Sure, the marketing world is buzzing about content marketing. What is it? How to do it better? How does your business use it to drive engagement and close more sales? All of those questions and more are essential to a successful business.
If you’ve dipped your toes into the content marketing world, you know it’s not just about content.
It’s about aligning your content with your sales message and meeting your prospect wherever they may be on their sales journey.
1—Targeting – Choosing the right target market is critical.
If you’re selling a cloud-based software program that allows people to access their documents from any device, then you need to target your marketing message to answering the questions they have. Questions like, is it secure? Can I customize the appearance? How accessible is it?
Likewise, if you’re selling coaching services to women entrepreneurs at the beginning of their entrepreneurial journey, you’d focus your website, podcasts, webinars, case studies and other content on the types of questions they ask. Do I need to establish myself as a sole proprietor, LLC or some other legal entity? What’s the best way to find clients? What’s the best way to handle invoicing?
All are fodder for blog posts, webinars, podcasts and other information that answer the questions and concerns of your audience.
2–Relevance – Your website reflects the solutions you provide.
If you’ve defined your target market well and know exactly who you need to connect with and their questions, you know what type of content to create and what it should include.
Hmmm, what if you have multiple audiences? That’s the problem cloud-based computing Docu-Sign had. They offered a cloud based service geared toward collecting signatures digitally so projects could move forward faster.
They served audiences from Enterprise level organizations like Wells-Fargo to the single person entrepreneur. That’s a lot of use applications and it was difficult to effectively target their message to each. The result? They were seeing a high bounce rate.
According to Victoria Garment of Software Advice, they were able to plug this leak in their sales funnel by using the web analytics of another SaaS company, DemandBase. Armed with the info that allowed them to slice and dice their visitation into more targeted groups, they could serve up a specific home paged geared to that audience.
That’s the beauty of big data.
3—Lead Nurturing – Not everyone is “ready to buy” when they connect with you. Some are in their initial stages of research, others are evaluating vendors.
You know “one-size-doesn’t-fit-all” in clothing so why would it work in business? Marketing automation programs to the rescue. Demandbase, Hubspot, Infusionsoft….All of them give you loads of back end metrics so you can better deliver relevant content at the right time.
For example, if your prospect reads a blog post on “7 Questions to Ask of a CRM” and then downloads the white paper you offer about “How to Organize Your CRM in the Cloud” in the post you know that person is interested in CRM’s and cloud computing. If you sell a cloud-based CRM solution, you can now reach out and offer a demonstration to this prospect.
It’s a variation on the traditional sales funnel. How are you aligning your content?
