7 Ways for Sales to Embrace Content Marketing

7 Ways for Sales to Embrace Content Marketing:from (title unknown) by Aswin Natarajan

Let us not fool ourselves, marketing’s entire purpose is to serve, promote and enable sales and customer happiness. So why aren’t more sales pros taking advantage of marketing’s content?
It beginning to be obvious that sales should care about content marketing, but how do they actually embrace it? Here are some ideas:
#1 Leverage Your Own Content Marketing

Be the first on the sales team to find out about new content. Marketing is creating content that helps customers, shares product features, best practices, and news you should know about. By subscribing to ALL your content, you will benefit from the industry knowledge your company is creating and your customers are consuming…keeping you up to date and in the loop.
#2 Help Marketing Understand Your Buyer Stages

Work with marketing to create content that assists you at every stage of the sales funnel. Each stage has buyers which need different types of info. Help marketing assess how they’ve done so far with their content marketing and where they could further help you.

Here’s a quick example:
Top of the Funnel: Education and Thought-Leadership
Middle of the Funnel: Solution and Product Suitability
End of the Funnel: Credentials and Decision Support

#3 Report the Top Questions Asked by Prospects

More often than not, you’re inundated by the same questions by your prospects and clients. And more often than not, you’re giving them the same answer. Use these experiences to help build content. You are the closest to the customer. Marketing shouldn’t be the only one to have input into content marketing.
#4 Understand the Competition

Your prospects are just as likely to read your competitor’s content marketing as they are through your own. They will want someone to be able to explain the difference between offerings. If you’re informed of the competitor’s content, you can speak more confidently about the differences and why your company is a better fit. Furthermore, you’ll benefit from market knowledge and insight that your own company currently doesn’t have.
#5 Brand Your Emails

Your email signature is a simple sales opportunity and an easy place to include your content marketing. You can use tools such as WiseStamp to subtly integrate your latest blogposts into an email signature. Test results, track links and see what works. Improve on the data.
#6 Run a Sales Drip Campaigns

A drip campaign is a lead gen strategy which sends pre-scripted emails to prospects based on their behaviors and timelines. It’s one of the most efficient ways to gently promote a call-to-action. Create these campaigns to come from your email address and reply to you.
#7 Get Social

Take each piece of your company content and rephrase it, quote it and share it on social. Rotate posts through LinkedIn, Google+, and Twitter to find what works best. DM your contacts with content and ask your closest connections for feedback. Next to email, social is the best content deliver mechanism that exists.
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Ultimately, the goal of both the sales team and the content marketing is to build, maintain, and strengthen your relationships with customers and prospects. And while the content team’s approach is one-to-many, as a sales pro you can go deeper and one-to-one with your prospects. So Jump on the content bandwagon and don’t be the sales rep “out of the know”.