Content marketing ROCKS for sales.
Here are the top 3 reasons content marketing rocks for sales:
1. Increases the number of well-educated prospects and customers
2. Shorter sales cycles
3. Higher close rates.
What is content marketing?
Content marketing is helpful, relevant content delivered to a target audience, consistently over time, with the stated goal of driving profitable customer activity. The bottomline is that you want to be a teacher, problem solver and a great resource for your prospects and customers. You want them to think of you when they are in buying mode; you want them to think of you first because you’ve built that relationship as a trusted advisor with them.
1. Increase the Number of Educated Prospects and Customers
Your marketing team most likely has a strategic and well-documented content marketing strategy, which is truly a key to success these days. The reason marketing teams are documenting their strategy is due to a statistic that “57% of the buyer’s journey is complete before they talk to sales.” So if your prospects and customers have a problem, they are in status quo but they move into problem-solving mode, they are going to research some solutions, perhaps do some comparison, and then make a decision.
2. Shorter Sales Cycles
Your prospects are self-selecting, they are digging in, they are educating themselves, they are looking for credible sources of information to solve their problems and to grow their business. When they come to you, when they’ve identified themselves, you are catching them (more or less, depending on the effectiveness of your marketing team in converting them from a marketing qualified lead to a sales qualified lead) in a much shorter sales process. You may have to sort out some details or essentially support their continuation of the process as they consider and compare solutions and make a final decision.
3. Higher Close Rates
Since only your most qualified leads are being passed as marketing-qualified leads to sales-qualified leads, you don’t have to spend a lot of time in the early stages educating. You will receive a lower number of higher-qualified leads, which boosts your close rate, so your close rate is much higher.
Those are the 3 reasons why content marketing rocks for sales.
I would love to hear your success stories on how you’ve effectively used content to support your buyers through their journey.
If you have a marketing team that has not shared their documented marketing strategy with you yet, I suggest you go ask them because you will get a lot of benefit from seeing exactly who they are targeting, what they are delivering and the outcome(s) they are seeking.
And even if they don’t have a documented content marketing strategy, let me know below. I have a really strong template to help marketers create and document their content marketing strategy. This document will lead to highly effective and aligned relationships with their sales organization.
So please ask and I will be happy to send it to you with some pointers on how to work through it with your marketing team.
So – think like a marketer and sell like an animal – and keep rocking that content!