As a marketing manager, one of your main roles will be to generate leads for the sales team to convert. What if I told you that one tool will help your sales team close lead after lead. It’s simple, it’s just content.
In late 2015 Forbes discovered that the world’s most prosperous organisations depend on well-crafted and strategic content to push their sales. “Content facilitates effective sales conversations. Top-performing sales organisations know the key role it plays in sales productivity,” the report states. “Creating the right content and ensuring that sales reps can find it when they need it is a significant challenge for some companies. Getting that activity right is the secret to success.”
So what kind of content is your sales team wanting in order to close those leads?
If you are a regular reader of JDR Group content, then it will come as no surprise to you that buyer persona focused content has made this list. If you are new to JDR content then, Amanda Maksymiw of Lattice explains why we at the JDR Group are so keen on buyer personas in all of content.
“In order to fully convey the value of your company’s offerings, you have to fully understand your personas – specifically your buyers and users,” she says. “Your sales team should understand your buyers’ top pains, challenges, motivations and responsibilities. Persona related content can come in many formats, from presentations to one-pagers.”
If you want to know more about buyer personas, then please click the following link to read more from JDR Group’s Leanne Mordue on the fundamentals of buyer personas: Why Defining Your Buyer Persona is Fundamental to Your Inbound Marketing Campaign
It’s surprising to see how many businesses still forget this main point on their own website. It’s obvious to include a top quality product page on your website that includes top quality content. It’s also incredibly common for a business to let a page stagnate with outdated product information that a buyer has seen many times before.
HubSpot’s Pamela Vaughan says that up-to-date product pages are essential to a top achieving sales team. “One asset that product marketers typically manage is a website's product pages,” she says. “These pages should highlight your various product and service offerings and provide the information that prospects are looking for to conduct product research and understand what you sell. Depending on what that is, these pages may be organised in a number of ways.”
I’m sure you have heard by now that blogging is crucial to your businesses digital footprint and online success.
Attracting customers, thought-leadership and SEO are just some of the advantages of business blogging. But Pamela Vaughan from Hubspot says blogs can also play a crucial role in the broadcast of new products and updates, and can even be a stand-alone stage that both customers and sales teams can access.
“You could also use this blog to announce company news, making it a combined company product and news blog. Use this blog to communicate significant product, service, and feature updates -- as well as noteworthy company news -- and house it within the product section of your website,” she says.
Today’s buyers want to read information that gives them satisfaction that they are making the correct buying decision. You can help facilitate this decision by supplying the buyer with detailed case studies which the sales team can use to persuade prospective customers.
“Case studies that highlight the success of your current customers are an extremely powerful product marketing tool,” says Vaughan. “In fact, they're one of the items on our list that could be classified as both product marketing and sales enablement content. They add a lot of credibility to your product marketing and prove the true value of your products/services.”
“In your case study content, be sure to demonstrate the customer's challenge, highlight how your solution addressed that challenge, and feature the outcome/results (quantitative and/or qualitative).”
Use the top 4 Content Ideas above and your sales team will love the marketing department for giving them high quality, qualified and ready to buy leads.