While the focus of content marketing is to attract leads, it doesn’t necessarily help convert prospects into customers. Creating a sales enablement content strategy helps. This content is specifically created to arm your sales team with materials to engage prospects as they make their way through the funnel and close deals.
Follow these steps to create a sales enablement content strategy to help you convert more prospects into customers.
1. Review the content your sales team uses
Find out what content the sales team is currently using. Learn what content engages prospects and starts conversations, and which content isn’t useful. The marketing team should also ask sales what content they use at each step of the buyers’ journey. This information will help marketing focus on the types of content they need to create and identify any content gaps.
2. Take inventory of your current content
Perform an audit of your existing content and review which items can be useful to your sales team. You also need to identify where each piece of content fits on the buyers’ journey, so sales understands which content piece is appropriate at each step. Some examples of content the marketing team can provide are:
- Case studies
- White papers
- Infographics
- Ebooks
- Testimonials
- Blogs
3. Create new content to fuel both sales and marketing teams
Next, it’s time to create new content to fill the gaps. The new content should help sales engage prospects, and it should help marketing attract qualified leads. While both teams play a role in deciding what content to produce it is important to keep your buyer personas in mind to ensure each content piece speaks to your target buyer(s). When handing the content over sales, marketing can also provide them with email templates to increase content promotion. An effective headline can make or break your email open rate.
4. Determine if content needs to be outsourced
While your marketing team can likely create most content in-house, there are some items you might need to outsource – such as videos and demo videos — depending on what resources you have available. When outsourcing content creation, make sure to provide clear, direct instructions to ensure it has the right messaging and tone. Attaching a content brief to the assignment can help with this and save time.
5. Align content to the buyers’ journey
After the content is created, it’s essential to determine where it should be used in the buyers’ journey. Sales and marketing should work together to establish when prospects need each content piece, and how sales will distribute it. To assist them, marketing can create emails or social posts to help promote the content. Marketing can also gate the content they are promoting. This way, contact information is captured for the sales team, and can be used for future marketing campaigns. Both teams should also discuss how to repackage the content– such as turning blogs into ebooks or videos – to help increase engagement.
6. Measure results
The final step is to measure how successful the sales enablement content is in terms of metrics and in advancing prospects through the funnel. This can be done in several different ways. For one, marketing should talk to the sales to get their take on how well each piece of content is engaging prospects and helping to close deals. Sales should also provide overall feedback as to how well the content was received.
Related Video: How To Create A Measurement Strategy
In addition to getting feedback from sales, marketing should use analytics. The metrics used will depend on what tools marketing is using to track performance on each piece of content. For example, pulling the click-throughs on calls-to-action, demo requests, and emails through analytics can determine how many prospects are engaging with the content.
When creating a sales enablement content strategy, it’s important to remember this is only one piece of marketing’s content plan. Marketing still needs to rely on its other tools and content to attract top-of-funnel leads that sales can turn into prospects and guide through the rest of the funnel. Sales enablement content benefits sales by helping them turn middle-of-funnel prospects into customers.
If you need help moving your prospects through the funnel, let Lake One help. Our experts can provide guidance and tips on how to convert leads into customers.