The arrangement between sales and the marketing department has been a classic challenge in the B2B ecosystem. Content marketing is a much-needed tool that can be used in bridging the gap between sales and marketing. Content Marketing has matured a lot since its inception. Organizations revolving around sales have benefitted a lot by adopting content marketing that helped in growing their sales. Progressive sales teams don’t just take advantage of content marketing, they participate in the creation and distribution of the content. As a business that operates on sales, you need to learn how to increase B2B sales with Content Marketing.
Sales teams in these organizations help the content writers map the content for the complete buyer’s journey. Nowadays, more and more businesses are following the same pattern of using content marketing for sales. A proper arrangement between the sales department and marketing department.
To fully understand how impactful content marketing on sales is, a survey was done with 1000 B2B marketers. The results stated that over 60% of the organizations had better alignment between sales and content marketing. So following that, in this article, we will be teaching you how to increase B2B sales with content marketing.
5 Ways to Increase B2B Sales with Content Marketing
As you may have understood by now, content marketing directly impacts sales. Here are the best ways content marketing helps in boosting sales.
1. Quality Content Boosts Organic Search Results
The first thing you need to know is that organic traffic is the best source of new visitors to your website. The more traffic you get, the better the outcome of your sales. Search engines have various algorithms that rank websites based on the quality, relevancy, and accuracy of the content.
Search engines also offer weightage to the social engagement of your content such as shares and likes. If your content is accurate, informative, and fresh then it would be shared more and more. Websites that have high domain authority would also prefer to link to your site if you keep producing content that’s relevant and tops the rankings. The era of stuffing keywords and backlink exchange is gone, if you can produce great quality content, then you can improve your sales by a lot.
2. Generate More Leads With Gated Content
Businesses can generate more leads with different content types such as white papers, ebooks, research reports, webinars, etc if you make that content gated. Based on the required filters, the complexity of the web forms can be enhanced.
It’s also a custom to add questions to get the basic business card information. Although the practice of gated content has been criticized by a lot of marketers as it can lead to a poor customer experience. If you really know your audience then you can make them answer questions, have them provide basic information, and generate leads. While most users don’t like to answer personal questions, it’s still a great way to produce high-quality leads.
3. Increase Conversion Rate by Mapping Content
Organic website traffic has been one of the most valued performance indicators for marketers. Marketers have been able to generate traffic for websites, but they tend to have a problem in nurturing and converting this traffic into sales. One of the main reasons for that is the lack of relevant content on the website.
Google Ads or PPC Ads on social media platforms offer several filters for marketers in order to display ads to the ideal audience. A large chunk of this traffic goes to a few landing pages with generic content. The need is to analyze the pattern of content consumption by the audience.
4. Use Content to Reduce Post-Purchase Dissatisfaction
In spite of doing a lot of research and comparison before buying a product, post-purchase dissatisfaction is inevitable. Most of the time the dissatisfaction is not because of the product, it’s because of the post-purchase service.
Therefore, it is very important for businesses to keep their existing content rather than running behind new ones. Retaining a customer is a collective responsibility of the account management staff, sales team, customer support staff, and marketing team.
To make the relationship between your customers and your brand livelier and warmer, you should share product-related information, new updates, and new product releases. The customers need to be updated about the services that support the purchase decision.
As a business, you can’t get better leads than satisfied customers who will recommend your products. Not only do they recommend your brand to 10 more people, but they will also most probably come back for a repeated purchase. The main thing you need to do is to build content that shows your customers that you care about them.
5. Boost Your Online Reputation By Amplifying Quality Content
With positive reviews and remarks about a product or service, negative remarks are just around the corner. In the current era of online reviews, it is super easy to say negative things without revealing one’s identity.
As a business, or as a marketer, it is not suitable for you to hide or delete unfavorable comments, reviews, or remarks. In 2021, it is essential to generate quality and relevant content to demonstrate your leadership and command over the subject.
If you keep generating good content and treat your customers ideally, then you can amplify the positive remarks tenfold. It’s needless to mention that it will result in better sales once you boost your online reputation.