More sales content, does not mean more customers!

If sales content is not picked up by the target audience and therefore does not contribute to achieving conversion goals, then the content is not working. It's as simple as that! This is a mortal sin and unnecessary.

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Instead of spending a lot of time in brainstorming sessions and creative meetings to generate new sales content ideas, approach sales content creation strategically. Taking a strategic approach means (among other things) a lot of testing and tweaking of content before it is made available to sales teams.

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These four practical lessons will help you prevent content from being commercially worthless.  

Research and validate your target audience

Who is the sales content intended for? Until the answer to this question is clear, no content can be created. Therefore, the first step is to establish a profile of your target audience.

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Elements that should be included in profiling your target audience are:

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• How familiar is your target audience with your services, solutions, market, etc.?
• What are the pain points of your target audience?
• What solutions are there now to eliminate those pain points?
• What content is now regularly viewed by your target audience?
• Which media channels are most used by your target audience?
• What kind of content does your target audience like best (video, email, blogs, etc.)?

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After you have established all these points, you have a good profile of your target audience. Next comes the most important thing: make sure you find out about your target audience. Make sure you get real-life input from your target audience. For example, hold customer interviews, or consult customer forums.  

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Research the content your competitors are sharing

Once you've mapped out your target audience and have confirmation that there is a need for your proposition, it's time to start looking at how the competition is promoting their proposition.

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Dive into the content your competition is presenting: what do you like? What do you not like? What is missing? With these insights, you'll increase your understanding of what your target audience is susceptible to in terms of content and/or what missing content offers opportunities for your proposition.          

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Create a content strategy map

You now have enough information about what content works best in your market, who you are specifically addressing with your content, and what content actually needs to be created to uniquely inform your target audience about your proposition. Use all this information to create your content strategy map.

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Start your content strategy map with a strategy statement (why do you want to deploy content?), then determine which content types you will use in which situation, what topics you will address in your content and what channels you will use to share your content with your target audience.      

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Very important: think carefully in advance about how you are going to monitor, analyze and optimize the impact of your sales content.  

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Plan and execute the most efficient content process

So many people and so many opinions ... not the least of which applies to content creation and sharing. CEO, marketing, communications, sales. Everyone wants to think, participate and participate in the creation and distribution of content. This can ... no, this needs to be more efficient.

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Ensure that the process of creating, distributing and monitoring content is standardized and transparent. For each step in the content process, it should be clear who is responsible and ensure that the number of people involved is as limited as possible. This not only ensures an efficient process, but also reduces costs and therefore optimizes the return on content.    

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Speaking of cost, it is certainly wise to determine in advance how much time each step in the content process will take. Of course - as experience increases - the time required will be further reduced.    

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Instead of endless brainstorming, making assumptions and then just hoping the right content gets to the right people, we advocate a more strategic approach: create content based on research and a clear content strategy.

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