How Marketing Content Can Help Drive Sales
How much revenue does your marketing content generate? In many companies, revenue generation is more of a salesperson’s duty. And while marketers and content are not directly involved in the sales funnel, they can help reduce friction between departments and, most importantly, equip their sales peers with the type of content that grabs attention and closes deals.
How can you transition from attention-grabbing content to sales-enabling content? By reducing friction points between marketing and sales. We have some solid tips to help you manage this.
Get Your Sales Team on Board with Content Strategy
Marketers and salespeople usually seem to have differences in perception in multiple areas. They perceive customers, focus, processes, and success culture differently.
For example, marketing people see customers as segments, whereas sales see them as individuals contributing to closing a deal. Marketers mainly focus on strategies to turn prospects into customers, while salespeople focus on what tactics they can use to turn the negotiation in their favor. To achieve their goals, marketers have processes, and salespeople tend to develop relationships with the most influential members of a decisional team. To validate their strategies, marketers turn to analysis and best practices, while for salespeople, only a closed deal will validate their efforts.
These differences in perception can create massive friction points between the two teams, but the good news is that these can be reduced through marketing content and an aligned sales and marketing strategy.
To get in the same boat as your sales team, you will have to focus on developing a content strategy that supports sales in key moments of prospect interactions.
Focus Points in Sales-Enabling Content Strategy
When creating content for sales enablement purposes, marketers should focus on the following three approaches:
- They should demonstrate that the company and team have the know-how of how to meet their client’s challenges and needs. Case studies and use cases fall into this category. Share your company’s success stories with other potential customers to raise brand awareness.
- The content from marketing should also be ready to answer any potential what-ifs (FAQ type of content). Potential clients will always have a whole suite of what-ifs, especially in B2B contexts, when purchases are more complex and have more implications than B2C sales.
- Get objective and positive customer feedback. In other words, learn how your customers are actually using your products. Some might be using them for other purposes than their intended ones, so you might be in for a larger market than you initially expected. Write testimonials based on customer feedback, as this will help you build a solid brand image.
Invest in the Right Tools that Ensure Sales-Marketing Alignment
While having an articulated marketing content strategy will help you win the conversion game, it’s also important to think about what tools to use. And when it comes to marketing content, you want to make sure that you invest in an efficient marketing automation system. Sugar Market offers a wide array of analytics tools that will help you personalize your content and help you make sure that you hit the sweet spot every time you interact with a prospect.
Sugar Market can be quickly integrated with Sugar Sell, offering your sales representatives more insights into what prospects expect from interactions with you, as well as easy access to a wide array of marketing resources, without even leaving their CRM.
The sales-Marketing alignment will require efforts from both teams, but once the balance is achieved, you’ll score extra points in multiple areas:
- More deals closed
- Higher customer retention rates
- More sales wins
- Revenue contribution
Concluding Thoughts
There is no perfect recipe to create sales-driving content. However, by reducing friction points between marketing and sales, businesses can create an environment where sales and marketing align via advanced software solutions.
There is no perfect recipe to create sales-driving content, but reducing friction points between marketing and sales has been proven to contribute tremendously. And, obviously, creating the right environment where sales and marketing are aided by advanced software solutions. Sugar Sell and Sugar Market are two automation tools that will help you achieve higher collaboration levels between your departments.
Want to learn more about revenue-generating content? Don’t hesitate to get in touch with us! We have more tips and tricks for you!
