Your Content Team is Bigger Than You Think

Sales and marketing teams rely on engaging and relevant content to start conversations, educate prospects about their solutions, and demonstrate value in the later stages of the buyer journey. But the job of creating sales and marketing content usually falls to a small group (or a single person), leaving both strategy and execution to marketing. Prioritizing content creation, determining the types of content to develop, and finding effective distribution channels can be a real challenge.

For startups, however, this potential cloud contains a silver lining. Companies that approach content as a company-wide responsibility can leverage subject matter experts across an organization, build effective thought leadership, develop customer advocates, and repurpose high-performing content. It’s an approach that takes diligence, but the results are worth the work. Here’s how to expand your content team and get everyone involved in creating quality content.

Engage Sales to Identify Critical Stages in the Buyer Journey

With B2B prospects taking control of when and how they begin the sales process, the buyer journey is no longer linear. That means sales and marketing teams must work together to determine the most common critical stages of the buyer journey, and how to deliver the right content for each stage. Combined, sales and marketing can identify creative ways to smooth the speed bumps that can slow the sales process through evergreen, target-focused or hyper-personalized content.

Mapping content to the most critical stages in the buyer journey also provides context for how salespeople can use it when engaging with prospects. Consistent evaluation of sales and marketing content helps keep messaging up-to-date, provides sales with current messaging, and empowers sales to use content to personalize their prospect interactions.

Develop Subject Matter Experts to Write the Most Effective Content

Successful content managers know the value of internal subject matter experts: not only can they offer a wealth of information about topics related to the business, but they can also help content teams create relevant, targeted content for prospects and customers. Meeting regularly with teams like sales, product, client success and sales operations gives marketing the raw material they need to build engaging content throughout the buyer journey. The team members who interact with customers or product on a daily basis have a deep and broad understanding of how your product impacts the market – and they are the best resources for sculpting your company’s brand promise.

Engaging internal subject matter experts can provide benefits for both the individual and the company: it encourages various team members to take ownership of messaging and education about your product. Featuring team members through blog posts, white papers and webcasts allows them to build their personal brands – an effective way to develop advocates for the company’s brand.

Empower Customers to Become Product Advocates

Employees are valuable brand advocates, but the best advocates are customers who know and love your product. More than half of B2B buyers prefer online research to talking to a salesperson, which makes strong customer advocacy one of the most effective ways to build and maintain brand awareness.

Customers are proof of your product’s effectiveness: they’re sophisticated enough to translate your company’s value to the marketplace, and often more trusted than any brand messaging your company provides. Customer advocacy involves more than just than case studies: customers can be sources of blog posts, videos, infographics, and much more. Giving customers a platform to talk about their businesses is an excellent way to engage prospects with content that demonstrates a company’s success with your product without being salesy.

“Repurpose” Isn’t a Four-Letter Word

If a great piece of content isn’t viewed or shared, does it make an impact? Companies must compete for a prospect’s attention, and even the best content can go unnoticed: up to 75 percent of ideas are turned into content that’s rarely used. That’s why incorporating repurposing into content strategy can help attract a larger audience and get more mileage out of existing content.

Everything from field marketing events to speaking engagements can be repurposed to craft relevant and evergreen content. Consider using longer pieces of written content and rich content to break into social posts, promotional blog posts, videos and more. Repurposing content also serves as a way to exchange content with partners, which can attract new and larger audiences for the original content.

Involving the entire company in developing, creating and promoting content makes it easier to keep teams informed of marketing’s efforts, encourages individuals to contribute their own expertise to prospects, and keeps messaging and product information fresh and relevant. As a company scales, so does a company-wide content program – and that gives content managers even more sources for information. The more diversity of thought a company can capture in its content, the better its sales and marketing efforts can become.