing. Use this document to analyze the quality and relevance of your output compared to your competitors and initial goals, or use it to jot down any thoughts on top-performing assets or areas of improvement. This data can help evaluators see if you’re meeting your traffic, engagement, and lead goals according to previous KPIs.

4. Create a comprehensive content strategy

Again, it’s not a requirement to have a content strategy in place. If you do, you’re already a few steps ahead, and it will likely reduce the time spent on having to discover everything from scratch. Use the results gathered from your content audit to support your overall thinking and business direction. When you align the two, it will be easier for evaluators to understand what you had envisioned for your marketing efforts and where you’ve fallen short. Be sure to feature your content marketing channels, formats, budgets, and promotional plans used in the past.

5. Identify your resources and assess skill availability

Depending on your priorities, your resources will look different. As you prepare for due diligence, make sure you’ve clearly defined your teams and their responsibilities in your content marketing plan. If you cannot pinpoint the right people for the job, make it known that you’re lacking. Either it can be a skills development process or the need for an entirely new team. Evaluators will always want to know these details to understand how much additional effort will be required from their side to meet your potential.

Final Takeaway

Each buyer has their own requirements. And by that, we don’t mean that a good product with poor content efforts won’t be considered. Not at all. These investigations are simply put in place to better understand a business’s dynamic and, ultimately, flag any concerns.

There is never a guarantee that a deal will materialize—but preparation helps. We strongly encourage every seller (or future seller) to know what’s going on with their content marketing and understand the goal and purpose of their SEO and paid content strategies.

Tune in to saas.unbound episode with Jane Portman @Userlist to learn how they leveraged content marketing for their long-term growth goals.

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