Tips to get your content driving sales
It’s all about informing and providing invaluable and relevant information. And in this way, you will be well on your way to building trust. By providing something of value you will be earning a repeat audience who will begin to display loyalty. Think of not only answering pain points with solutions but also what else might be of interest. Perhaps a thought leadership piece on industry trends that could be sent to prospects via Sales.
But you’ll also need to grab attention in the first instance. So ensure that your content is accessible. Use strong visual assets to grab attention and interactive elements to maintain it. There are a number of tools out there that can help you through the process of content creation. Research them.
Find ones that work for you. And get cracking. It will though be essential that whatever you use has a solid analytics package built in. Only by measuring your content performance will you be able to improve it.
Understand exactly who you are generating content for. Use personas. And listening to your current customers will be crucial in providing solutions that will delight potential customers.
Revisit what type of content has delighted your current customer base and both repurpose and produce more of the same. And get feedback on what their pain points are too – this will be equally important in feeding what kind of content you should be best generating and could provide answers to questions potential customers may have before they even have to ask them.
Make sure your content has every opportunity to be read. It’s imperative to have a presence on social media even if it doesn’t appear to have a direct impact on lead generation. Your potential customers will be there and it provides you with another opportunity to let them know how you can help them.
Hashtags, mentions, re-tweeting their insights, direct communication via replies or messages are all important to experiment with. Be friendly. Be social. And make sure your Sales team shares content too. The more exposure, the better.
These are probably one of the most effective ways in which you can prove to potential customers how your product or service is so absolutely right for them, especially in a B2B content.
Word of mouth recommendation has been proven over and over again to help drive sales. And today hardly any purchase is made without rooting around to see what others have to say. From a simple paper back book to a sophisticated accounting package. So get creating awesome and engaging customer case studies and get them out there to all those potential buyers.
Case studies are the top content type for buyers, with 78 percent accessing this format type when researching purchases in the past 12 months (vs. 72 percent in 2016). [Source: DemandGen Report – 2017 Content Preferences Survey]
Analysing the heck out of your content’s performance will ensure you can optimise its performance by gearing it specifically to helping serve potential customers.
Use data gathered on reader behaviour. The more granular this is the more you’ll be able to successfully steer your content in the right direction.
Page by page performance, length of time spent on a piece of content, where readers drop off, what they share on socially – all these things are powerful insights that will hugely help knowing what content to create more of and how to improve existing content.