Did you know that your content marketing strategy can directly impact your sales department?
Evidence shows a 15% increase in win rates when marketing and sales work together to create a sales enablement marketing strategy. Collaboration and communication between the sales and marketing teams will ensure optimized and efficient content marketing. Additionally, it will boost sales performance.
Sales enablement marketing is a Pace Creative approved marketing strategy. In the rest of this blog, we’ll give you a peak into our strategy:
How Does Content Marketing Help Sales Enablement?
Sales enablement is the process of equipping your sales team with necessary content, information, and tools to sell as efficiently as possible. Content marketing provides support at each stage of the buyer’s journey, from brand awareness to consideration, purchase, referral, and engagement. Communication and objectives between the sales and marketing teams need to be aligned to be effective.
Having the right content, images, or infographics at the right time can make a big difference during a sales interaction.
Data reveals only 39% of marketing teams agree that their counterpart sales teams are using the content at the right stage in the buyer’s journey, and 1 in 4 times the marketing and sales teams tell a completely different brand story. For these two teams to work effectively and for them to support each other and support sales enablement strategies, marketers need to focus on creating content which sales teams can use effectively and logically to meet their goals. Since the market is flooded with so many options, approximately 95% of buyers prefer marketing agencies that can support them through each stage of the buying process.
Good news: Pace Creative is one of those agencies! 😊
How Do You Participate in Sales Enablement Marketing?
The answer is content marketing! During the process, break down the concept of ‘Silos’, where the marketing and sales teams can come together to agree on unified values and goals:
Understand Your Customer Personas
Before you put together your content marketing strategy, you need to figure out who you are speaking to!
To map out your customer journey and identify your customer personas, complete primary (if there is available budget) or secondary research.
Outline the Sales Cycle
Marketing and sales teams must collaborate to gather information on the sales cycle. This information is used to better understand typical objections from each persona and how to overcome them. Interview your sales team as they interact with customers and have a better understanding of the kind of content that would facilitate in securing new deals.
Train Your Sales Team
It’s highly recommended to provide basic training and coaching on content marketing for your sales team to fully comprehend how the content can be used as sales enablement tools!
By understanding the sales cycle, the marketing team can plan a robust content management system and document the type of content that would support specific stages of the buyer’s journey. Going forward, the creation of engaging content that is aligned with the needs of the sales team will become a priority!
How Do You Create High Value Sales Enablement Content?
There are many ways to create high value sales enablement content – here are our six suggestions for marketing teams:
1) Documented Strategy
Documentation is the foundation of a content marketing strategy. Bottom-of-the-funnel content works to address the specific and recurring questions identified by the sales reps.
2) Use Internal Subject Matter Experts (SMEs)
Work closely with your sales team and sales reps to identify common questions encountered at each stage of the buyer’s journey. As sales enablement is an ongoing effort, the content will need continuous updates to cater to your company’s expansions and new ventures.
3) Take Advantage of Auditing
Auditing your existing content per channel will allow you to identify misalignment, inconsistencies in tone and messaging, and most importantly, allow you to find new opportunities to adjust or create more content.
4) Invest in Your Content Creation
Visual storytelling like presentations, webinars, videos, infographics etc. are highly effective, engaging, and growing in popularity in the industry.
First, determine what content is important and what information needs to be conveyed. Second, present this information in a visually stimulating way that will answer questions before they are asked. This will improve customer retention and boost sales performance.
5) Optimize Your Content Strategy
Tracking content usage and analytics provides a tangible way of assessing team performance. Monitoring marketing content is crucial to improving sales enablement. Read our two-part guide to marketing metrics for more information on how to measure the success of your content marketing strategy.
You can save time and money by monitoring your metrics and adjusting your strategy accordingly!
6) Figure Out What’s Missing
Develop a wide variety of strategic content asset types. Each asset should, firstly, add value to your overall strategy. Secondly, they need to align with your customer persona and journey. If you do not have the internal resources or need to elevate the quality of content, hire externally! We’re always here to help.
Examples of Sales Enablement Strategies
As we mentioned earlier, sales enablement marketing is one of our specialties as a full service B2B marketing agency.
Here are some examples of content marketing strategies that Pace Creative has worked on that have exponentially attracted sales leads in the manufacturing industry and energy and resources industry.
Tradeshow Campaign Strategy for Family-Owned Local Business
E.B. Horsman & Son, a family owned and local electric distributor, has been around for over 115 years. Their industry was rapidly changing. Therefore establishing an overarching content marketing and tradeshow strategy was necessary to show their expertise and thought leadership. Additionally, they needed to close the marketing gap between their traditional and digital initiatives.
Working alongside the CEO and sales team, Pace Creative created a tradeshow strategy by establishing goals, identifying target audiences, and recommending promotions and tactics based on the current strategy in place and our additional research. With a comprehensive sales enablement guide and strategy document recommending what to do before, during, and after a tradeshow, E.B Horsman & Son’s tradeshow strategy complemented the content marketing strategy, social media strategy, and strategic landing page that Pace Creative previously established for them.
The newly generated content led to high quality leads, more customer and industry referrals, and higher local SEO ranking.
Content Marketing Strategy for Finning Canada
Finning Canada is a manufacturing company, supplying Caterpillar products and parts for industries worldwide, such as mining, construction, oil and gas, forestry, and more.
Finning needed help creating a SEO-driven content marketing strategy for their website.
We created a content strategy plan focused on the customer journey and target personas. We produced engaging and relatable content that positioned Finning as an expert in their industry.
With the content marketing strategy in place, Finning Canada’s marketing was able to generate more leads and attract potential customers using online and digital channels.
Content Marketing Strategy for Barnes Group
Barnes Group Inc. is a global leader and manufacturer of engineered products in the aerospace industry.
They had a wide range of target audiences. Therefore, they needed to update their marketing strategy to convey the right message to the right audience. Afterwards, they could reap the reward of quality leads!
Pace Creative developed a sales enablement strategy, focusing on the complex customer journey. We developed a strategy focused on the aerospace industry, Barnes Group Inc.’s customer personas, and their unique product.
Barnes Group is now fully equipped with the sales enablement strategies and are reaping high quality online leads!
Next Steps in Sales Enablement
We hope this blogpost explained how important marketing and sales collaboration is! With good communication, sales enablement marketing can get record-breaking ROI!
We know how to craft sales enablement strategies based on your needs. Read about why SEO for the manufacturing industry is a worthy investment here and how it can help your business. To learn more about how we can help you, make sure to get in touch with us!
In the meantime, check us out on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook to see what we are up to!
