How to Enable Sales with Content Marketing

Posted at December 12, 2015 at 8:57 am by Stacey Talieres

How-to-Enable-Sales-with-Content-MarketingWe live in a buyer’s world. Period. Long gone are the days when you could just advertise at many random digital avenues and expect a steady stream of click through rates to your website. Today’s consumers have changed. They tend to block out the advertisements, look beyond the logos, overlook the seemingly innocuous promotions and wouldn’t sign-up for newsletters. They need the information when they want it, in the format that they want it. They have access to mobile and prefer to gather information on their own rather than being force-fed it.

If you are still broadcasting your products or services to the haystack, you may have more luck fitting a camel through the eye of a needle than your target audience finding your products or services. So how do you make your customers notice you? How do your cut through the noise and get the right information to your customers? With the web littered with chock-a-block content, and more getting added every minute, content marketing which doesn’t enable your sales is like bringing more sand to the beach. Earlier it was the sales teams that used to shoulder the sales funnel, but nowadays the sales funnel has transformed more into touchpoints rather than funnel. Today the content needs to create business value which can be created by creating customer values where the customer is at
the centre. Read on to learn how you can create customer-centric content to enable sales.

Determine the goals for your content marketing plan

The first thing which you need to do is determine the goals for which you want to create content. Is it to create awareness, interest, consideration, evaluation, conversion or retention? Determine the goals and then create the content marketing plan accordingly.

Know your content marketing audience

Remember if your content is for everyone, it is for nobody! Your content marketing plan only works when audiences respond. Just knowing your buyers’ persona is not enough, you need to know your audience for each piece of content you are penning. You also need to understand why the content is being written, that is, what is the desired behaviour change you want to see in order for this content initiative to be a success. What is the desired outcome, as in, what is in it for the reader? The content marketer needs to think of all this and more before you can start on the plan.

Determine information your audience seeks

Just because the information you think is important doesn’t make it automatically what your audience may be seeking. You need to first find out what information your audience require and then work on the content accordingly.

Incorporate your brand into your content

You need to be very careful when incorporating your brand into your content as if it sounds like a promotional piece, your readers will disappear faster than a speeding bullet. Incorporate your brand subtly without making it look like a promotional piece.

Talk about your company

The most successful companies are those that have an emotional connect with their audience. Talk about your organization’s initial days and share interesting trivia with your readers to create a connection with them.

Use different content formats for your content marketing and build an editorial calendar so that you have better visibility of your content and its formats.  Make your content interesting and have a strategic approach focused on distributing and promoting the content to drive desirable customer actions.

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