How to Use Sales Insight to Become a Better Content Marketer

Having grown up with two older brothers, I know a thing or two about sibling rivalry. 

What I've found is that the relationship between sales and marketing departments is reminiscent of that same competitive mentality we shared.

But if that's the case, we're all still family at the end of the day, right? Why can't we all just get along?

Rather than push and shove, it's important for both teams to recognize that aligning their efforts will actually translate to more growth for the business. 

So content marketers, this one's for you. It's time to squash the beef and pay the sales room a visit. They're pretty insightful and I've got a feeling you could learn a thing or two.

Improve Your Content Performance

For someone who isn't creating content on a regular basis, it might be easy to brush off the creative process. Sure, they see the physical content but they don't understand the planning, cups of coffee, revisions, PG-13 profanity, and strategic direction that go into bringing it to being. 

There's always a push for quantity. Sales needs more resources to carry out their calls more effectively, but they have trouble understanding that quantity and quality don't happen overnight.

Coming up with topics and angles takes time. We want to be sure that the content we are pouring ourselves into will resonate and work towards advancing a specific goal. But what we're not realizing is that sale's intelligence can help us come about this topics and angles more quickly. 

Your sales team has a really strong understanding of what prospects are thinking about, worrying about, and asking about. This is the type of information we need to nail down our personas, and start shaping content concepts that matter. Concepts that generate leads and work towards nurturing them in the most efficient way possible.

Sure, we can gather insights from page views, CTA conversions, and comments on our archived blog posts, but our sales teams are out there communicating with prospects on a daily basis. They know the questions being asked which means they can help you come about a content concept that addresses the challenges that people are looking to overcome. 

Establish a Distribution Strategy

Every minute of the day 571 new websites are created, WordPress users publish 347 new blog posts, Twitter users send over 100,000 tweets, Facebook users share 684,478 pieces of content, and Instagram users share 3,600 new photos. (Source: Mashable)

While creating an extensive library of high quality content is important from both a marketing and sales standpoint, perhaps we need to focus more on how we will distribute it. How will we as marketers insure that it doesn't get lost in the noise?

Sales wants us to put forth content that is optimized and can be easily found by prospects so that they can move them further down the funnel, but in order to do so, we have to know where they are hanging out.

Do you see where I'm going with this now? Sounds like another opportunity for a smarketing conversation.

By sitting down to talk about what they have been able to uncover in terms of popular platforms being used by prospects, marketers can learn a lot about how and where we should be positioning our content.

Rather than push out content on channels where our ideal customer may or may not be hanging out, we can use sales intelligence to come up with a strategy for posting to channels where they are more likely to pick up the content, share it, and engage with it. 

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