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Content Marketing Demand Generation digital marketing marketing Marketing Management social content marketing social media selling

Why Content Marketing Is Still a Crucial Growth Method in Sales

Content marketing has become a staple for most companies – whether Fortune 500s or new startups.  Much like the gargantuan oak tree began from a tiny acorn, content marketing is the same – so important and valuable that even the latest businesses can use it to their advantage.

Everyone is familiar with content marketing. Why? Why is content marketing powerful? What benefits can you expect? How do you do it?

How Content Impacts Your Marketing and Sales Strategies

How Content Impacts Your Marketing and Sales Strategies

All content is not created equal. Some of it is just plain bad.

We know this because we’ve seen it firsthand: in our content and the content we see from other businesses. And when there’s terrible content on the internet, people stop trusting your brand. They don’t want to give you their money or their time anymore.

Think about the last few articles you read. Were they short? Were they long? How did you feel about them?

Like most people, you felt the longer articles were more thorough. However, you also felt shorter articles were more concise and direct. Do you think about how much better it feels to know the author has been consistent over time? Or taking time to make sure every word was important and well-crafted?

No doubt writing quality content takes time—but it’s worth it. Because when your audience can see how much effort goes into each piece of content, they will feel much more invested in what you have to say. When they see your consistency, they’ll know they can trust this information and expect more from you in future pieces of content!

Capturing Attention

Great content can be used in many ways to grow your business. It can help build customer relationships, generate leads, and increase sales. But how do you know if your content is effective?

To keep your audience engaged, you need to understand their needs, wants, and desires. This means you need to know what they’re looking for in a product or service like yours. When you understand this, developing content that will resonate with them and help them feel connected with your brand is easy.

When creating great content, you must ensure that everything is focused on one goal: attracting new customers while retaining existing ones. The best way to do this is by creating quality content that educates them about your brand or product line without being too salesy or promotional-sounding; this will help build trust between you and your readers, so they’ll want to continue reading more from you in the future!

Quality content is the key to success on social media

Social Media Traction

As a business owner, you know how difficult it can be to get noticed on Facebook and Twitter. You’ve probably tried posting funny photos, links to articles that will interest your followers and clients, or even updates about what’s going on in your personal life. But did any of those things work?

It’s time to change your approach. Instead of posting random updates that no one cares about, focus on creating quality content that will attract the people who matter most to your business: your customers!

Quality content is the key to success on social media because it allows you to connect with potential customers in a way that feels genuine and authentic—and they’ll trust you because of it. Even better? 

Quality content stands out from the noise online, which means more people are likely to see it than if you were just trying to get clicks by posting clickbait titles or sharing outdated memes. 

Online presence is essential because it allows people to learn more about what makes your company different from others in its industry—and why they should do business with YOU instead of someone else.

Lead Generation

When you write blog posts, infographics, and other content that is helpful to your audience and solves their problems, they will want to read it. This helps them feel they know what they’re doing regarding your products or services. They’ll be more likely to make purchases from you because they trust you and what you have to offer.

In addition to generating leads, content marketing is also an excellent way to get more views on your website. For example, when people see what kind of information you share on social media or through email newsletters, they might click over and check out more details about what you have available for sale. 

This can help increase traffic on your site, which may lead them down a path towards becoming paying customers for whatever it is that you sell!

SEO

If you want people to find your site when they search for specific information or products, then it makes sense that you would like to create content that is as relevant as possible.

This doesn’t mean that every page on your website needs to provide information about every product or service you offer—but it does mean that if someone searches for something specific on Google and finds your site near the top of the results page, they’re likely going to stick around long enough to see what else you have available.

The first step in SEO is to write great content, not just old content. Next, you must focus on creating helpful stuff that interests readers and makes them want to share it with their friends.

The second step is ensuring that when people search for things related to what you write about, they find your site first. That’s where keyword research comes in: you need to learn what words or phrases people use when they search for things related to your business to optimize your site for those terms (and avoid using them yourself).

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Content Marketing marketing marketing tips

Using Conversational Video Storyboards to Boost Your Marketing Strategy

According to Hubspot, 85% of enterprises utilize video as a marketing strategy, which is unsurprising given that mobile video consumption grows by 100% every year. While blogging and long-form content are important components of any marketing plan, they aren’t enough if you want to grab your target market’s attention. But how can you make good use of B2B video marketing? Here are a few tips. 

Create a strategy.

Create a strategy.

The adage “failing to prepare is preparing to fail” couldn’t be more accurate in B2B marketing. The most important aspect of your success with it is your plan. In this sense, ensuring that your marketing plan interacts seamlessly with all of your other marketing platforms, such as blogs or social media, is critical. 

