Content Will Close the Communication Gap Between Your Marketing and Sales Team
Your marketing team versus your sales team
Regardless of the size of your organization or the volume of your profit, sales and new business is something you always want to have a good eye on. And it does make sense to look at the long term and have a plan for how your firm will generate revenue. You want to make sure it will come from new and existing clients.
It would be great to rely on a good marketing team that gets on well with your sales team. This holds true even for your small business that may have one marketer and one sales rep.
So your marketing team creates great campaigns, based on solid content marketing ethos, which efficiently reach out to all your target audiences. Consequently, these campaigns create leads for your sales team that they can close easily right?
Well, that is the dream scenario for any organization, not just yours. However, it does not work like that in real life. For starters, the connection between sales and marketing is not like a fiberglass connection. Rather, it is more like a slow dial-up connection and this is the case in many companies.
Creating good marketing campaigns that lead to an abundance of sales qualified leads is not that easy. The ROI of any marketing activity may not always be that straight forward. The marketing team will create leads but from their dial-up connection with sales, they most likely will get a message that those leads were not “sales qualifiable”.
On the sales side of life, the process is really simple, they are trying to get the signature on the dotted line. When that fails to happen fast enough or often enough, the sales team tends to start questioning the quality of the leads and how they were generated. The weak communication -the dial-up connection- just adds to all of that.
High-quality content for high -quality leads is the solution for your small business
As an entrepreneur, you need to create time to oversee these issues correctly and be able to recognize the pain points of the departments (and have a genuine will to fix it). But even then you will find that it’s not an easy fix. Your option can be to invest in better campaigns and in the training of employees, hiring experienced professionals, etc. If you are a small to medium size organization that kind of time and money may not be at your disposal. So, is there a solution?
Behold, content to the rescue! OK, so according to Julia McCoy of Content Marketing Institute, “content marketing generates over three times as many leads as outbound marketing and costs 62% less”. In the same article: ‘9 Stats That Will Make You Want to Invest in Content Marketing’ she reports that “small businesses with blogs get 126% more lead growth than small businesses without. Check out 12 more things that will happen when your small business starts a blog.
I think that the use of content marketing will increase more and more in the coming years. As an SME you have a chance to correct the many processes with your content strategies. It can actually help with your sales and marketing dial-up connection problem. How? Well simply by allowing the marketing team who know how to talk the talk create content in cohesion with the sales team who walk the walk when it comes to getting that signature on the dotted line.
We have already mentioned the benefit of saving costs by using content marketing. Of course, as an SME you might not have the budget for training or hiring to fix a revenue problem. Content can help here, as more and more of your target audience moves to consume content before even reaching out to you, for you not to invest in content marketing will be a waste.
The secret is creating content to become the go-to guy for information
Branding through content, yes it’s a thing and most successful businesses implement this strategy. However, it is highly dependent on the quality of your content. In order to create content that speaks to your audience, you need to understand your target audience and their pain points which might not always be directly related to the product you are selling. However, you want to make a mark in your industry so that when it comes to the information and knowledge about a certain issue you are the go-to person.
Once you have that established, the next step is simple. You should basically treat the content you create as an alternative to your sales rep’s cold calling and traditional prospecting. The ROI of these traditional tactics is decreasing due to the buyer taking control by educating herself through – you guessed it – content.
There are many opportunities for SME’s to use the science of content creation as a sales tool and save money while uniting the sales and marketing teams.
What problems have you come across when qualifying leads? Do you agree that content is the solution? Would you be willing to invest in it?
- Will content marketing for lead generation work for you? - July 2, 2019
One thought on “Will content marketing for lead generation work for you?”
Its hard to find knowledgeable people on this topic, but you sound like you know what youre talking about! Thanks