Content marketing is becoming ever more important to drive sales. Regardless of the type of company, your marketing team are working harder than ever to understand what this new type of customer wants. In this blog series we look at how to harness what the sales team knows about your customers and what they really want.
Most often, marketers are not customer-facing and don’t spend time with customers the way the sales team does. Or customer services, account managers, service engineers and so on.
There has never been a better time for sales and marketing to work more closely together. Here’s why:
Content marketing is used for brand awareness, customer acquisition and customer retention.
It’s significantly less expensive than traditional forms of marketing.
And customers are also buying in a different way.
But the marketing team don’t know always what customers want.
Peter Drucker famously said:
“the aim of marketing is to make selling unnecessary.”
This doesn’t mean making the sales team unnecessary! Marketers can sometimes think, wrongly, that if what they do is great, the job is done. But it’s the sales team or other customer-facing colleagues that really build the relationship with customers.
Peter Drucker also said:
“The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well, the product or service fits him and sells itself.”
This is a tall order, especially if the marketing team never speak to customers, they don’t get to hear how they describe themselves or what they really want from us.
This makes it impossible to create marketing that gets inside their hearts and minds. Unless you involve the members of your team who regularly meet with, speak to or listen to objections from… your customers.
Content marketing is a newish form of marketing, which has really developed in the last five or six years; a lot of it is in response to changes in consumer behaviour, their access to the internet and multiple sources of information about products and services, as well as access to other customer reviews. Buyers are influenced by their friends on social media, what other people buy and how they feel about it.
Your customers are now very well-informed.
Increasingly, people want to find this information on your website or within the content you’ve created for them. “Content” is basically the copy that you create, the words that you use, pictures, graphics, audio (podcasts or narration) or video (webinars, animations, how-to guides). Most importantly, it is self-published so you are in control of what is being said or shown by you.
Sometimes, we know customers make a quick purchase and their need is fulfilled in a few minutes. Other times, it may be months or even years before you’re finished and have delivered what they bought from you.
It’s the stuff that people want to know, the tricky questions customers present and the things they’ll ask you face to face. Or your customer-facing colleagues.
We’ll be looking at how to involve the sales team more in your content marketing in this series of blogs.
What key insights can marketers learn from the sales team?
It’s not easy to get sales and marketing working in harmony but we share tips and real life examples from the sales and marketing teams we’ve worked with – saving you time, money and heartache.
We hope you’ve enjoyed Why Your Sales Team Holds the Key to Content Marketing. Why not check out the other blogs in the series:
- Content Marketing and the Inbound Funnel
- Content Marketing and the Journey from Segmentation to Buyer Personas
- Why your Buyer Personas Need the Sales Team’s Customer Insight
- Buyer Personas: Top 10 Questions for Your Sales Team
Or if video is your preferred content type, click here to view the recording.
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