Everyone is searching for compelling content — but what if I told you that wasn’t enough to close sales?
Apart from content that’s compelling, you also need content that propels your prospects to buy. This type of content is more strategic than you might think. Not only must it intrigue and engage your audience, but it must also be delivered where your prospects are looking and when they are ready to hear it.
The Essentials of Content
Supporting your sales cycle demands meticulous execution, precise timing, and the engaging delivery of highly valuable content pieces. Your content should create a “marketing-enabled process,” meaning it should naturally support your sales team’s efforts. In doing so, this content should both tell a compelling story and inspire your prospects to take action.
What are the three essential goals all content should accomplish?
SPARK
CONVERSATION
Guide your clients through their purchasing journey with content that makes them feel empowered, inspired, and informed.
KEEP YOU
TOP OF MIND
Sustain interest through long sales cycles and multiple touch points with consistent, on-target content at just the right cadence.
ANSWER
BIG QUESTIONS
Become an expert and thought leader in the minds of your prospects by demystifying complexities and solving their toughest problems.
Content That Connects
To educate and engage your audience, first select topics that are most likely to pique their interest. Quiz your sales team and your current customers about their biggest challenges, explore possibilities for more scientific analysis, and peruse existing industry content for ideas. Once you know where an organization’s inherent problems intersect with the solutions you provide, you’re much closer to a real connection — and real connections are exactly what propel your prospects to buy.
Content That Converts
Every piece of content you put together should be mindful of the customer’s journey and contribute something meaningful to their overall experience when interfacing with your company and your brand. Are you aiming to support prospects early on in your funnel? Offer content that is entertaining or educational. Are you targeting prospects midway through their sales journey? Shoot for something inspirational or highly customized.
Of course, identifying each customer’s position in your sales funnel isn’t always a clear-cut process. It can be difficult to know what content you need at each stage of every customer’s unique journey. Fortunately, it’s much easier to tailor your content to your prospects’ specific needs when you categorize content creation according to three distinct goals: generate awareness, facilitate consideration, and influence decision.
Each piece of content should be accompanied by a compelling call to action (CTA). Much like the content itself, the CTA should be based on the prospect’s buying stage. Simply put, top-funnel content lends itself to CTAs that require minimal commitment, such as an invitation to download a white paper or sign up for a newsletter. Farther down the funnel, your content should introduce CTAs that invite more commitment, such as attending a webinar, scheduling a demonstration, or meeting with a business development representative.
Let’s Get Started
Once you have compelling and powerful content, your next objective should be to share it far and wide. The broader and more immediate your reach, the greater your returns on search engine optimization (SEO). So, learn where your prospects are looking for information, then put it there.
For example:
- Email content to your database of contacts.
- Offer a download in social media advertisements and digital ads.
- Use content as source material for an earned editorial pitch.
- Publish content using paid media opportunities.
- Place content on your website as a blog or gated download.
- Request backlinks to content pieces from clients and industry partners.
The Right Support
Creating the perfect content piece to enrich your sales process can be complex and time-consuming. It takes leading expertise, precise targeting, and quality content creation to get your unique message delivered to the prospects who are most ready to listen. Are you facing internal capacity challenges, or simply need to take your content creation to the next level? SCORR offers unmatched support across all content channels.
Our creative experts have more experience than any other agency when it comes to crafting content that resonates with your health sciences audience. Our market intelligence team can help you identify the essential statistics and proof points that will make the biggest impact, and our communications team has spent decades building and leveraging editorial relationships across the industry.
Ready to harness the closing power of compelling content that drives sales? Let’s talk.
About the Author
Haley Steinhardt