Simply said, video isn’t a stand-alone marketing strategy; it needs to work in tandem with the rest of your efforts.

Begin with the funnel. 

A great place to begin is to search for ways to include it in your current marketing funnel. And, because the video is better at establishing a personal connection with clients over other types of content, it will be more successful to make them for clients early in the buyer’s journey. This is a fantastic way to assist or educate your prospects on significant industry and business challenges while also establishing your firm as a thought leader. 

Whatever stage of video marketing you’re in, it is essential to a good video strategy to make sure that the visual content you develop corresponds to precise moments in the client experience. Your material must fulfill their needs and include a call to action that encourages them to take action.

Create personalities for your target audience.

Create personalities for your target audience.

Understanding who you’re talking to is the foundation of every successful marketing approach. And video is no exception. Before you can develop video content that your target consumers will engage with, you need a clear image of them and their position.

Begin any video marketing campaign by building customer personas. This will assist you to tailor the content you generate for certain groups of your target audience (which will make it more effective), as well as confirming what kind of material you’ll need to develop in the first place.

Think about the sorts of videos you want to make.

There are various types of video content you may develop to fulfill the demands of your clients at each level of your funnel, just as there are several customers for whom you should consider generating video content. It’s worth remembering that the more diverse your material is, the more your market will see you as a thought leader in your field. So shake it up a little. Just make sure it is still in line with the rest of your approach.

Make a storyboard for your video

It’s crucial to plan out your video material ahead of time if you want the completed result to strike home, just like it’s important to have a sound approach when it comes to video marketing.

A decent narrative and storyboard are essential for success. The screenplay is what the presenter (or the narrator in the video) will say, whereas the storyboard is a visual blueprint of your video from beginning to conclusion. What you need to film should be based on your narrative and storyboard.

Make use of video to supplement your textual material

When making a video, we generally suggest starting with the script – after all, it’s the foundation for whatever may happen in it.

The good news is that if you currently have a written content marketing plan in place, you’ve already completed the majority of the effort required to write a screenplay that will provide genuine results. A majority of executives prefer to watch a video rather than read text, so making videos to accompany the information you’ve previously produced will allow leads to consuming it in their desired format.

This method also greatly reduces the amount of labor necessary to generate a video. For example, the script may be based on the textual material from a top blog post (which should already be written communicatively), and the storyboard can be based on the visuals from the article. 

Make sure you're using the correct platforms to distribute your work.

Make sure you’re using the correct platforms to distribute your work.

Promotion, like every other type of B2B marketing content, takes effort. So, once you’ve finished making your video, the next step is to show it to your audience.

For B2B, social networking, particularly LinkedIn, is always a good place to start. On LinkedIn, a majority of executives say they exchange videos with coworkers on a weekly basis. As a result, placing it there enhances the likelihood that your target audience—and the genuine decision-makers within it—will notice it.

Subtitles are also important in this situation… Because most people scan through their social media feeds without turning on their speakers, adding subtitles enhances the likelihood that they’ll stop and view it. 

Adding your films to your Youtube account (or another video hosting platform) also makes it simple to embed them in other places, such as your website and blog. This makes integrating their dissemination into your entire content strategy much easier.

Conclusion

If there’s one thing you should remember from this post, it’s to make sure that each video you make has a defined function inside your funnel.

It’s not enough to make marketing videos just to “do video” – they have to serve your clients and complement what you’ve been doing on other marketing channels if they’re going to help you generate leads.

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Blog Content Marketing digital marketing digital sales campaign Digital Selling Sales

How to Write the Perfect Sales Emails That Get Responses

With LinkedIn taking the top position among best sources of B2B prospects, sales professionals have massively turned their heads to a new way of reaching out to potential customers – LinkedIn InMail. Meanwhile, your old friend email will be handier if you need a cost-free solution for a sales outreach. What is more, with email outreach, you can send up to 1600 emails a day and track their performance, which InMail won’t cope with.

But, if you decide to use the potential of email marketing for your sales campaigns, you should be well-versed in all  “dos and don’ts” when preparing a sales email. In this post, we’ll talk about them and show you how to craft perfect sales emails that will bring you more responses.

Write a strong opening line

People spend only 12 seconds, on average, reading an email. This means – what you write at the beginning of the email, including the very first sentence after the greeting, should be engaging enough to make the recipient want to get in touch with you.

Image source: Tidio.com

There are 4 principal approaches to writing an opening sentence:

  1. Value offering

This approach is particularly common in eCommerce. Companies like Amazon or eBay send out thousands of newsletters daily. They don’t use redundant digressions and get to the point straight away.

