Content As A Sales Conversation Starter
Most buyers don’t just judge your brand by its cover. They evaluate your brand through their own personal process of online information-gathering and research — on both you and your competitors. And what are prospective buyers coming into contact with during this research phase?
Content. Lots of content, generated by you, your customers, online reviewers, and your competitors. But the only content you can control is your own.
From your website copy to your social media presence, branded content at the top of the funnel has expanded to encompass a multitude of potential touch points for your brand. Ideally, every piece of content a prospect comes into contact with helps her learn something new — and hopefully intriguing — about your company.
Content as the First Point of Contact
According to HubSpot’s 2013 State of Inbound Marketing report, reaching the right audience is the top marketing concern for 1 out of every 4 CEOs, while 23% of marketers are focused on both reaching the right audience and converting leads to customers. The right content creation strategies offer an opportunity to do both.
Images via HubSpot
Content marketing can be used to connect with prospects by addressing and creating resonance around pain points, subsequently allowing the sales process to evolve as a conversation. Well-executed content is the antithesis of the cold call — it’s an ice breaker.
As conversations go, it is typically better to start from the realm of familiarity rather than anonymity, and the same holds true for marketing and sales teams’ interactions with prospects. Top-of-funnel content touch points create opportunities for just such personalized conversation starters.
Image via HubSpot
Strategic content creation can also implicitly contribute to the lead qualification process. If you are targeting buyer personas with director-level titles or above, for example, then your content should speak with greater specificity to those higher up the corporate ladder. Proactively producing content that is designed to resonate with your target audience will help to organically filter out those who probably wouldn’t have any interest in your product in the first place.
Consider, for example, if someone were to download our Competitive Analysis Powerpoint Template. That action is a pretty clear indication to our sales team that competitive analysis is an issue for this particular person. This content touch point not only lays the groundwork for our sales team to talk about competitive analysis, but it is also self-selecting for our target audience.
The Catch: Content Consumption Does Not Always Align With Your Sales Funnel
Beyond the role of content as a catalyst for the sales conversation, the key takeaway from this discussion of the informed buyer is that passive content creation won’t magically cause leads to land on your sales reps’ desks. Rather than waiting for your audience to evaluate and comparison shop from the safety of their own Internet browser, the best content addresses and helps with the buyer’s research phase.
A common content marketing fallacy is that buyers’ content consumption follows the general outline of your sales funnel, beginning with piquing awareness at the top of the funnel, then progressing to content that addresses specific pain points. But realistically, a buyer’s research process will not follow in sync with the steps of your editorial calendar.
Again, this means creating content goes beyond simply stating who you are and what you do. Quality content must be consistent, cohesive, and all the while helpful to the buyer’s research process and ultimate purchasing decision.
Want more proactive content marketing tips? Download our COLOSSAL CONTENT MARKETING REPORT for insights into headline optimization, publishing frequency, social distribution, and more.
Kara Burney is the Content Marketing Maven at TrackMaven, the Competitive Intelligence platform for Digital Marketers. Have content marketing questions or topics you'd like covered on the TrackMaven blog? Tweet her your ideas! See more of Kara's posts
