Providing engaging and free educational content should be something that every company offers. Why? Doing so gives your potential customers a reason to buy from you, builds your authority, and earns trust.
Here are a few objections I’ve heard over the years:
- “Why should I give away free content? It costs me money and time to produce it!”
- “Do white papers, webinars and guides really generate sales and leads? I haven’t seen them work for my company.”
- “No one is reading anything I write about, so why should I continue to invest in content?”
To combat these objections, here are a few content marketing stats that you should be aware of:
- 56% of marketers believe that personalized content promotes higher engagement rates. (Source: IBM)
- Content marketing costs 62% less than outbound marketing and generates more than three times as many leads (Source: NewsCred)
- Conversion rates are nearly 6x higher for content marketing adopters than non-adopters (Source: Aberdeen)
More specifically, here are a few ways you can supercharge sales with content:
Use Email to Promote Your Content Assets
If you’re just using email to drive promotions and push for direct sales, you’re probably not seeing great results. Instead, utilize the content assets you create (e.g. white papers, upcoming webinars, guides, infographics, blog posts, etc.) to help nurture leads into paying customers. Here are a few great examples to help you generate ideas for your own company:
- Lead nurturing
- Educational eBook
- Content Curation
Make Sure You Know What a Qualified Lead is Worth to You
Now, back to the first objection of: “Why should I give away free content? It costs me money and time to produce it!”
Knowing the cost of qualified leads and the value of paying customers can help you better understand how much you should spend to produce/promote content. Here’s a simple ROI calculation example:
Looking at this ROI calculation, you’ll see that if you had a LTV of $10,000 with a 10% close rate, spending $2,500 total for developing and promoting just one content asset yields a 300% ROI. Now if you were double your content budget with the anticipation of growing leads by 3x, then you’d receive an ROI of 567%.
That said, a lead (CPL) is worth anywhere between $150-250 to you. So overtime, the more qualified leads you generate and turn into paying customers, the more you’ll see that the content pays for itself.
Align Outbound Sales with Inbound Marketing
Get rid of the silos and focus on building alignment between departments. This will enable your organization as whole to push towards a collective goal, i.e. the overall business objective.
To get started with aligning outbound sales initiatives with inbound marketing, institute a process that makes sense for both. For instance, you know that sales has their routine of making calls and then sending follow up emails. As such, identify the marketing injection points – specifically where your content assets will be of use.
For example, let’s say you hit one vertical (like IT firms) and also happen to have a case study relevant to how you’ve helped IT firms see a lift in their revenue by 2x. Share it!
Have the Right Technology and People in Place
I’m sure you’ve heard the saying that technology is only as good as the people who use it, right? To be more specific, there doesn’t have to be an ultimatum of just choosing one over the other.
Instead, make sure that you adopt technology that will help increase efficiencies and lower costs, while also teaming up with the right third-party service company or hiring the right in-house personnels to handle the execution as well as the strategy.
Here’s how I like to look at it – technology should be there to help with the execution; whereas, your investment in having the right people/team in place will be there to drive the strategy.
This further ensures that the execution is always aligned with the strategy. And if there are any major shifts in the strategy, the technology is flexible enough to change and grow with you too.
Check out these 11 content marketing tools to help >>
Final Thoughts
Remember, people buy from people. Make sure your content initiatives involve that human touch of being authentic, providing a solution to a problem, and focusing on selling the ‘why’.
Generating sales with content also takes time. Take that time to build out a library of content that is useful, actionable and engaging.
Be clear on who your target personas are and center your content efforts around being the ‘go-to’ source for these personas. Again, doing so will help you build trust and authority.
