For a successful business to convert leads into customers, your marketing and sales teams need to coordinate their efforts.

The content your marketing team creates is valuable for getting eyes on your products and services. It also helps sales people follow up with leads and inspire those prospects to turn into customers.

Your sales team can use that content to excite, convince, and appease prospects during the sales process.

But if marketers and salespeople aren’t talking regularly, the content can often miss the mark. In this article, we explore five ways your marketing team can create content that helps your sales team win over those prospects.

1. Prioritize regular communication between your marketing and sales teams.

The more these two teams learn from each other, the better the content creation can be.

Rather than just meeting quantity goals each month, marketing teams need to understand their role as creators of a direct path to a sale, producing better content for more sales.

When marketing and sales communicate regularly, the conversations usually lead to more content topics that are relevant to generating quality sales leads. Content creators will also find ways to reposition messaging of sales materials to resonate better with your prospects and customers.

2. Evaluate metrics from a sales point of view.

If a blog post attracts the most views but produces very few leads or a whitepaper generates lots of leads but only a handful are qualified ones, the success metrics aren’t telling the whole story. The content may seem successful marketing-wise but may not be satisfying your sales team’s bottom line.

If creation teams trace all content back to desired sales numbers while sales teams give credit to content that generates high-quality leads, it can encourage more relevant content development.

3. Be the most trusted voice in your industry.

Marcus Sheridan, author of the book, They Ask You Answer, teaches marketers how to generate effective sales content based on what prospects and customers are asking about their companies. He believes all marketers are in the business of trust, so it’s essential for them to be the best authorities on their own industries, companies, products and services – and to share that knowledge with the asking public. “Never undersell the power of teaching,” he says. “You can address your customer’s hard questions or not, but someone will, so it might as well be you.”

This means being the one who drives the conversation about your company by providing customer reviews on products and services before consumers buy, explaining your company’s “secret sauce,” or manufacturing process openly and honestly, and exploring topics that address people’s concerns in content pieces that people care about.

4. Personalize sales messaging as often as humanly possible.

When it comes to responding to an email message with a generic subject line like, “Following up,” or a personalized subject line like, “Hi <Name>, I put this material together for you,” recipients will choose the personalized message every time.

In fact, it’s almost a universal truth among email marketers that the best engagement rate with non-personalized emails is still very low, so they strive to add custom sales messaging whenever possible.

To that end, a short, personalized video embedded into an email can be an instant success at establishing a strong relationship with your customers and sales prospects (see number 5).

5. Incorporate video into your content strategy.

The old adage, “Show it, don’t say it,” rings true in 2021. While they’re considering a purchase, people want to be able to visualize your products and services – how they work and, more important, how they answer a potential buyer’s query, solve their problem, or fit seamlessly into their lifestyle.

That’s why video is a critical component to a strong content marketing strategy:

• People remember 95% of a message when they watch it and only 10% of a message when they read it.
• Using video helps boost your audience’s ability to retain knowledge.
• People find video messaging more engaging and more memorable.

Experts agree that since video is more popular with audiences than any other type of content, using video as part of your content strategy is no longer an option – it’s a necessity.

11outof11 for Content Creation

When you’re ready to create content that serves both your marketing and sales teams, connect with 11outof11. Request a complimentary call with an 11outof11 expert. Contact us to learn more.