Rule #1: Get organized. Your sales content strategy needs to follow the buyer’s journey. Your buyer’s journey directly correlates with all of your sales funnel stages and is impacted by the type of content you offer in each one.
When you take the time to 1. Organize your sales content in the funnels and 2. Identify any gaps within each funnel stage, you will be able to track the success of the buyer’s journey with ease.
Gaps in the funnel may include:
- A lack of content at a certain stage
- Content that doesn’t actually match the stage (ex. Awareness content that is being sent to the bottom of the funnel leads – these prospects don’t need to see this!)
- Failure to provide content that meets the needs of the prospect
- Valueless content that the prospect doesn’t care about
Keep in mind that the most powerful part of your sales content strategy is located in the BOFU stage, or the bottom of the funnel. This is where your prospects make their final decision on whether to do business with you or not. But, this doesn’t mean you should slack off on the other stages of the funnel.
Let’s take a closer look at the type of content you should provide in each stage.
Top of the Funnel (TOFU)
TOFU ads include all of the marketing content you deploy to spread awareness of your brand and invite leads to interact with your business. Outreach campaigns and the identification of ideal customer profiles usually takes place at the top of the sales funnel.
During this phase, be sure to measure active engagement of new accounts as well as reach.
Measure the following:
- What content is successfully grabbing the attention of your target accounts in this stage?
- Are there any content gaps or desired leads that are slipping through the cracks?
- Are your outreach campaigns actually working?
If you already have an account based marketing approach, then your sales team should be familiar with the specific clients you’re targeting. The type of content your sales team sends to the accounts should match this stage of the game and can include blog posts, informative e-books, and white papers.
Pro-Tip:
Remember, content that spreads brand awareness and builds trust with your company is highly encouraged at this point.
Your sales team has their foot in the door with an ideal account – good!
Now that the prospect is aware of your brand and is interested, they enter into the middle of the sales funnel. At this point, the client is actively looking for a solution to a problem (that YOU can hopefully solve for them) and they’re creating a list of required capabilities to alleviate this pain point.
Next, you’re stepping into the stage where your content needs to provide immense value for the prospect. They WILL be looking for quality value. And if they don’t get it from you, there is a good chance they’ll get it from a competitor.
So, you need to make sure your sales content is on its A game!
Wondering what else is important at this stage?
Relationship building and lead nurturing campaigns are also critical. You can use content like educational videos, entertaining podcasts, exclusive webinars, and comparison guides to take the relationship to the next level.
Pro-tip:
If your offering is complicated or has a long onboarding phase, be sure to explain it in as simple terms as possible during this stage. This will make your prospect feel more at ease to follow through with the buying process.
Bottom of the Funnel (BOFU)
Listen up!
Your prospect has just entered into the key decision-making stage of their buyer’s journey! This is called the bottom of the sales funnel, and it’s where you convert prospects into revenue.
During this stage, you MUST hone in on your client’s fears and frustrations.
Are they hesitant to do business with you? If so, WHY? How can you alleviate their worries?
Your sales team should have simple, straightforward answers to the concerns of the account’s internal team (CEO, CFO, CMO, core managers, etc.), build urgency, show the value of your offering, and explain the cost of inaction (or what the client will lose out on if they DON’T do business with you).
How do you do this?
By creating sales content that has strong call-to-actions, gets to the bottom of any push backs or mental barriers, and communicates how VALUABLE your business is for the client.
Pro-Tip:
Live demos, sales decks, free trials or demos, and highly personalized sales messaging will help the prospect make an informed decision to work with your company.