4 min read

How to Use Content to Supercharge Your Sales Team

How to Use Content to Supercharge Your Sales Team

Revenue growth is the number one priority for many businesses. But as we all know, driving sustained, profitable growth is far from easy. Doing so requires significant investments in research and development to create new technologies, marketing campaigns that boost awareness, and sales teams that close deals – and that’s just for starters. 

All of these investments are prerequisites for success: core pillars of any successful business model. Think of them as legs of a stool: take one away, and the whole business can easily fall.  

But there’s a new pillar emerging, and many businesses are being left behind. This new pillar helps businesses build closer relationships with their customers, expand their marketing to new audiences, and yes, drive revenue growth. That pillar: content. 

Content is no longer just a nice-to-have add-on to your business model, it’s now a key component. Designed and executed right, a comprehensive content strategy is the tide that raises all ships, elevating every area of your business to new heights. 

Content strategies turbocharge your sales growth by attracting lots of high-interest, pre-qualified visitors to your website. They help you answer prospects' questions before they can even ask them, freeing your sales team up to spend more time closing deals. And they help your business stand apart from the competition by showcasing your understanding of the challenges customers face and the unique approach your business takes to solving them. Content even boosts the morale and loyalty of your people, helping them build a reputation as thought leaders in your industry. 

Now, this doesn’t happen overnight. Investing in content today isn’t going to have a noticeable impact on your sales numbers this month, or even this quarter. This is a long-term investment, but it’s one that’s proven to pay off in multiples, no matter what type of business you’re in. 

Curious to learn more? Here’s a couple of the benefits that a comprehensive content strategy can deliver for your sales team. 

Driving Increased Quantity and Quality of Leads

Think of your sales process as a funnel. A large cohort of potential customers start at the top of the funnel, but as they progress through your sales process, some percentage of them fall away, never to return.  As a leader, you should be constantly optimizing every touchpoint throughout this process to maximize the number of prospects that you convert to customers – it’s one of the primary ways to grow sales. 

But there’s another way to grow sales: pour more leads into the top of your funnel. Usually, that requires an investment in paid marketing: running paid search campaigns for example, or prospecting lookalike audiences on Facebook. That’s all well and good, but you have to pay for that traffic, and it can be a challenge just to get to breakeven this way, never mind profitably growing your sales. 

Building out a comprehensive content strategy enables you to bring all this traffic in without the expense of paying for every single click. Of course, you’ll have to develop the content, which isn’t free. But would you rather pay a few hundred dollars for a high-quality piece of content that drives traffic for years to come, or a few hundred dollars for a couple of dozen clicks on Google that are gone in an afternoon?

Creating content isn’t just about the quantity of leads you’re able to drive in the long-term, it’s also about the quality of those leads. The content that you create should speak to the challenges and questions that your customers have. When they search for the answers to these, they’ll end up right where you want them: on your website. 

By investing in content, you’re positioning your business to attract higher calibre leads in greater numbers. That alone represents a huge win for your sales team, but we can do better. Let’s explore how meaningful content can help your business to convert more of these leads into paying customers.

content business resources 

Boosting Conversions By Providing Value

Once prospects have entered your sales funnel, it’s important you make every effort possible to convert them. There’s all kinds of things you can experiment with, from new landing pages to A/B testing your ad copy, but for the most part, these offer marginal improvements. 

The key to increasing conversion rates lies in convincing your prospects that your product or service offers the most value to them. A content strategy provides you with a multitude of ways to do that. Here’s a few content strategies that work well:

  • Buying Guides: define how customers should approach and evaluate different solutions in your category, on your terms. 
  • Competitor Comparisons: your customers already know about your competitors, so there’s no sense trying to keep them secret. Instead, provide a fair comparison on metrics of your choosing, and highlight the use cases where your product represents the best solution. 
  • Answering Questions: preemptively answer customer questions and set expectations about the onboarding and rollout process to remove friction and uncertainty in the buying process. 
  • News Summaries: share summaries of key industry events, like major news or conferences. Don’t forget to share your unique perspective to position your people as thought leaders. 
  • Case Studies: pen case studies and testimonials highlighting the value your product adds to the lives of your customers.
  • Educational Content: invest in creating content that helps your customers understand key strategic ideas and principles, helping them improve their business. 

The overarching goal of all of these activities is to provide additional value to your customers, helping them better navigate their problems and arrive at a solution that they’re happy with. And sure, you’re not going to win every customer, but you never were in the first place. Building out a library of content helps you win a lot more deals than you did before. Even when you lose out to a competitor, you can bet your prospect will remember you next time around.  

Building and Executing a Content Strategy

Convinced that a content strategy makes sense for your business? Awesome. Your next step is to identify a quarterback that’s responsible for running every element of it. That individual––or team––will define your goals, draw up your strategy, and call every play on a day to day basis. 

Exactly what that looks like depends on your business, but you can expect it to involve a mix of technical and creative skills, from managing on-page SEO to interviewing executives and translating their thoughts into meaningful articles. It’s a complex blend of skills, and often, finding the right person can be like finding a unicorn. 

You might already have that person inside your business. But if you don’t, the team at Hire A Writer is here to help. We’ve got expertise in all areas of content strategy: from nailing your on-page SEO to creating thought leadership content that sets your business apart. 

Interested in learning more? Let’s talk.

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