The success of a company that manufactures products or provides services can directly be determined by its sales. There is a tangential connection between adopting an effective content marketing strategy to obtain more traffic and making sales by striking actual deals. The content you publish is capable of leaving an indelible imprint on the mind of your readers which can eventually lead to better sales.
So, in order to prosper your business, it is essential that you use a combination of these two strategies. When you combine content marketing with your sales strategy and these two are intertwined tactfully, the results are beyond imagination.
What Is a Content Marketing Strategy?
The process of carrying out the creation, publishing, maintenance, distribution and marketing of content related to the enterprise so that it gains the maximum traffic is known as content marketing. Such a plan helps in performing the maintenance-related tasks of the content of a company effectively. A content strategist is a person who is responsible for shaping the way people perceive the products of a company or the brand as a whole.
Importance of a Good Content Marketing Strategy For Sales
To sum up, both content marketing, and sales strategies, hold equal importance when it comes to making a business successful. Most people tend to do intensive research online before making a purchase. They compare features, pricing, pros, and cons before buying products and services. They like to be kept informed but not being sold.
Here are some reasons why a content marketing strategy is of immense importance for making sales.
1. Provides Valuable Feedback and Scope For Improvement
When the content team and sales team work in collaboration they can provide each other updated information and give each other feedback based on the current trends. The content marketing team is responsible for keeping track of the comments of potential clients and handling client interaction whereas the sales team is responsible for scrutinizing the sales pattern. The content marketers can optimize their content and further improve it on the suggestion of the sales team.
2. Increasing Understanding Of The Customer’s Needs
When a salesperson makes sales, he gets an opportunity to interact with clients and find out about their needs, demands, and whether they find a particular service useful. Next time, the content marketing team could use this information in the upcoming articles and utilize it for the company’s benefit. This way, more appropriate topics can be written to target the audience by following a specific approach.
3. Adding Value To The Content
Tons of traffic without any conversion is merely a futile attempt. This kind of vacuum won’t turn out to be helpful for your brand. A company can turn a reader into a valuable asset only by making good sales. Without monetization, even numerous visitors are of no use.
How To Connect Content Marketing Strategy To Your Sales Strategy?
Very few B2B companies make use of a documented strategy for content marketing. Considering the boost it can give to the sales of your company, both the approaches have to be used in collaboration with each other. Let us take a look at some ways to connect a content marketing strategy to the sales strategy of an organization.
1. Analyzing The Customer Requirements
While making sales, make sure your salespersons interact with the customers and ask them to explain their requirements. Carefully listen to their queries or any problems they are facing. On the basis of their primary concern take note of their feedback and use it to the organization’s advantage. This helps in two ways. First, the customers will realize that the organization cares about them when someone is there to interact with them at a personal level. They will think that the company values their feedback and will take prompt action.
In order to fulfill the expectations of existing clients and to increase the client base by attracting more potential customers, the salespersons can provide detailed information to the content management team. After an in-depth analysis of the customer needs, complaints, and demands the content marketing team can work on creating more compelling and requirement specific articles. This, in turn, will drive more traffic to your content and if customers find it valuable, the sales will witness a significant hike.
2. Improving Conversion Rates
The optimization of content in order to generate more conversions has to be the top priority. A sure way to attract customers and retain existing customers is to offer something unique. Let them know the utilities only you can provide that can influence them to start or continue working with you. Provide detailed information about your company and let them know that you will always be there to fulfill any needs that may arise.
A successful business is all about getting conversions for the content. Introduce a call-to-action button when you promote your content. This provides a simple and better interface to the users along with the ease of use. They can reach out to you with a click of a button. If your content is compelling, valuable, and interesting, this approach is sure to give your company the progress it deserves.
3. A Step Further: Gaining Better Conversions
According to a common assumption regarding conversions that is rampant in the business world, the more is better. Well, that is not the case always. When it comes to the development of an organization, quality triumphs quantity. Quality leads are often far better than uninterested or weak conversions. Now, you must be thinking, how is all this related to content marketing?
In order to ensure that the leads qualify, your content is the key to making better conversions. Content created by taking into account the target demographic leads to highly worthy leads and will enable you to filter irrelevant content. The team responsible for content marketing can make the pitches more relevant and create effective posts that are specifically targeted.
Tips For a Successful Content Marketing Strategy
If you wish to improve the relationship between sales strategy and the content marketing, then here are some tips to keep in mind.
1. Evaluate, Examine and Act
Take into account all the factors that indicate interaction with customers such as comments, reactions, and shares on various social media platforms. Analyze even the most intricate details of the data collected. Scrutinize the statistics and make a plan. You can experiment a bit with your tactics and strategies to find the best plan for the content marketing project.
2. Creation Of Personas
Personas are basically representations of customers in general that help content creators to imagine them as real humans, understand their needs and act accordingly. The creation of personas can be carried out with the help of feedback from existing customers and detailed surveys. Gender, age, preference of technology, current database, purchase history are some crucial factors that can aid in creating ideal personas. You can also interview regular customers to gain an insight into their goals, objections, behaviors, challenges, issues, and fears.
3. Documentation Of The Strategy
When you are satisfied with your research and analysis, it is time to document the entire strategy step by step. The components you should include are:
1.) Channels
When it comes to content creation there, one should take into consideration the channels and platforms to be used for communication. Each channel has a different functioning. Choose the one that suits you the best.
2.) Target Audience
Select your target audience wisely. Sometimes, the product a company manufactures is specifically meant for a certain category of audience. Make sure, when you create the content, target the mindset of your audience instead of using a generalized approach. For instance, if your company manufactures cosmetics, it is preposterous to select male target audiences.
