When you need to sell more and when you appreciate the inevitable process involved in selling, you’ll know it’s entirely dependent on numbers – the number of people who know about your company, product or service and the number of people your sales team contact.
So here are 4 things content marketing can do for that sales process (if you do it right):
Your company will feature earlier in the decision-making process
The best content marketing aligns to the customer’s research process; the things they are reading about, the topics they are researching online. This sort of content will attract people to your website much, much earlier in their process. And that means they will have the opportunity to become aware of your product or service. So, by the time a company representative engages with them, that customer will already be aware of the company and its areas of expertise, reducing the time to sale.
You get to engage with more people
By engaging with people much earlier in their decision-making process - the ones that are researching and not just the ones who have looked up your website – you’re engaging with more people. Having more people at the start of the sales funnel gives your salesperson a fighting chance of having more customers at the bottom of the funnel.
You’ll demonstrate value and build trust
Great content marketing shares insight, education and experience and, the more generous you are with this, the more you will be adding value to the reader before they’ve even engaged with you in person. They will start to see you as credible, knowledgeable and, if you really go for it, as a thought leader in your field. They get to experience the value you can offer before they buy. And these things start doing something really special - they start building trust.
You’ll get to deploy your salespeople on what they do best
The role of content marketing is to attract people to your website and capture interest. This means your business development people don’t have to be the ones responsible for the first awareness stage of the process. They don’t have to be constantly travelling around the country or the world (or zoom) meeting new people and getting the company name out there at conferences and networking events. They can focus on what they do best – high quality, 1:1 meetings with people who have made themselves known to the company because they already get what you do.
...and imagine if there were simply more of them.