Why is content marketing crucial for your sales team?

Discover why content marketing is crucial for your sales team. Develop effective strategies and adapt their use to your business areas.

Learn the benefits of applying content marketing strategies and tools to your company and how it can benefit and bring value to your sales teams in different areas of customer management.

Content Marketing will help your organization develop strategic marketing based on business processes focused on creating and sending relevant, valuable, and consistent content to attract and retain different types of audiences already segmented by your commercial teams. 

This aspect is to boost the profitability of actions of your customers or prospects with your company, business opportunities, and monthly marketing planning strategies, among others.

This article will address the development, execution, and long-term practices that will benefit your company through guidelines on why content marketing is crucial for your company and your sales team.

• Why is content marketing crucial for your sales team?
• Why plan content strategies for the long term?
• Create an alliance between content marketing and contextual marketing.
• The importance of content idea generation.
• How to measure and analyze the effectiveness of your content marketing strategy.

Why is content marketing crucial for your sales team?

Content marketing is a type of marketing methodology that aims to develop, implement and share content suitable for attracting, converting, and delighting audiences of significant interest to your company. 

The importance of its application is to share your content to prospects or customers based on well-focused and relevant content strategies to solve their daily problems, needs, or challenges.

Reflection to consider: 

This process is not a mass approach but a highly strategic one with your key accounts, buyer personas, or a specific segment of your customers or prospects needing to receive this differentiated content.

Content marketing is essential for your commercial teams because nowadays, many of the challenges faced by commercial managers, marketing, sales, and service managers are closely related to their communication strategies or derive from other processes, so communication becomes an additional challenge. 

Why plan content strategies for the long term?

As I mentioned earlier in this article, content marketing is not about focusing or developing massive efforts of the marketing team on communication. 

Imagine the following scenario: 

"Your company generates the same content monthly, no matter what industry you're in or what type of buyer persona you have. "Do you believe it will translate into new customers, more sales, or retention?"

• The answer is no and would achieve none of those three options. Why? Simple, because it is the same communication month after month, it doesn't make it a strategy; instead, it becomes a monthly annoyance. It does not generate new customers by communicating the same information because it is unattractive. It loses impact, and eventually, there will come the point where your audience receives repetitive content. 
• It does not translate into sales because it does not solve the needs or problems of your audience. Lacking a strategy, it becomes irrelevant. 
• It does not help retain customers if they are not aware of the value your company gives them. 

It is essential to define long-term content strategies for the following reasons: 

1. With well-planned strategies, it engages your different business verticals for continuous customer acquisition, sales improvement, and customer retention.
2. Develops best practices for analysis, understanding, and adoption of agile and innovative methodologies with its buyer personas or target accounts.
3. Defines specific business goals by business vertical.
4. Establish performance indicators based on results.
5. Attract leads and strengthen the company's demand generation strategies.

Create an alliance between content marketing and contextual marketing

Every content marketing strategy requires defining a direction and a starting point. It is not a matter of generating pieces of content and then publishing or sending them. There is an essential element within the gear of any content marketing strategy that benefits its results, and that element is contextualization.

Contextual marketing is a tactical marketing strategy oriented to the digital world and its tools such as:

• Your company's websites.
• Search engines.
• Social media pages.

The purpose of contextual marketing is to guide the efforts of marketing strategies based on user behavior. It applies to user interactions through different devices such as computers, and smartphones, among others.

The importance of generating content ideas

The content pieces that can use for content marketing strategies can be very diverse such as the following: 

• Articles, publications, or blogs. 
• Events of certain exclusivity or access. 
• Ebooks. 
• Different types of audiovisual resources, videos, or visual content.

Therefore, your company should not be limited to only using a specific piece. You can be free to opt for various materials or valuable resources, as long as they align with your strategy, audience type, and business model. Generating diverse content techniques to communicate your business strategy is crucial. 

Successful cases in the application of content marketing strategies

Here are some success stories of content marketing strategies generation:

• Drumeo: Is a company dedicated to teaching percussion instruments such as drums. They make this effort through a methodology based on ten levels of studies with personalized classes, more than 260 courses, and about 2500 to improve any skill.

Drumeo has a section of articles called "The Beat," in which he shares a wide range of themes, tips, and guides, on practical issues, teaching, musical health, and even podcast sessions with experts in the field.

This way, Drumeo remarks on its prestige as a leading platform in this market, forming an alliance and consulting with associated teachers.

• Coca-Cola: Content marketing strategies for a global company like Coca-Cola may be an ordinary everyday task, but the truth is that they manage these strategies at a very high level.

They have made their products and content have a compelling connection with a critical feeling in human nature, such as happiness. In this way, Coca-Cola has established itself as a leader in its industry by connecting with its audiences with content that is highly targeted to their feelings and emotions.

How to measure and analyze the effectiveness of your content marketing strategy?

Imagine that you already have all the essential elements and factors for your content marketing strategies. The content pieces, the resources or inputs you will share with your audiences, and the direction your process will take for your various sales teams. However, you are missing an important variable: how do you plan to measure and analyze your effectiveness?

In our companies, we need to have reports, reportage, and data that show us the reality of our efforts and results.

Here are some actions and recommendations you can consider to diagnose the effectiveness of your content marketing strategy:

• Your campaign goals and objectives.
• Your Buyer Persona type and the objectives you have specified for them.
• Your strategic campaign metrics, the results of your campaign reporting, forms, landing pages, email marketing, automated mail sequences, and web traffic, among others. 
•  The flow in the conversion stages of the customer lifecycle.

Suppose you want to learn more about how to apply or develop effective content marketing strategies in your company at Imagineer. In that case, we can advise you in these processes with Working methodologies such as Inbound Marketing, and Account-Based Marketing, among others.  Plan a conference with one of our consultants.