When your marketing team writes a blog, what do they use as a measure of success? The number of visits to the page? Bounce rate? Time spent on the page?
These are all good metrics to establish whether the people who visited the blog found it interesting or worthwhile…
But let’s take a step back. How is that blog going to contribute to your wider sales objectives? And how do you know that the people reading the blog are the right people?
It all comes down to the relationship between your sales team and your marketing team.
Marketing
Your marketing team should be, at a minimum, ensuring that they are creating content that will appeal to your company’s target audience. For example, although writing a blog aimed at a junior member of staff might seem like an easy win, these aren’t going to be the people who decide to work with your company. Instead, your content should be aimed at senior decision makers.
This might seem counter-intuitive. Targeting content at a smaller audience will reduce the number of clicks you get (as you know, there are fewer senior decision makers in a company than junior members of the team). However, by pitching your content in this way your marketing team can increase the likelihood that the clicks your blog gets are valuable.
So, you’ve got the VP of a company in your target audience reading your blog. Great. Now what?
First, make sure there’s a call to action at the end of every blog so that the reader is compelled to get in touch, or continue getting to know your company. For example, this can take the form of a downloadable guide that requires a reader to input their email address to access it.
Once you have your visitor’s details, you should check they’re in your target audience. This can be achieved by a whole host of marketing software (for example when you work with us, a subscription to the marketing automation software Sharpspring is included).
Now your sales team have got the details of this VP and are ready to reach out and do what they do best. Job done, right?
Nope. We’re about to let you in on the secret to adding even more value to your marketing and sales cycle. Hold on to your hats…
Sales
Your sales team have the benefit of knowing which leads have ended in a deal, which type of person (or company) is most likely to convert, and what kind of offer and language appeals to your people. They have the benefit of hindsight and of actually having direct conversations with the people your marketers are trying to attract.
Through these conversations they naturally gather information about the problems your audience is having, and what they’re dealing with on a day-to-day basis. This kind of insight is invaluable to marketers.
It’s a no-brainer that they should share that information with your marketers, so they can improve the content they produce and the way they promote it—but in our experience this doesn’t always happen.
Our top tip? Ensure your marketing and sales functions are regularly communicating and that there are open channels that encourage a continuous feedback loop. This doesn’t have to be formal—here at JTN we simply use a Slack channel to share any insights that we’ve learned.
However you choose to do it, getting your marketing and sales functions to align and work together is the key to unlocking the potential of both teams.
Got the sales team and the insight, but no one to do anything with it? You’re in the right place. We’re experts at producing content that resonates with decision makers, and understanding how to develop and improve our activity based on experience.
We also make sure that all the content we produce for our clients is designed to generate leads. This means that all you need to do is what you do best—close the deal.
To chat about how we can help your company, get in touch with our account manager Kelly [email protected] or call +1 877 465 7740 / +44 20 7099 5535
