How to Develop an Effective Content Strategy to Boost Sales?

Is the content of your website solely focused on driving traffic that your sales team can do nothing productive with? You might be losing prospects and sales opportunities!

The content you have already created can be reused and improved to directly boost sales. You can also create more content specifically designed to increase sales and assist your sales team.

Want to know how to proceed? Check out our sales support content strategy guide and let us help you enhance your content!

Understanding sales support content

Sales support content is any content that directly contributes to increasing sales. Most of the website content aims to increase traffic and brand awareness, with sales being a secondary objective.

But there is potential synergy between your content team and your sales team. Creating a sales support content strategy can leverage this synergy by bringing the two teams together and using content to empower the sales team.

Exploring the terminology: Sales support content and content marketing

People sometimes confuse sales support content with content marketing. There is a significant overlap between the two terms, but their goals are very different.

Content marketing is a broad term that refers to marketing practices that use content primarily to achieve traffic and awareness objectives. It is mainly associated with creating blog articles aimed at generating organic traffic from Google or Bing. But it can also exist in the form of video content marketing on YouTube, TikTok, or SMM across various platforms.

All content marketing is customer-oriented and targets the top of the sales funnel. It increases brand awareness and often serves as the first point of contact with users.

Sales support content aims to promote sales by directly assisting the sales team or influencing prospects who are closer to the end of the sales funnel.

Internal sales support content is meant for the sales team and is designed to help them better understand the customer or product, such as battle cards containing common customer objections or an internal wiki.

External content is generally content located in the middle or bottom of the funnel. It aims to help prospects better understand your company and increase their chances of making a purchase.

Developing an effective content strategy to facilitate sales

It's not always a good idea to create content hastily to spur sales, even if you have some good ideas. Start by creating a sales support content strategy.

That’s where you begin.

Audit existing content

As most organizations don't have a lot of internal content, it's better to start there. Take a look at your sales scripts, presentations, customer personas, and any internal documentation meant for salespeople.

Judge how informative and useful it is, and whether it's up-to-date and effective. Making a decision is somewhat subjective, so be sure to gather feedback from your sales team.

Next, audit the customer-facing content you have published. Much of the audit can be done using Google Analytics.

Identify blog pages that guide prospects toward the end of the sales process. For blog pages, converting actions such as purchasing a product or subscribing may be a priority. If that's not happening on your blog pages, consider adding a pop-up or integrating a CTA within the text.

It can also be a conversion action that moves a prospect further down the funnel, such as signing up for a webinar, requesting gated content, or subscribing to the newsletter. If you don't find pages that do this, consider adding a form at the bottom of your articles.

Audit the competitors' proposals

Your next step is to audit your competitors and the content they produce. While you cannot access their internal documentation, analyzing the content aimed at customers is entirely feasible.

Examine their content that ranks for the same keywords as yours.

Using manual analysis and SEO tools, analyze the most important metrics of organic competitors for the chosen keywords, including content type, length, media files present, estimated traffic volume, page quality, page performance metrics, and much more. Based on these metrics, you will be able to plan your SEO strategy.

Another effective way to increase your online presence and sales is to produce shareable content. Use a backlink checker, such as the one offered by SE Ranking, to identify the pages of competing sites that attract the most backlinks and analyze the content of those pages as well.

Talk to your salespeople

Collecting feedback from your team is an integral part of creating a sales support content strategy. When auditing the existing content intended for your employees, be sure to organize a meeting with the entire sales team and a one-on-one interview with the team leader.

Gather their opinions on the drawbacks of existing content and their ideas on new content that can be added.

Create an ideal customer profile

When preparing for content creation, it is very important to create an ideal customer profile, a representation of your typical customers. The ideal customer profile will allow your content creators to know who they are writing for and will enable them to create a more compelling message.

Generally, an ideal customer profile includes the following elements:

• Company size;
• Industry;
• Location;
• The challenges they face.

You can learn more about the last point by interviewing existing customers in person or through surveys.

With this information, you can make connections with ideal customers by providing interesting examples and discussing the challenges they face.

Create content to fill gaps

The most time-consuming part of the business content strategy is content creation. Centralize all the information you gathered during previous research, plan a content calendar, and delegate tasks to your writers.

However, do not focus on creating perfect content on the first try. The advantage of digital publishing lies in the fact that you can (and should) improve content over time. So try to produce quality content first and enhance it as you analyze its performance.

It’s preferable to prioritize content aimed at employees, as it has the potential to produce results faster.

Involve the sales and marketing departments in promoting the content

Your sales team is one of the most important target audiences for sales support content. Make sure they know how to use it effectively.

When implementing new sales scripts or new internal documents, provide salespeople with guidance and resources on how to properly use the content elements. Consider organizing webinars for pieces requiring direct customer contact.

Include your marketing team in distributing content meant for customers. Since it is intended for the bottom of the funnel, it will need help to gain views. Consider implementing an internal linking plan, promoting it to prospects who are at an appropriate stage of the funnel, or using social media to disseminate it.

Give all team members a way to provide feedback on the new content. Your sales support content strategy is just getting started. Therefore, the more feedback you collect, the better it will improve.

Measure effectiveness

There are two main methods to measure the impact of your sales support content strategy.

To create customer-facing content, the simplest way is to measure the conversion rate using Google Analytics. Thanks to GA's attribution feature, you can also see sales where your content played a small role, meaning prospects who stop on one page before being converted on another.

It is a bit more challenging to measure the effect of content aimed at employees. One way to achieve this is to record key sales indicators before and after implementing the new content. Focus on indicators such as monthly growth, MRR, churn rate, and other related metrics.

If these indicators improve several months after creating new content for the sales team, you have succeeded.

Summary

Even though content marketing is often considered a traffic generation technique, it can be very effective in boosting sales. But only when used in tandem with other techniques.

When the different departments in your company work together, they perform better. Include your content team in the picture, and sales will increase.

Follow the advice from our guide and test different types of content to improve your results.

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