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Marketing is used to inform, educate, convert and maintain customer satisfaction. However, when you boil it down, the purpose of digital and content marketing is to make sales easier. It sounds like a simple idea, but it can be infinitely complex. Sales and marketing go hand-in-hand, where one is not successful without the other.
You can market a great product, but if your sales staff isn’t effectively serving the needs of potential customers, you won’t close deals. If your sales team is laser-focused on delivering results, but lacks the content resources to help tell your company’s story, it will be increasingly difficult to win business.
When it comes to content, it’s everywhere and we are exposed to content around the clock. As Bill Gates famously pointed out, “content is king.” We consume content to entertain, pass the time, educate and inform us to make better decisions. As such, successful companies rely on their content to do the same — and then some. Creating high-quality B2B content sets you apart from the competition and allows leads to resonate with your brand and familiarize themselves with your product much easier.
Let’s say you created a company blog and began writing or hired a content creator to write a few blog posts. Once the editing process is complete and the content is ready to be published, the final chapter might seem like pressing publish live to the web. In reality, this is just the beginning.
Creating content is just one aspect of content marketing. It’s the foundation, since without the written and visual content, you have nothing, but it’s the circulation of that content that is most important. Circulating your content means finding opportunities to share the content beyond your live website.
Content circulation could be through:
Let’s focus on the last item in the circulation list: sales outreach. Although it’s last on the list, one could argue it ranks first in importance to generate growth and revenue. Think about a day in the life of a sales or business development representative (SDR and BDR). Their day is consumed with new prospect outreach and follow-ups with already engaged prospects to move them down the funnel towards a booked demo or meeting with an account executive, who works to push a deal across the finish line.
By most industry accounts, these necessary prospecting efforts typically have a 3-5% win rate, meaning it takes 100 contacts to get just three, four or five people interested in moving forward. It’s a numbers game that requires consistency, conversation and persistence. Since an SDR or BDR has to email complete strangers on a professional level, they need solutions
Enter sales collateral content.
The beauty of sales collateral content is that it can also double as inbound marketing tactics. In another blog post, we described the differences and compared inbound and outbound marketing. When you marry the two marketing tactics, the application of one piece of content can be circulated in a manner that lends itself to demand generation.
Allow us to give you an example.
Say you created a blog post highlighting 5 best practices for your ideal customer to execute. That blog post, if written and more importantly, optimized for search correctly (SEO), has the potential to rank near or at the top of Google Search results, thus driving traffic to your site that could be interested in your product or service.
Now, that same blog post can be used by an SDR or BDR in an outreach email to a prospective customer. An example prospecting email template might look like this:
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Notice how Eric related to the prospect on a human level, shared a piece of content that could be of value and simply gauged interest, rather than immediately trying to close the deal. This is how effective sales and marketing work in unison to generate demand and lead to paying customers. Getting the most out of your content requires expertise and effort, but the fruits of your labor will pay off.
Your marketing must first delight, then you can rely on sales to ignite.
If the content covered in this blog delighted you, feel free to reach out to us. We’d love to discuss your goals and how we might be able to help you surpass them.
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