Sales Content is Your Friend

Building Supplemental Docs For Every Stage of the Buyer’s Journey

Having control over the buyer’s journey can lead to an uptick in sales, and it’s something every business wishes they could have. While it’s not always possible, businesses can have better insight into their potential buyer’s journey, which can lead to more control over the frequency of conversions. Creating a strategy that targets both managing your content and the way it is presented to potential buyers is one way to do that.

Start with a goal

Be specific. Of course, you want conversions, but what does conversion/sales success look like to you? Does this change for each potential buyer? One of the most important parts when it comes to building conversions is knowing your audience. Having a clear idea of who your buyers are will help you decide in what direction you’re trying to point them. Before a business can start acquiring conversions, they must bring their audience to the right place. This could mean bringing them to a particular product or product type, or it could also be something as simple as setting up a potential buyer with the appropriate salesperson, taking a tour, or downloading a white paper on a particular topic or promotion.

Think big

Businesses spend a lot of time, energy and money on the big pieces of content on their sites, such as white papers, videos, and webinars. Taking a closer look at these bigger pieces of content can provide valuable insight into which smaller projects you should be investing more time in.

After this close examination, make a list of all of the places you can explore ideas further in smaller posts. Again, this goes back to knowing your audience. How are your customers—or potential customers—finding and consuming your content? If your consumers find you via Facebook or Twitter, invest more time in quality posts that highlight specific products or services your business offers. If your newsletters you send via email bring on more conversions, perhaps you need to send them more often. A monthly email may not be enough—see what happens when you send messages on a biweekly basis. Does your audience click off your website or social media platforms after watching your video for thirty seconds? Videos can be costly to produce; consider doing shorter social videos that engage your customers quickly.

Map it out

Your next step should be to ask where this mini-content should go. While considering this, it’s important to be consistent. Regardless of where your potential buyers are consuming your content—be it on Facebook or your website—your content shouldn’t deviate from your mission and brand.

Creating content that reinforces your mission and brand and looking at how your audience is consuming your content will make it easier to map out your future content marketing strategy. First of all, your content should be run through plagiarism checker, then look into when and where your audience is viewing your content and plan ahead by adding your potential content strategy into a project management tool with due dates, dependencies, and analytics (click here for great project management tool recommendations). Are you seeing the most traffic at a particular time on your website or social media platforms? Plan your posts to coincide with those peak times. Schedule your newsletters to arrive in your audience’s inbox at a time when they’re most likely to read it.

Lead your audience to where they should go next

Your Call to Action (CTA) should prompt your audience where they need to go next. Because of this, it’s imperative that you’re leading them to the right place. You can do this by making your CTA short, sweet and full of the excitement needed to turn your audience into buyers of your product or service. If your CTA is too clunky, your potential customers are going to stop reading and click off of your site or social media platform. Your CTA shouldn’t be too pushy—your audience should feel as though they are choosing to click on your link instead of feeling like they’re being forced into it.

Put it to the test

How can you tell early on if your strategies are working? Try using an analytics service, such as Google Analytics, which can tell you how many page views your website has received, what your audience is clicking on and how long they’re spending on your site. What are the most popular clicks? If videos seem to be doing well, perhaps it’s time to invest more in your multimedia strategy. If no one is using Twitter to get to your website, perhaps that platform is a wasted use of your social media efforts. If you’re seeing success from a particular strategy, repeat it and try to improve upon it as you see fit.

Creating a marketing strategy that works won’t happen overnight, but creating thoughtful content for your audience and being willing to change things up can drastically improve your conversion rates. And remember: changes don’t have to be significant. Sometimes starting small can make a big difference.