In order to encourage collaboration between departments, resourceful companies are doing away with the strict division between departments and taking strides toward teaming up for the greater good of the organization. Some businesses are restructuring their departments, often coupling marketing and sales in a “revenue increasing team,” called smarketing.
The advantage of this team lies in merging the talent of the sales and marketing teams to create the best possible sales funnel, equipped with highly converting content.
In this article, we’ll show you how writing blogs can be useful for organic traffic, but also for producing marketing and sales-qualified leads that may convert from your website.
What is Smarketing
Smarketing refers to a business strategy in which the sales and marketing teams closely realign themselves in order to create an integrated approach to reaching revenue growth. Since both departments share some of the same objectives, including finding new leads and converting them to customers, it makes sense to join forces.
One of the biggest benefits of a smarketing team is the joint effort to create the best content strategy possible. The sales team has insight into what possible customers want to know about your industry/business and what hooks them in. While the marketing team knows how to shape the sales team’s insights into content and present that content through the best channel, whether that is a blog post, press release, social media, or email newsletter.
If the marketing and sales teams are not collaborating, there are two things that happen more often than not – the sales team loses time creating content needed for different steps of the sales funnel, and the marketing team creates and analyzes content without knowing how many leads are actually converted.
Having those two perspectives will help you create an all-encompassing content strategy that will bring desired results.
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Do you know your goals?
The marketing team usually has goals that include reaching a predetermined audience as well as putting out many different pieces of content.
The sales team, on the other hand, focuses more on converting leads, and they use the marketing teams’ content in order to target an audience and segment qualified leads. If the sales team has the right type of content from marketing, they might help themselves meet their goals by referring their leads to detailed blog posts that bring more insight into the products and services they’re trying to sell.
If there’s a disconnect between those efforts, the two teams will not meet their goal of bringing in more customers and more importantly, more revenue. That is why it is important for both teams to be on the same page and know what their short-term and long-term goals are.
Your smarketing team should focus on converting potential customers and the best way to do that is by serving them the type of content they want to see.
Both teams should analyze the current content strategy, sales strategy and talk to their customer support team to find out what your clients are most interested in learning about, what serves as a deal maker and breaker, and what type of content works best for them.
Once you have that information, you’ll be able to create better content that has higher converting ability. We know this sounds counterintuitive, but more content doesn’t equate to more customers, so make sure to focus on the quality of your content instead of the quantity.
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Map out your content strategy
Each piece of content created for your blog should have a specific place in your sales funnel. Not every piece of content needs to convert, but every piece should have a specific goal. This simple rule should be the basis of a successful content marketing strategy. An online scheduling software will help you manage your leads. This is an essential tool for any business that wants to stay ahead of the competition, save time and grow.
The stages of your sales funnel are set – the awareness stage, interest, evaluation stage, engagement, and purchase. You need to create different types of content for each stage. Depending on your industry, you may want to start with low-lift content such as how-to blogs or videos and social proof, then create long-form content like free e-books and case studies. Consider adding a free trial or a coupon to your content.
The content you make for the first stage of the sales funnel should spread brand awareness and doesn’t need to have a high conversion rate. This is the stage at which you engage a new audience and let them know you have a solution for a problem they have.
As your lead moves down the sales funnel, you should serve them content that is more compelling and has a higher chance of converting. For the second stage of the funnel, create content that is informative, educational, and valuable.
The evaluation stage is where your potential customers decide if they want to buy the product or service from you. This is where your USP comes to play. You need to have something that differentiates you from your competition and brings in customers.
At the engagement stage, the ball is in your court to reach out and offer something that will capture your potential customer’s attention. After that, be prepared to answer any questions they may have and bring them into the purchase stage.
If you’re looking to invest in native ads, once your content is created, it’s important to align it with relevant publishers to reach your desired audience. Taboola can help you with that by using contextual targeting. It will show your ads alongside content your ideal customers are already reading, with the help of machine learning and contextual intelligence.
That way, they will seem like a natural fit and people will enjoy the native representation of your content.
Choose the right keywords
Many times, we marketers get blinded by numbers. We see huge potential in a keyword that has lots of searches, but neglect their capability to drive good leads to our website. The sales team has a different view on things, meaning they tend to focus more on the actual conversions that are happening thanks to those keywords.
This is where smarketing comes in handy. Having these 2 teams work together makes choosing your keywords more efficient in attracting the right audience.
Don’t fall into the trap of using buzzwords to create a content strategy that is relevant for the next 15 minutes. Make sure to research your keywords meticulously and find the right ones for you.
Sure, the word free will help your rankings, but will it bring you results?
Make keywords the focal point of one of your meetings and discuss how you’re going to research keywords. Everybody has to be on the same page when it comes to the method of choosing. Once you select your keywords, you can map out a well-rounded strategy.
Every good blog should have external links to authoritative sources. It helps your SEO and gives your website credibility. But even more importantly, internal linking can improve your bounce rate and make people stay on your website longer and ultimately, convert.
Create a list of priority links with the sales team that have a higher converting rate, and make sure to link to those pages in all your content. That way, you’ll create a natural transition for your visitors to find out more about your brand, products and services.
Conclusion
The creation of a smarketing team is long overdue for most companies. Having the marketing and sales teams join forces and work together will naturally bring out better results and save time on content that needs to be created. Since the end goal is the same for both teams, bringing them together will help your business thrive and build a bulletproof sales funnel.