A few months ago, we discussed how you can ensure your copywriters produce compelling content. Now, it’s time for the next step: producing powerful content that propels your prospects to buy. This step is more strategic than you might initially think. Not only must your content intrigue your audience, but it must be delivered when your prospects are ready to hear it and where they are looking.
Get Your Message Heard
Supporting your sales cycle demands meticulous execution, timing, and delivery of your finished content pieces. Your content should create what we call a marketing-enabled process. In brief, that means that your content should support your sales team’s efforts by setting up a compelling story and inspiring your prospects to take action to learn more.
Here’s what your content should do:
- Spark a conversation with your current and prospective clients, advancing them along their purchasing journey. With the right content, your prospects will be better prepared for your sales team to engage with them as they enter the final stage of your pipeline.
- Keep you top-of-mind with your prospects through long sales cycles and multiple touchpoints. When you give your buyers consistent and on-target content, they’ll progress faster through the issues they consider most important.
- Answer your prospects’ biggest questions and solve their problems. That way, you become the expert and the thought leader in the minds of your prospects while keeping them focused on your value in an educational and inspirational manner.
Pick a Topic That Interests Your Prospects
To educate and engage your audience, first select topics that answer the questions your audience is asking. Quiz your sales team and your current customers about their biggest challenges and peruse existing industry content for ideas. Once you know where your prospects’ problems intersect with your solutions, you’re on your way to a real connection — just keep it authentic and original.
Create Compelling Content That Converts
Every piece of content you put together should bolster your customers’ journeys. Does your piece need to support your early funnel? Then go with an entertaining or educational approach. Or, are you targeting prospects mid-funnel? In this case, perhaps you need to convince your prospects with more inspirational content.
It can be difficult to know what content you need at each stage of the customer journey, so take a look at the following graphic for ideas. Don’t forget to include a compelling call-to-action (CTA). Base it off your prospect’s buying stage. In other words, for your top-funnel content, create a CTA that requires minimal commitment, such as an invitation to download a white paper or sign up for a newsletter. Farther down the funnel, introduce CTAs requiring increasing levels of commitment — for example, CTAs that ask your prospects to attend a webinar, schedule a demonstration, or meet with business development.
Publish Your Message Where Prospects Are Looking
Now that you have content, your next objective should be to get it out the door. Learn where your prospects are looking for information and put it there. The farther your reach with your content, the better it will enhance your search engine optimization (SEO) goals by attracting traffic to your website.
Get started with these tips:
- Email it out to your database of contacts
- Offer a download in social media advertisements and digital ads
- Rewrite your content to fill a need in a particular journal’s editorial calendar.
- Consider a paid opportunity through industry publications
- Place it on your website as a blog or as a download
- Approach customers and other industry partners and ask them to link to it
Educate. Engage. Elicit Action.
Creating the perfect content piece to support your sales process is complicated and time-consuming. It takes research, expertise, and attention to get your unique message delivered to the prospects who are most likely ready to listen. Whether you’re having trouble getting started, need help generating ideas, aren’t sure how to put the words together, or simply need assistance spreading your ideas, find a team that can support you.
At SCORR, our creative experts have more experience than any other agency crafting content that resonates within the life sciences industry. Our market intelligence team can help you differentiate by finding a new angle, and our communications team has spent decades building relationships across the industry and leveraging those relationships to get you the best exposure. Let us help you help your sales team and elicit action from your target audience.