If your business wants to stand out from the competition, and become a thought leader, it’s critical to publish high-quality content consistently across multiple channels – your blog, website, and social media accounts.
In fact, that should be your #1 goal of content marketing - to be the subject matter expert to everyone in your eco-system (your technology partners, prospects, clients, and current & future employees).
One of the main reasons businesses struggle in this area is there is no documented content strategy in place. What’s more, the responsibility of content creation often lies with team members who lack the technical expertise and understanding about your integration services but might have social media knowledge or are in administrative support roles.
There’s nothing wrong with this approach, however, if you want to create content that consistently adds value to the sales process, there needs to be a strategy in place.
So, what does that strategy look like? We’ll cover all the details in this three-part article.
#1 Get Your Sales Team Engaged
Your sales team knows better than anyone what your prospects, customers and end user accounts need and what security challenges they are looking to solve. They know the questions customers ask before the sale, during a site visit, or project install and afterwards when service needs arise. In short, the sales team is the key to publishing high-quality content.
Getting them involved seems great in theory. The reality is your sales team is busy. Busy with quotes, managing customer accounts, prospecting, hitting their quotas and a ton more – and when it comes time to get their help, they might not be available.
So, to avoid this frustration, strategy #1 is to get your Sales Team to buy-In.
This might seem obvious, but you’d be amazed how many sales teams don’t understand why content marketing is important, how it works or what they can do to help.
That’s the key to getting started and ensuring they make time for it when needed.
Help them by sharing the following:
- Content marketing will position our company as subject matter experts to everyone in our ecosystem (the why).
- By regularly publishing blog articles, social media posts, and building content resources on our website we’ll be able to shorten sales cycles, get more prospects in our pipeline, answer their most pressing questions and more (how it works).
- To produce high-quality content, the kind that will resonate the best with end users, prospects, and even current accounts, we need guidance on topics we are creating and promoting (what they can do to help).
Set the stage and get buy-in from the sales team as your first step with the points above. Both your leadership and sales team will appreciate the value and their role in the effort.
Next time we’ll cover step 2 in this strategy – from start to finish, running the perfect Content Marketing Meeting in 30 minutes or less.
