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| How Great Content Marketing is Crucial for Your Sales Team |
How would you like to find a salesperson who never needs to sleep, who can close deals 24/7, and doesn’t ask for commission or salary? Well, you already have this salesperson on your staff. It’s called Content Marketing. Integrating content marketing with sales isn’t really optional anymore, even if it means getting sales and marketing to join forces. Here’s how to start down the road to around the clock closing.
Why Content Marketing is Crucial for Sales and Marketing Alignment The vast majority (75 percent) of B2B purchasers are relying more heavily on content to make their buying decisions. That means content plays a major role in qualifying leads as well as converting them. In fact, a majority of those looking for B2B solutions now investigate their options through seven different types of content:
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It’s silly to think that buyers only look at content at one or two points early in the buying cycle. Obviously content plays a role at every stage from awareness down through evangelism, which means that sales and marketing both need quality content to do their jobs. But having content created independently by each department is a recipe for disaster, because you’ll end up with two discordant voices and inconsistent messaging.
As Jim Collins so astutely points out, “The signature of mediocrity is chronic inconsistency.” If your sales and marketing departments aren’t working together to create content, you’re setting yourself for nothing better than mediocrity. Both teams must work in tandem. I’ll pause now for the shocked gasps. Ok, let’s move on to how we achieve this fanciful goal.
Make the Right Content For the Right People
Establish one or two key assets for each of the major points in the customer life cycle, and assign a few people to create them. These must be interdepartmental teams. Whenever possible both teams will commit to using these high quality, jointly-created assets first. You can get more specific based on your specific buyers’ journey, but these are always great points of departure:
Exploration
Focus on evergreen, thought-leadership pieces that will work well outside your brand’s own website (because general exploration is not necessarily going to happen in branded space).
Decision Making
Prospects are now preparing to compare their specific options, so you’ll be adding more product-driven topics to your existing stable of content. Each piece should, like the lead itself, progress from a general level of interest to one that is more focused on the specific solution you can offer.
Purchase
The content has now, hopefully, guided the consumer through general exploration and decision making into readiness for a purchase. Of course, the buyer’s journey in the twenty-first century is anything but linear, and all of our content needs to be structured so that it can speak to a consumer at any level. Generally, however, content centered around a purchase is going to very focused on the benefits of the purchase. It will reinforce the great decision the customer just made, and further cement their relationship with the brand.
Advocacy
If you were successful in establishing a strong connection with a customer, and your product was as exceptional as all of your content promised it would be, you can expect at least a few advocates to emerge. These folks want to share their great experiences with their social circles, and you should create content that enables them to do so.
Conclusion
There are several big wins here that make it completely worthwhile to tackle the long-standing feud between sales and marketing. After this integration over content marketing, both groups will be offering a consistent message using common language and jointly-created content. That means success and failure are contingent on content for which both departments are responsible, so there’s less blame, and hopefully less fighting.
(A longer version of this article was originally published on MarketerGizmo.com)
Related Topics:
- What is Agile Marketing?
- Fully embrace agile-not just scrum
- Move your company forward with an agile approach
About:
Years ago I was leading content marketing for a SaaS company, and my team was drowning. We couldn't keep up with the agile software development team, and I was tired of running from fire to fire. I convinced my boss to let me transform our marketing team into a proper agile marketing team, and I've been hooked ever since.
After I wrote and spoke about that first transformation, I quickly began fielding requests from my fellow marketers to help them do the same. Eventually I left brand-side employment to co-found AgileSherpas and work full-time to transform the way marketers everywhere get work done.
Since AgileSherpas was founded in 2017 we've helped over 2,500 marketers at dozens of organizations to move from high stress to high performance. We offer certifications in Agile Marketing Fundamentals (ICP-MKG) and Agile Marketing Leadership (ICP-LEA), as well as organizational design consulting for marketing leaders who want to recreate their teams from the ground up.
Our experienced coaches guide new agile marketing teams through the early days of their journey and train internal agile leaders to help the changes stick. More details on how we work with marketing organizations is available here: https://www.agilesherpas.com/training-services/ Most recently I've published my second book, Mastering Marketing Agility (masteringmarketingagility.com), which distills the learnings from 5 years of working with agile marketing teams into an entirely new framework called Rimarketing. The book shows you exactly how we implement this system with the teams we work with at AgileSherpas, offering a detailed roadmap for marketers looking for a better way to get things done.
At this point I'm pretty much a professional agile marketing nerd, so if you're looking for someone to talk about marketing agility in any capacity, please don't hesitate to reach out. I'm an international keynote speaker and frequent webinar and podcast guest.
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