Image source: Blogs Brighton

Although such an approach seems fairly utilitarian, it makes a lot of sense. Senders don’t have to invent ornate texts, while their recipients don’t spend a lot of time reading these texts, trying to extract the key point.

  1. Asking the question

This is a nice tactic to engage the recipient with email content. People like it when somebody asks their opinion or shows interest in their plans. You can ask a recipient about his/her business and slowly add a problem statement to that question. For example:

How does your company cope with an excess burden of taxation?

3. Praising achievements

Verbal applause isn’t flattery if it’s genuine. However, this kind of opening line requires preparations from the sender’s side, like skimming through the prospect’s recent news or publication on LinkedIn.

4. Introducing oneself

Finally, you can choose to write about yourself or the company. This approach is particularly justifiable for cold outreach when you should make a recipient acquaintance with the brand before any kind of offer.

There are several common tips to write an apt opening sentence:

  • if the line is too long, it’s better to split it into two shorter sentences
  • use numbers that add value to what you say, for example, “Want to increase sales by 10%?”
  • don’t make it too loud – avoid misusing all caps and exclamation marks
  • don’t add too many adjectives – give more credits to verbs
  • point to something that connects you with the lead – a background, previous experience (including negative), etc.
  • tailor statements – do not use common phrases like “we see you achieved much this year”; instead, add some personal touch, like “we see you’ve launched IPO this year”.

Create a helpful email body copy

The message you send should bring value to recipients, otherwise don’t expect they’ll respond to it. Winning sales teams are those that can connect their company’s proposal with the lead’s needs.

Say, you sell a full pack of digital marketing services to small companies. Instead of addressing their owners with a “We will help you to grow revenue” pitch, point that you know how to deal with exact constraints small companies face. For example:

If you want to promote your business on the Internet, but do not know how to do it and where to start, look at what others are doing.

We prepared success cases for you, based on what our clients told us about their SEO techniques and the results they have achieved.

By the way, until January 1, you have the opportunity to get a 40% for any services plan purchased for 6-12 months.

Another technique to write a sales email is to use social proof. People rely on other people’s actions and tend to copy behavior patterns. So, they will be more willing to get in touch with your company if they see others choosing it.

You can wrap up emails by politely asking for sales referrals. People like being asked for help, so if you show them a sort of dependency on their opinion or actions, they’ll be more engaged with your brand as a whole.

An apt sales email copy is not about the content alone. It’s also about text length and structure, wordings, and visual design. If you’re aimed to convert the lead with an email, follow these recommendations:

  • identify the action you’ll treat as a conversion

For example, if a company sells subscription-based apps, the target conversion may be either a purchased product or an application for a demo.

Long copies can provide the lead with more details, but the issue is – nobody has time to read long-drawn-out rationales. So, unless the email is “clean and neat” enough, it’ll probably be bounced by recipients.

  • use short sentences

A sales email isn’t a literary work. Put yourself into the recipient’s shoes – imagine you’ve opened an email in a hurry to quickly get to the point. Would you prefer complex sentences with difficult lexis or – short phrases with “easy-to-digest” words?

  • use conversational language

Of course, if you address government agencies or highly specialized clients like healthcare companies, you should use very qualified words. In all other cases, it’s better to simplify the vocabulary. The best approach is to write an email copy as if it was prepared for your friend.

  •  use active voice and avoid the “by” passive

Compare two sales email examples:

The increase in revenue was achieved by increasing the share of qualified leads (passive voice)

More qualified leads boosted the revenue (active voice)

The second example looks more conclusive, while the first is stuffed with prepositions. It’s better to add strong verbs in a sales email copy, like “drive”, “grow”, “start” –  to motivate leads to actions.

Wrap up the email copy with a CTA

A call-to-action isn’t a guarantee of getting instant conversions, still, it can create a chance to get them. There are 2 key rules regarding CTAs in sales emails:

  • there should be 1 per copy

Remember, the recipient should grasp further actions clearly, so don’t overwhelm him/her with asking for extra actions.

If the email is about to engage leads with content, add a single “Read the full story” button in the copy. You can, however, include links to socials, just make sure they don’t distract attention from the main CTA.

Image source: Sumo.com

  • a CTA should be specific

If you wrap up an email copy with a sentence, outline further steps with (tentative) deadlines. Like “Can we jump on a 15-min call on Monday?” or so. A good thing is to add the link to Calendly so that a recipient will be able to schedule the meeting straight away.

Add a professional signature

Employees’ email signatures demonstrate the company’s attention to detail. There’s nothing bad to construct a simple signature with, e.g. by using settings in Gmail. Still, by adding some pieces of design to it, you can stand out from the crowd and look more professional than your peers.

