Content-driven marketing is essential for all brands. It is one of the most valuable marketing strategies you can use to create value for your customers, build brand awareness and loyalty, and boost conversions. That said, there is often debate over what the focus of content should be.
There are many different types of content and various strategies that can be used. However, sales-oriented marketing is growing increasingly popular, especially among B2B brands, as it has been shown to help drive growth and revenue, and increase profits.
In recent years, brands have been aligning sales and marketing and seeing promising results. 76% of B2B brands say that an Account-Based Marketing (ABM) approach delivered higher ROI than other marketing efforts — and one of the focuses of ABM is aligning sales and marketing.
Of course, there are many different ways to align sales and marketing, but one of the most crucial and beneficial strategies is through a sales-driven content marketing approach.
Why Sales-Driven Marketing Content Matters?
Sales-driven content marketing makes it easier for brands to better understand their customers, their needs, their pain points, and what influences their buying decisions. The goal of sales-driven marketing is to build better relationships, ensuring you are targeting the right buyers with the right incentives.
Some of the many benefits that come from implementing a sales content-driven marketing strategy include:
- Higher-quality leads: When sales and marketing are aligned and you are creating content that keeps the goals of both teams in mind, you end up generating higher-quality leads that benefit both departments.
- Increased engagement and stronger relationships: When sales and marketing work together to target the ideal customer, they tend to do a better job engaging with the customer and building stronger relationships because of their shared vision and goals.
- Competitive edge: If your marketing team is only concerned with what they are doing and your sales team only worries about what they are doing, then both teams end up less informed. However, if these teams work together and share information when researching the market, they will be more informed of the competition and what content will be most effective.
- Increased revenue: Hubspot statistics show that when marketing content is created in alignment with sales, brands achieve 208% higher revenue than companies with disjointed sales and marketing teams.
How to Create a Sales Content-Driven Marketing Strategy
Below are the three most important things you should do when creating a sales-driven content strategy:
1. Communicate With Sales to Address Buyer Concerns
Before creating a content plan, sit down with the sales team to get their input. Your salespeople will be most aware of any barriers that exist to conversions, such as the pain points your target customers experience. It’s important to use this knowledge to ensure you are creating content that addresses these concerns.
Questions to ask the sales team that can help you get the information you need can include:
- What are your buyer personas?
- What are the most common pain points for our buyers?
- What are the most common reasons for a lead not converting?
- What information would be helpful for leads to already know before you get in contact with them?
- What are common questions our customers have, and what errors do they often make?
- Are there any content materials you wish you had to provide customers with to help them better understand the value of our product/service?
- What inspires our customers to refer us to others?
2. Set Specific, Attributable Goals
It’s helpful to think of content marketing as an extension of your sales team's efforts. Thus, it’s more beneficial to set very specific, attributable goals for your content strategy, just like sales teams have very specific goals and targets they want to achieve.
Instead of the general goal of “increasing traffic” or raising brand awareness, consider these goals which are measurable and actionable:
- Create content specifically for each buyer persona
- Create content that the sales team can use to keep leads informed during their customer journey
- Improve client or account retention with informative guides and resources that maximize value
- Create content that increases the number of qualified leads coming into sales
These are just some examples. The idea should be to determine goals based on the specific needs of your business and your sales team. Just make sure the content goals are specific, measurable, and actionable.
3. Optimize Content For Topic Authority
When implementing a sales-focused content-driven marketing strategy, it’s also important to ensure your content is optimized to give your brand authority. ABM strategies are rapidly gaining in popularity among B2B brands, so simply having your own sales-driven content isn’t enough. Your content also needs to be optimized to give you an edge over your competitors.
If you cover your key topics more comprehensively, it will give your site higher authority and help you out-rank other competing sites. In other words, don’t just do what everyone else is already doing. Use tools to help you create optimized and authoritative content that goes above and beyond to help your brand stand out.
Effective Sales-Driven Content Marketing
Sales and marketing alignment are key to a successful Account-Based Marketing strategy. However, if you are new to this kind of approach and aren’t sure how to create sales-oriented marketing, Cogo & Co. can help.
Take our Growth Readiness Scorecard to receive a score on your sales and marketing approach with customized results, detailing how you can improve your results quickly and easily. Schedule a free consultation to learn more.
