How To Use Content Marketing In Your Sales Process

Times have changed - your customers have become savvier than ever before and can smell a salesperson like a shark smells blood in the water. They don’t want to feel like they’re being sold to - they just want help solving a problem they’re having. This is where content marketing in sales can play a powerful role in closing deals. It’s an altruistic approach to sales, which focuses on helping, not selling.

Content marketing isn’t just a marketing approach to attract visitors; it’s also an essential part of the conversion and closing process during sales. Helping your prospects solve their problems with useful content is huge for building trust and strengthening your relationship with them. The following are some powerful ways to implement content marketing during your sales process:

1. Align the Buying and Sales Processes

First thing’s first, you need to understand your buyer and how they buy. The buyer process and sales process need to line up - this is crucial to delivering the right content at the right time. The goal is to understand what buyers research online, their questions and concerns, and how these things are addressed with your                                                                                     goods/services.                        

Why are buyers looking for a solution like yours? What problem does that solution resolve for them? Answering these questions can help you get a better grasp on the pain points your buyer is experiencing.

Once you understand what your buyer is grappling with and what content could support a buying-decision, it’s time to help them find a solution.

2. Create a Sales Content Library

Once you’ve found out who your buyers are and their pain points, it’s time to guide them to a solution through content marketing. To quickly and efficiently do this, your sales team should build and utilize a sales content library. Your salespeople hear your buyer’s pain points on a daily basis. Therefore, they’re the most knowledgeable when it comes to what content to create.

Sit down with your sales team and ask them what they’d like to see in a sales-oriented content library. From there, you can either create those pieces of content, or prepare existing content for your team to use in the “Sales Content Library.” Organizing your sales library by lifecycle stage is a good start.

In the content library, you need to identify all of the assets you have access to. Do you have slide decks, blog posts and white papers, or do you need to use another company’s resources? Sometimes, your back catalogue of content won’t have the right solution - and that’s okay. In a perfect world, all the content would be produced by your company, but it doesn’t have to be. The important thing here is that you’re sending users something of value. If someone has a better resource for a specific purpose, then use it; your buyer will appreciate it.

For example, your company may awesome content for the first stage of the buying process. However, your middle of the funnel content may be a little spare, so you should send them to someone else’s infographic; they get what they’re looking for, and it’s still you that’s helping them. HubSpot produces a useful, in-depth report every year, “The State of Inbound Marketing Report.” We send this to prospects all the time without hesitation because it shows how useful inbound marketing is for businesses.

Bottom line: you’re still helping them, instead of another company, by filling in the gaps where you don’t have content - even if you’re sharing another’s content.

3. Injecting Content

To deliver the right piece of content, you must focus on your buyer and the message you’re sending them. You have to remember where they are in the buyer’s journey - a lead that’s in the bottom of the sales funnel will have a different set of questions, based on their personal research, than a middle-of-the-funnel prospect. It’s time to go through your sales content library to see where you can inject that one piece of content that will really put
                                                                             them over the edge for your company.

To build the most effective sales team, you must align your touch points with the sales process that’s right for them. Use content marketing appropriately (and at the right time), so you’re providing prospects value instead of an annoyance.

For example, if your prospect is at the decision-making stage, they’re evaluating what company is right for them. To help them out, you can send them a case study that shows how one of your clients benefited greatly by choosing your company.

Send prospects content based on what stage of the buyer’s journey they’re in. For example, if someone doesn’t know the solution to their problem yet, you should send them a top-of-the-funnel blog or SlideDeck on possible solutions and the ROI of implementing these solutions. If they’re almost ready to buy and evaluating competitors, you should send them a case study or a problem-specific white paper that will help them make an intelligent decision.

4. Create Templates

At this point, you’ve gotten all the information you need to understand when certain stages in the buyer’s journey occur. You can now automate the content marketing process and create content triggers, sending what you need to at the right time and to the right people. This kind of content automation (a workflow and campaign) can be easily created and customized in your CRM system.

The amount of contact you’ll have between each buyer will vary. Typically, there are five to eight points of contact for helpful communication and three interactions during each buyer stage.

Make sure to vary the way you’re reaching your contacts; whether it’s through email, social media, phone calls or a combination of these three, do whatever feels natural and appropriate. If you found a blog that your prospect could find interesting, feel free to tweet it out and share these new industry insights. If there’s an awesome, share-worthy piece of content out there, don’t hesitate to favorite or retweet it.

5. Deploy, Adapt, and Refine… Constantly

The ultimate goal of all of this is to align your sales content library with the buying and sales processes, and have this library built out so you can send content to prospects very quickly. This entire sales process is predicated on the sales person helping and NOT selling, which is also the foundation of inbound marketing and why it’s so successful. With inbound, you’re only dealing with customers who are a good fit. If they’re not a good fit, they self-exempt earlier in the sales process, which saves precious time for your sales team, as they’re only dealing with customers who are a good fit.

The sales process is never completed. You should constantly be tweaking, testing and analyzing email open-rates, click-through-rates, conversion rates and other marketing data. Just like inbound marketing or web design, you should be continuously optimizing your process to ensure it’s producing the best results possible.