How Content Marketing Drives Sales
While marketing and sales are not the same department, they should work in sync. Marketing and sales are a combined effort to attract your ideal audience and close leads.
Marketing efforts should not only inform your audience about the benefits of purchasing the product or service, but also warm up the audience and make them feel connected to the community, so they feel more decisive when making a purchase. Content marketing specifically, can drive sales by strategically creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and engage a target audience.
What is content marketing and how does it specifically drive safes? We'll answer both of these questions in this blog.
What is Content Marketing
According to Coursera, "Content marketing is creating and distributing valuable, relevant content to attract and engage your brand’s target audience. It often signifies expertise in a particular area and helps promote brand awareness."
In other words, it's blogs, social media content, podcasts, email newsletters, videos, opt-ins, templates, and more, that is created for a brand to promote, inform, and entertain the audience surrounding your product/service.
How Content Marketing Can Drive Sales
Building Brand Awareness
By consistently producing high-quality content, you can increase your brand’s visibility and reach. For example, social media, both organic and paid, can reach a wide variety of audiences and open new doors for your brand. Social media marketing efforts allow for your brand to be directly in front of your current audience, and expand into more markets beyond it. Optimized blog posts can be another example of this. With just a simple Google search of a question, viewers can be drawn to your site if you are using powerful keywords to pull them in.
Establishing Authority and Trust
With an increase in trust in your brand-customer relationship, they are more likely to purchase from you! Have you ever searched for a brand on Google and their website looked less than professional, to say the least, or searched for a brand on Instagram and their last post was from 2020? Staying up to date with professional content can be key in keeping your audience's attention and building an online community.
Educating the Audience
Informative content helps potential customers understand their problems and how your product or service can solve them. Educational content can guide them through the current issues they experience on a daily level, and convert it in to how your product or service can fit these gaps for them.
Improving SEO and Organic Traffic
Content optimized for search engines can increase your visibility on search results pages. Social media platforms are search engines! Content within each platform should be catered toward how your target audience is using it and searching for what they like or need.
Lead Generation
Webinars, free guides, weekly newsletters, and other opt-ins can be used to create an email list and marketing to this list. Email marketing remains a powerful marketing outlet. The ROI of email marketing averages $36 for every dollar spent.
Customer Loyalty
Providing valuable content even after a sale helps in maintaining customer engagement and loyalty. Long-term customer relationships can become a referral source, a collaboration effort, and even a customer for life. It's all about how you nurture your followers once you see them rolling in.
Supporting the Sales Team
Sales teams can use content as a tool to address potential customer questions and objections. Social listening is everything! You can gauge how your audience feels about features and situations to get to know them on a 1:1 level, and that's how you can continue to adapt your brand around your target audience.
In sum, content marketing drives sales by building awareness, establishing trust, educating the audience, and nurturing relationships. By creating strategized content, your sales and marketing team can work in tangent to guide them through the sales funnel and convert.