Image source: Mail-signatures.com

A photo in the signature will show you follow the human-centric approach and have nothing to hide. The website address, 2 or 3 social links, and contact information will be sources of extra information and allow leads to get in touch throughout the channel they prefer most.

Best Sales Email Templates

Different selling purposes require distinct outlines and wordings. Moreover, sales templates differ in B2B and B2C markets. Below we’ve listed 6 examples of the high-performing emails that one can tailor and use for the most common business purposes:

  1. To promote a free trial

SaaS companies usually promote their products by offering customers free access for a limited time. A corresponding sales email should briefly explain key terms of the subscription, including start day and duration. You can also wrap up the email by providing information on how to upgrade.

Image source: Snov.io

  1. To retarget prospects

People who’ve shown interest in the brand are “warm” leads, so try to convert them through retargeting. These kinds of sales emails usually start with a “We want you back” pitch and are commonly used by online stores. Retargeting emails should include an attractive deal, for example, a discount for the next purchase.

Image source: Sendinblue.com

  1. To get in touch after an event

Webinars or offline events are good to build brand awareness, but to be commercially justified, they should be followed with a proper sales email. Thank your prospect for the attention to the brand and then – list the benefits of the solution a company sells. And if you provide some examples, make them relevant to the lead by referring to his/her pain points.

Image source: Saleshacker.com

  1. To get in touch for the first time

Cold sales are tough yet essential to keep the pipeline full. Pay foremost attention to tailoring copies so that they don’t seem spammy or impersonal. Start with a brief introduction and explain how exactly you or your company can assist a prospect to resolve a particular issue. A good tactic is to also point to mutual interests, especially if a company operates on the B2B market.

Image source: Saleshacker.com

  1. To follow up after no response

Wait for at least 3 days before sending the first follow-up email, and increase the pause between all subsequent emails. To attract prospects with an offer, add some extra information or explain the benefits of the product in detail.

Be polite and never insist on answering. Still, make sure you’ve provided the recipient with a “go-to” instruction on how to get in touch in case he/she is interested.

Image source: Snov.io

  1. To nurture leads

The best tactic here is sharing interesting content. It takes months to build brand loyalty, so although nurturing emails don’t result in instant conversions – they are an essential part of any sales funnel in the long term.

Image source: a snapshot from Snov.io monthly newsletter

Wrapping up

While preparing your sales outreach, you should consider which communication channel will be most effective — phone or Zoom call, InMail or email — or you might wish to mix them.

And if you stop your choice at email, keep in mind that a sales email takes time to be prepared. The perfect copy starts with an apt subject line and is followed by a neat email body and good wrapping-up. If you doubt how to write a sales email, refer to the best sales emails examples and tailor them as required.

Author:

Yulia Zubova, Outreach specialist from Snov.io

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Blog Content Marketing marketing Sales

Two Innovative Ways to Improve Sales and Marketing Alignment

I recently read an excellent book called The Excellence Dividend by Tom Peters—an ex-McKinsey consultant whose consulting practice now focuses on customer experience and customer excellence. In his book, Peters talks about the importance of cross-functional alignment. And I whole-heartedly agree!

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Blog Content Marketing

Creating Experiences: From Your Content to Your Trade Show Booth

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Blog Content Marketing Sales

Empowering Sales: Content Sharing & Continuous Enablement (Part 2/2)

sales content enablement

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Blog Content Marketing

Why Events Should Be at the Center of Your Content Strategy

 

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Blog Content Marketing Sales Enablement Social Selling

Effective Sales Enablement Requires Tighter Alignment Around Value Messaging

enablement-alignment-messaging

Sales reps ask for more content, yet the content already created by product teams, marketing and sales enablement groups seems to sit there taking up server space and offering zero action. Some research indicates that up to 65 percent of the content created for sales teams is going to waste. Why?

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Blog Content Marketing Sales and Marketing

Back To The Basics: How To Find And Share Credible Content 

If you are only posting stories for people to read, you’re only using half of the Internet. Great content should encourage B2B buyers to engage in conversations with your sales teams. Consider your ideal buyers for a moment and try to assess what would motivate them to engage, explore further or even buy.

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Blog Content Marketing Sales and Marketing Sales Leadership

The Secret of Creating Effective Sales Content vs. Influential Marketing Content

marketing-sales-content

Sales reps are calling for more and better content so they can ramp up revenues, yet up to 70 percent of the content already produced by marketing is going unused. Why?

For many B2B organizations, the problem of disappearing content now stands in the way of sales and marketing alignment. One of the primary reasons for this breakdown is that sales and marketing too often use contradicting definitions of a shared word: content.