Segmentation of the audience goes a long way. This way, you can appoint particular sales teams to handle the needs of different audiences. With the help of segmentation, you can get a better idea of the idiosyncrasies of your customer base.
3.) Plan The Execution
Once you are done with the documentation, you should start planning the execution. Blog posts, guides, e-books, podcasts, videos, and infographics are some of the most popular and effective content types. Decide what kind of content you wish to create. Nowadays, infomercials or advertisements that convey a message are considered great ways to approach potential customers. Keep up with the current trend in order to get the most out of your content marketing strategy. Make a schedule and stick to it.
Conclusion
Salespeople and content creators are people possessing different skills and they come from varying background. The importance of having experts for both these tasks is undeniable. But the way you instigate efficient communication between these two departments for the company’s benefit is what sets you apart in fierce competition. The better is the connectivity between the content marketing and sales segments of the organization, faster will be the progress.
March 29, 2018 0 comment
CONTENT STRATEGY
WHY YOU SHOULD HIRE A COPYWRITER WHO KNOWS CONTENT STRATEGY
written by Contentmart Team
Any business which is starting out faces one big question – which of my tasks should we do ourselves and which do we get professionals for? This question comes up not only because of the costs involved but due to many reasons. When you are starting off, every bit of money you can save is important. Let’s understand a fact here. Compromising with content means you are neglecting an aspect, which can act as a potential lead magnet.
Understand what Copywriting is and why do you need Strategists-Cum-Copywriters:
What Is Copywriting?
The word copywriting used to earlier refer the job of writing your promotional material for your print advertising, outdoor spots, and email promotions. Today the word copywriting has evolved because the word promotion now encompasses a whole lot more. It covers all your digital content, in the form of the matter on your website, on your social media pages, the blogs that promote your company or products and so many other vehicles which you use to pull in prospective customers, generate referrals, resolve customer queries and even disseminate non-promotional information about yourself.
The Benefits of Hiring a Copywriter Who Knows Content Strategy
What is Content Strategy?
Let us start with one of the points mentioned above and see if we can turn it around. Yes, time is valuable, but you also need to remember that you are a businessman, not a copywriter. So the money you save by doing your own copywriting and managing your own social media traffic, is it more valuable than the time you spend? You need to do a quick calculation of what value your business gives you for every hour of your time, and compare it with your costs per hour if you hire a copywriter. That will help you judge if your copywriting is a job best left to the experts.
Why do you need Content Strategy for Your Business?
The scope of copywriting has increased by leaps and bounds today. Unlike earlier days, it is not enough to write attractive copy for a newspaper advertisement, and hope for people to like it and come to you and buy your product. Copywriting straddles the world of digital media and static media. For the brave, new world of digital marketing, copywriting must be a living, breathing animal that can engage the customer set and encourage interactions, shares, follows etc. It is not a one-way communication at all. The correct content strategy in the copywriting efforts will result in better traction for your products or services, so hiring a professional make sense.
Top 6 Benefits of Hiring a Content Strategy-Savvy Copywriter?
1) He knows the Direction:
A copywriter will have a strong grasp of the latest concepts of metadata and search engine optimization. How this differs from a static newspaper advertisement is that a newspaper ad you pay for will have your insert in all copies of that newspaper, and any customer who reads that newspaper is bound to see it.
2) Customers like the Web:
Customers today are more likely not to wait for the next day’s paper to find what they are looking for. They would just open a search engine on their web browser or mobile and seek what they are looking for. And that’s where your content strategy comes in.
3) You need to be on top:
A search engine’s results have a limited number of results showing on each page, depending on the search string used, and the presence (or lack of it) of that string on your page.
4) SEO Savvy:
The way your page text is written will decide if the metadata of your page results in a match with the search string you are hoping to attract, and how high up in the search results it will feature in. This is, in a nutshell, what search engine optimization refers to.
5) Expert Strategy:
Your copywriter decides your content strategy in such a way that your pages get the most number of hits on search engine results, helping you generate prospects and referrals. That is something you would not be an expert on.
6) Social Media Expertise:
Another area which needs a clear and effective content strategy is social media. No business can hope to flourish if it doesn’t have a robust presence on social media, irrespective of which industry it is in.
If you hire a copywriter who is strong on content strategy, he would be able to decide on the best social media sites that match the nature of your business, what kind of communication would work best for your target audience, and also what extent of interaction you can provide or wish to provide.
The Cons of Hiring a Copywriter, who is not a Content Strategist
This article began by talking about businesses which are starting off, and most of the cons associated with hiring a copywriter pertain to new businesses more than they do to businesses which are reasonably established.
• Ideas behind business
A business that is new might not be clear itself about which are the most important target segments, or which vehicle of communication would be the most effective, or even what are the most important products/services that need to be promoted. For a copywriter to grasp that might not be so easy and explaining to him would be difficult for you as well. Since you, yourself, are not so sure. Therefore, initially doing the copywriting yourself might make more sense, as you understand your business.
• It’s the Money Factor
Money is another big factor, of course, like we already said. Hiring a good copywriter might cost you a substantial amount, a burden which your fledgling business might not be ready to take just yet. Finally, the question of time is important. When the new business is still a long way off from being on autopilot, it needs all the time you can provide, so would it make more sense for you to explain things to the copywriter or utilize that time to do your own copywriting instead? These are a few reasons why your decision to hire a copywriter, at least initially, might not be advised.
Conclusion
Today’s digital world requires a multifaceted media content strategy, which generally is difficult to provide in-house. A business would be well served by hiring such an expert who knows content strategy so that the copywriting servicesprovided can help your company get ahead of the race and win over customers and influencers alike.
