We asked you what your current content challenges are and we received a variety of answers. 26% of you said align content between marketing and sales.
So…what are some things you can do to bridge the gap?
We first need to recognize that sales and marketing alignment is a shared system of communication, strategy, and goals. This shared system enables marketing and sales to operate as a unified organization. Working together, aligned teams can deliver high-impact marketing activities, boost sales effectiveness, and ultimately grow revenue.
Use these four tips to align your content marketing and sales teams.
Define Your Buyer Persona Together
A buyer persona is a profile that depicts your ideal customer based on real data of your existing customers and market research. Buyer personas help humanize the ideal customer you are trying to attract. Understanding your customer better and picking the right marketing strategy to convert them is very helpful.
Developing buyer personas includes demographics, prior purchases, behavior patterns, motivations, and other quantifying attributes. The idea is to be as detailed as possible in the development stage. A thorough buyer persona can provide a lot of insight into where you should focus your time, money, and development. With the right focuses, you will attract the most valuable leads and clients.
Both marketing and sales, should collaborate on creating the document. They have unique insights into what challenges customers face and what type of person your product or services are directed towards.
Track Joint Key Performance Indicators (KPI)
Aligning content marketing and sales is one of the biggest challenges for most organizations. The reason for this is key performance indicators (KPI) are measured differently.
Sales KPIs are focused on sales performance. These indicators are specific, measurable, and time-bound. Every organization will have a defined set of KPIs for individuals. These KPIs are quantifiable and used in the performance evaluation of a salesperson.
Content marketing measures KPIs a bit differently. Content marketing measures results around number of pieces published, website traffic, session-to-contact rate, ranking for relevant keywords, and new leads attributed to content.
To sync up your marketing and sales departments, you should find a common KPI.
Working together towards a clear goal will help you detect areas of weakness in your customer acquisition and retention processes. It will encourage collaboration and communication between departments.
Advise Your Sales Team on What Content to Share
Content marketing is highly effective at nurturing leads. However, your marketing team may not always be in control of when leads see what content.
You have likely created content for all stages of your sales funnel. But have you shared your strategy with your sales team?
To have the best impact content generated needs to have a strategy of how the sales team deploys it. One idea is to host regular meetings with your sales teams. Use this time to help the team decide which content to share, when to use it, and where to find it.
Join Forces on Retention
It is not only during customer acquisition that your content marketing and sales needs to align. Your teams should be joining forces on retention as well.
Both your sales and marketing teams benefit from putting a higher focus on customer retention.
You want to work together to increase the lifetime value of your customers.
For example, once a lead converts into a customer, the marketing team needs to change the communications.
Conveyance from attraction to retention. Focus on areas such as product upgrades, trying new products, adding more licenses, etc. Then have your sales team ready and waiting to step in, advise, and close the sale.
Content marketing and sales are two areas of your business that, when synced up, can exponentially improve results for both teams.
Aligning team goals with buyer personas from both teams will create a positive environment for communication and collaboration. This strategy will increase conversions.
