Would you like your site to attract more qualified clicks that are easy to turn into sales? I’d be surprised if anyone replied “No” to that. There may be an easy way to generate more relevant traffic to your site: Turn to your sales team.
Your sales team is likely to be a goldmine of relevant content and ideas:
- They know your customers best as they talk to them on a daily basis
- Your sales reps know exactly what prompts people to become your customers as that is their job
- They are likely to have developed lots of content assets of their own that they use daily to turn leads into buyers
So why does content marketing so seldom include your sales team?
What is TOF Content?
Top-of-the-funnel (TOF) content aims at attracting your target customer who is just at the beginning of their buying journey.
At this point, your future customer has a problem to solve but they don’t know you or your products. If you have a much more established and popular competitor, your customer may know about that brand but not yours.
Sales enablement content is seldom used at the top of the funnel because sales people tend to work with qualified leads, i.e. those who already know your brand and are able to make a more or less informed buying decision.
Yet, sales-driven content is often highly relevant and visual. Failing to use it to attract and engage “cold” traffic is a missed opportunity, especially if your goal is to create an effective – yet budget-friendly – content marketing strategy.
It goes without saying that content helps sales. But how can your sales team help your content creation strategy? How can your sales reps help you create content that can drive clicks?
How to Turn Your Sales Assets into TOF Content
Step 1: Empower Your Sales Team with Solid Content Creation Tools
Your first step is to get your sales team to use the right content creation tools. When choosing a sales-enablement content creation tool, you need to use the combination of the following features:
- Visual and professional content creation
- An ability to easily share content with leads and prospects
- Interactivity (for the clients to engage with the content)
- Customization (an ability to remove private client data from content before making it public)
- Re-packaging feature (an ability to host and/or download content to publish it elsewhere)
There are a couple of new tools that make sales enablement content easy to repurpose into TOF content.
Pitch is a sales enablement tool that allows you to create interactive decks. The tool has some powerful collaborative features allowing your team to define workflows, share stats and ideas and personalize each deck for every specific lead. Every deck is easy to download to reuse on Slideshare, Linkedin or even Instagram:
Obviously, Google Slides is a valid free alternative to Pitch and Google Slides can be integrated in WordPress. But Pitch has more powerful templates and editing tools.
Step 2: Curate and Organize Existing Assets
Once your team has the tools that make content creation and sharing possible, start curating those assets that are being created.
There may be a lot of duplicate assets that travel from client to client, there may be assets that work for a single client, and there may be outdated assets. So take your time.
Step 3: Match Your Assets to Search Queries
Before creating your SEO brief, you need to match your content assets to searchable keywords.
This is a crucial step because you want that content to attract traffic and nothing works better in the long run than organic search traffic.
When trying to identify my target keywords, I start by searching Google because it is incredibly good at suggesting other ways people search. All you need is scroll down through search results scanning search snippets, search suggestions and additional search elements (like shopping results, ads and People Also Ask boxes):
SE Ranking’s keyword suggestion tool is perfect for that as it lets you cluster your keywords into groups and create a more focused SEO plan.
SE Ranking is also a Sharpspring partner which means it can easily integrate with your digital marketing dashboard.
This process of attaching searchable keywords to your sales assets can also go in the opposite direction. You can identify keywords that drive unengaged traffic (using Search Console and web analytics) and then find sales assets that can make those pages more interactive and appealing.
Step 4: Optimize and Publish Content
Once you know your core keyword, create an optimized context for your sales asset. I use this tool to make this SEO brief even more powerful:
Text Optimizer uses semantic analysis to determine underlying concepts and entities that should be used to optimize your current content or create supplemental content to drive more links to that landing page:
When optimizing your content keep its readability in mind because you want those assets to engage busy strangers. They will not have time to figure your copy out. Write clearly and run readability tools to make sure your copy is easy to understand. Microsoft Word offers some great readability checks to use.
Step 5: Don’t Forget about Your Branding
Visual branding is very important for any top-of-the-funnel content these days because people click what they recognize, so they need to know your logo and your name.
So make sure your visual branding is present on all assets you are pushing live. If you haven’t yet defined your visual brand identity, do that before launching your content strategy.
Tools like Namify are extremely helpful for that. Namify uses artificial intelligence to create your brand name and generate a matching logo. This is a great way to start working on your brand attributes.
Conclusion
Content marketing is much more effective if you strive to repurpose every single content asset to have. Making the most of your sales enablement content and using it to attract traffic will help you empower your content strategy by making it more visual and interactive.
