Content marketing is an indispensable element of sales. It helps customers discover and connect with businesses while providing essential knowledge that enables them to make informed decisions.
Content strategy success starts with creating a buyer persona. Doing this will allow you to better understand the needs, goals, and challenges faced by your target audience.
Awareness
At the awareness stage of your sales funnel, your goal should be to capture customers’ interest without pushing hard sell tactics on them. One effective method of doing this is publishing useful content via articles, videos, podcasts or ebooks that answer consumers’ FAQs while positioning you as a trustworthy source of information.
Targeting the pain points of your target audience is one thing; doing it in such a way as to appear more like genuine care for prospects is another entirely. That is why content marketing has proven such an effective and cost-efficient method for reaching prospects – 62% less expensive than traditional methods!
Content creation is integral to every stage of the buyer journey. A successful content strategy relies on accurate buyer personas, along with knowledge about what type of media works best at each step. For instance, blog posts or articles might work at raising awareness; white papers and case studies might work better at increasing consideration.
Understand that content marketing takes time to build an audience and drive conversions, and have a plan in place for what, how, when and how success will be measured will ensure your efforts will align with goals and will be recognized accordingly.
Consideration
Content marketing is an effective way of engaging consumers throughout their customer journey. Unlike traditional forms of promotion, content marketing doesn’t create as much disruption and allows you to achieve various goals without overt sales tactics. Content marketing can boost website traffic and revenue while building brand loyalty while increasing authority within an industry and closing sales deals.
To create content that will engage consumers at the consideration stage, you need to first understand their pain points and challenges. Buyer persona research can be invaluable in helping create relevant material while meeting target audiences’ informational needs.
At this stage, consumers are looking for solutions to their problems and understanding how your product or service can meet them. One effective strategy to do this is creating educative content that informs them before making their purchase decision. Tools like Google Analytics can help monitor its success so that any necessary adjustments can be made depending on what works and doesn’t.
Consider using testimonials and case studies to provide social proof and demonstrate the worth of your product or service. These can come in the form of videos, blog posts or written articles; the more engaging your content is the higher its chance of converting prospective customers.
Decision
Content marketing aims to inspire action from potential consumers, yet its implementation can be complex and time consuming. To be effective at it, one needs to formulate a plan, monitor its success using metrics, and then market products or services either digitally or traditionally based on these measures.
Content marketing can be an indirect form of promotion that feels less pushy and aggressive than traditional ads. Content can take the form of blogs or articles, videos, audio podcasts and other media formats that provide answers to customers’ FAQs and address pain points, while simultaneously promoting your brand with positive customer reviews and testimonials.
Content marketing must align with each stage in the sales cycle for maximum impact, whether through blog posts and social media ads or case studies and white papers distributed. By doing this, content can help increase consideration rates faster while increasing purchases down the line.
Successful content marketing requires planning and setting clear goals, along with an in-depth knowledge of your audience which can be gained via research or data analytics tools. According to a CMI study, 77% of the most effective B2B marketers use buyer personas in their content marketing strategies.
Closing
At the closing stage, salespeople can employ various strategies to secure deals. One such approach is known as the now-or-never close, also referred to as scarcity tactics or FOMO; another effective tactic is question close where sales reps ask prospects for commitments such as scheduling a follow up meeting or verifying that certain dates are acceptable.
No matter their chosen sales closing technique, top closers always put their prospect first. They spend time understanding a buyer’s challenges, needs and goals as well as their buying process in order to build trust and form meaningful relationships with prospects.
After each sale, these companies make sure they remain connected with customers by sending cards or keeping in contact via email and social media, or making regular visits and calls with industry information and solutions. This helps maintain their organizational process while staying at the top of customers’ minds.
Salespeople who use content at the right time and place are more likely to successfully close sales. Marketers must create dual purpose content that serves both the awareness and consideration stages of the sales cycle; content in the awareness stage should address their prospect’s pain points, questions and concerns while content in consideration should demonstrate how your product or service can address these.
