This article shares a Q&A with content and growth expert Ariana Keil during our May 2026 Content Marketing Friday Forum featuring the latest tips, tricks, frameworks, and more to improve your content strategy for better (and provable) results.
These questions are from you, our MarketingProfs community, who attended Ariana's session and asked what was on your mind.
Check out your questions, answered!
How do you see sales collateral content hosted in the CMS versus external marketing content working together?
I would be neglect if I did not preach the good word to digital asset management, but it is the best and simplest place to have a portal for all your sales content because it's going to directly mirror marketing content.
If you make any updates on marketing content—you update a one pager, you update an eBook, you update some graphics—that mirrors to the content your sales team is going to access. You don't have to track down where assets live in multiple places and make that change eight or nine times.
That being said, it can also live in a CMS or an LMS. If you have a dedicated career education and learning system, I know a lot of folks are storing their sales collateral in those libraries as well.
And that's where if you have a DAM and a marketing automation system already playing together, having a DAM that has an open API is the most essential step because that way you don't have to wait to make sure, "Okay, did my CMS build a connector out of the box? Did the DAM build a connector integration out of the box?" You can use that API, especially now with Claude coworker agentic tools to directly make sure that that's connected.
When you make those updates to your own content, with the API using either a dedicated system like Zapier or Claude agents, it's then mirroring that update to where it lives in the CMS or where it lives in the learning portal.
This is definitely an area where yes, you do still have to make sure you're making those changes on your end, but AI can help make sure you're not then having to double check 20 places afterwards.
How would you recommend getting buy-in for this infrastructure when it hasn't previously been seen as a priority or worth investment?
It depends on what you're talking about. I mentioned a few tools: your tools of creation, your tools of project management, and your tools of storage and distribution.
There are amazing statistics around the ROI of digital asset management; of project management; of brand consistency. We have some tools on our Canto website—we actually have an ROI calculator.
People aren't going to care, management's not going to care if you're saying, "Hey, my team feels like they're nothing but order takers. We're constantly stressed out with, get me this, send me that. I need this now. Is this approved? I need a new format of size."
What they do care about is when they see exactly how much that can be costing them in terms of wasted time, lack of productivity, and burnout in terms of real hours and dollars and also in terms of deals lost and liability.
I think it can be really hammered into—using some great statistics and research to upper management—that brand identity and consistency and loss of brand trust is a revenue issue. It is not just a nice to have; it's a must have.
If management is wondering:
- Why did the bottom suddenly fall out on our SEO strategy?
- Why am I having to spend twice as much?
- Why our CPL is going through the roof because I'm having to devote all this money towards paid because organic search, which used to be so reliable, basically disappeared
You have to hammer into them that because we are playing in a new era, we have to design for the LLM, and brand consistency is very big part of that.
We need to invest in the systems that will allow that to happen.
Ariana’s Four Takeaways for Winning the Deals You Can’t See
- Audit your last 10 pieces of content. A blog post, eBook, sales one-sheeter, etc. Remove your logo. And if a competitor could have published it, your distinctiveness problem is already costing you that consideration moment (with prospects).
- Run the skeptic test. Google yourself and your top competitor. Read results from the perspective of someone who's looking for reasons to say no to you, and start that as a place to address fixes.
- Ask your top three sales reps what content they're actually using. Not what you gave them. Give them a safe space, and find out what they're actually using. What do they roll into initial meetings with? What are they sharing as email attachments or links? The gap between what you gave them and what they're actually using is your champion problem in plain sight.
- Find one asset that's traveled furthest from its source. Trace where it lives now and all the places it might have lived—how it got from A to B and why it still lives in all those different places. That gap is your infrastructure starting point. Because the brands winning deals they can't see aren't lucky. They've built a consistent content presence that's going to survive contact with the skeptic—a champion-ready content system, and the infrastructure to make it scale.
Editor's note: This article was edited for flow and clarity from a Q&A segment with content and growth expert Ariana Keil during our May 2026 Content Marketing Friday Forum featuring the latest tips, tricks, frameworks, and more to improve your content strategy for better (and provable) results. Our Friday Forums are monthly, free mini- conferences featuring multiple sessions that dig into the latest on a specific topic. Always free, always on a Friday, and always a community-favorite event. Check out what's coming up!
About Ariana Keil: Ariana is the senior growth marketing manager at Canto, helping teams organize, find, share, and analyze their digital content. With over 10 years of B2B sales and marketing experience, she brings a storyteller's viewpoint to product-led solutions.
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