Creating content that answers your customer’s questions is key to attracting, retaining and engaging with your audience.
Whether it’s an informative blog post, a high-quality infographic or a video explaining the benefits of using your service or product, with the right content you can empower your salespeople to have productive and personalized conversations with your audience and develop meaningful connections with high-quality prospects.
Often, digital marketers are responsible for creating consistent content for both content marketing and sales enablement.
In order to answer this question, it’s important to understand the different goals of both content marketing and sales enablement. While content marketing focuses mainly on attracting leads and converting them into prospects, the goal of creating sales enablement content is to keep high-potential prospects moving through the sales funnel and connect them to the sales process.
The primary focus should lie on empowering your salespeople to have engaging, authentic and value-added conversations with prospects throughout the buyer journey, by answering their questions to help them make buying decisions.
There are various types of sales enablement content that help you convert prospects into loyal customers. To give you some examples, we have collected the eight most effective types of sales enablement content:
Blog posts can be a very effective form of sales enablement content because they’re easy to share and contain a wealth of information when written properly.
In order to write great blog content, listen to the conversations and topics your audience talks about. What questions do they have? What kind of problems come up that your product can solve? With the right content you can provide answers to these questions and illustrate how your product or service solves their problems.
You can also add a small section to all your blog posts where you describe your company and include a call-to-action button where people can fill in a contact form. This way you gather even more information about your audience and provide your sales team with more leads.
We have published informative blog posts, for example about the benefits of Digital Asset Management systems or a comparison of a Digital Asset Management system (DAM) and a Document Management System (DMS) that have been a very effective driver of new customers.
Like blog posts, e-books and whitepapers are useful to provide valuable information regarding your company’s products and services. Their content is considered even more valuable by most potential customers, since they deliver in-depth reports on topics that your company has credibility on.
E-books and whitepapers provide evidence of the effectiveness of your product or service and position your salespeople as trusted experts. You can include statistically sound data, well-researched findings and reports hat help to persuade decision-stage buyers.
To give you some examples: Lytho has created whitepapers with valuable information about the impact and business value of a Digital Asset Management system.
With an active line of communication between your marketing and sales departments, you can ensure that these e-books and whitepapers generate the right leads, especially high-potential prospects who will be found further down the sales funnel.
Salespeople love to have good references to share with prospects. Case studies and testimonials serve to build trust with your prospects and clients and show them the type of experience they can expect from your product.
In order to craft a case study for sales enablement purposes, look for your company’s biggest fans, those who absolutely love your products. Then, contact them and ask if they’re open for an interview in which they can talk about their experiences.
Check out our case studies, where we explain why a customer like Segway chose Lytho’s DAM solution and how we are helping our customers to be more efficient and consistent with the usage of marketing content.
This high-quality content helps you explain the challenges that required a solution, how your brand stepped in to solve these problems, and the results generated from utilizing your service or product. These documents are a great reference for late-stage prospects, since they provide proof as to how your solution is the game-changer they need.
Slide decks are slideshow presentations, that you can create to showcase the features and benefits of your product or service. This type of content is very useful for sales enablement because they deliver information in in concise ways and allow prospect to go through them at their own pace.
The length of these slide decks is not set – they can be as long as you need them to be in order to deliver the most important facts. We recommend using a whitepaper, e-book or informative blog post which you can turn into slides. Sum up the most compelling facts, stats and other relevant details and narrow them down to a few slides. In order to make your content more engaging you can also insert interesting graphs, images and charts.
One of the biggest advantages of a slide deck: it enables you to pack a lot of information - such as information about your product, pricing information or key differences between you and your competitor - into one single, shareable document.
Sales scripts are an integral part of the sales process and help salespeople persuade leads to make a final purchase decision. They can be seen as a guide for team members in sales call conversations and provide a base for consistency throughout the sales funnel, as well as between various sales professionals on a team.
They should include various talking points around different topics that may come up in your conversations with customers. We recommend creating short outlines with the major points rather than a full script that is read word-for-word to your prospects in order to maintain a natural conversation. With these bullet points, salespeople have a guide through their conversations and can better concentrate on listening to their prospects.
These one-pagers can be used to quickly build knowledge around specific topics such as products or services. They are perfect tools that can be used as training material to help salespeople build their own product knowledge or can be sent to prospects who are currently in the decision-making process.
Having a sheet like this readily available is also essential for any initial meeting with a prospect. They should clearly state the benefits of the product or service and how it can solve problems faced by potential customers.
Although social media is usually thought of as a content marketing channel, don’t forget that it can also be a useful tool for salespeople to interact with prospects.
Give your sales team links to social media content that could be useful to customers, such as infographics, in-depth blog posts or short videos. I can be of high value to salespeople in their process of creating and maintaining a connection with prospects. In order to help your sales team to quickly locate relevant content, you can also add a unique sales hashtag to certain posts.
It’s important to know your competition and where your company outperforms others in your industry.
In a competitor analysis document, you can summarize what the competition is offering and how your brand differentiates itself. This helps salespeople to more effectively highlight the benefits of your products and services and educates them on how to best persuade a high-potential prospect to make the final step in the online sales funnel.
We hope that we could give you a good overview of the most important types of sales enablement content.
Now it’s up to you to choose which type of content is most valuable for you and your customers and how you can integrate it into your sales processes.
One last tip: make sure that everyone in your organization has access to your content, no matter where they are and when they need it. In order to make all these types of content accessible to all your team members, we recommend using a cloud-based online location like Lytho’s Brand Center, which enables all your colleagues to have access to up-to-date documents and other digital assets.
