The Power of Content in Sales and Marketing

Your customers and prospects are more connected than ever before. The digital world gives you more opportunities than ever to reach them – but they control when, where and how they engage with your company. So how do you reach and engage with your customers and prospects? How do you turn prospects into customers, and customers into referral sources? By using great content to engage their interest, answer their questions and concerns, provide a platform for interaction, and showcase your company’s products and services (without making direct sales pitches).

Still not sure? Here are some thoughts on the power of content in sales and marketing.

What Is Content Marketing?

There are lots of definitions of content marketing, but a good, basic definition is providing valuable information in a variety of different forms to attract and engage your customers and prospects to drive profitable customer action. Content can take many forms including your website, blogs, newsletters, e-mails, whitepapers, videos and podcasts, and social media. Content marketing is not direct selling or “push” marketing ads, television, radio, telemarketing, direct sales. It’s “pull” marketing. It attracts your prospects to you through the content you provide for their consumption, whether directly to them or that they find through searching the Internet.

Why Use Content Marketing?

The short answer is because it works. Content marketing is both less expensive and more effective than traditional marketing and advertising – about 62 percent less per lead than traditional marketing. Companies with active blogs receive 97 percent more leads, and get 97 percent more indexed links and 430 percent more indexed pages with the most popular search engines (source). Leads identified through organic searches by prospects (not paid search results) have a 14.6 percent close rate, while outbound marketing leads have a 1.7 percent close rate (source).

Creating Effective Content Marketing.

Effective content marketing is more than just sending random pieces of information out into the world and hoping that it attracts customers and boosts your search engine results. It requires planning and a strategy that ties your content to your sales and marketing goals, so that your content gets to your target audience in all of the places they are looking for it.