Your brand’s content strategy should be intrinsically linked and funnelled into your sales pipeline. That way, you’re using content pieces to make money, increasing their overall value.
Whether it be finding customers, qualifying leads or completing subsequent sales, the many steps of the sales cycle can be minimised by a single piece of on-site content – if it’s done correctly.
1) Use your content to attract customers
Customers want to see you as an authority. They want to buy from someone in-the-know. By being more than just an active participant, a conversation starter, of industry-related discussions, you’re demonstrating your knowledge, your expertise and your authority.
You can also target your online content to those people searching from more information, using SEO focused keywords and phraseology to showcase that you are the answer to what they are looking for.
This way, your content can act as a sales net for a bunch of potential customers.
2) Address sales difficulties
Once you’ve caught someone’s attention, you only have it for a very short period of time. Selling to that target audience can be hard.
In the digital age customers are now savvier than ever before and they are sceptical of traditional sales processes.
Your content can tackle these issues with readily-available articles that act as your introductory approach to a sales cycle.
This content should answer pressing industry questions and inform your audiences. Matt Heinz of Heinz Marketing highlighted how customers are now “self-educated”and are comfortable doing research on their own.
By being ahead with your content strategy, you’re not leaving it up to your competition to be the authoritative voice for customers.
3) Utilise content as a sales tool
You should also ensure that your content is usable for the sales team at other stages of the sales cycle.
Content can qualify leads and present offers to the customer by showing knowledgeability on important industry topics that link back to your product or service. This content can link to sales landing pages and therefore offer a concrete pathway to convert.
Make that content more easily available to your sales reps by using a sales enablement platform like Data Dwell. It lets you position relevant content directly into the sales cycle and highlight new & engaging pieces of content that can help your reps get that sale.
4) Embrace social media
In addition to attracting, persuading and encouraging conversions, good content can also be posted periodically across your social media profiles in order to further promote your product or services.
Want accounting advice? Great – here’s a popular “how-to” piece of content from a local accounting agency that links exclusively to their contact page.
When done effectively, content marketing can become an extremely useful vehicle to drive sales forward.
