To reach the fruitful land of content utopia for your brand, you need to master writing content that sells. That doesn’t mean salesy language. Rather, it’s rich, compelling, and motivating. It moves your prospects from warm interest to blazing urgency.
This type of content isn’t just for the bottom of the funnel (BoFU). It should be a principle for every stage of the buyer’s journey. Perfecting high-quality branded content that sells and converts isn’t easy. It requires ideation, careful planning, and evaluation of performance via content analytics. However, there are some tips and best practices you and your content team will want to hone to deliver the most impactful content.
Creating Content That Sells: The Steps Toward Finding Utopia
Crafting content that helps close the sale should still include storytelling, wherein your audience is the star and your product the solution. There are some critical steps to take to find the right balance.
Assess What You Have
Is the content your team creates for sales enabling them? How much of it do they use? Do you have metrics on the sales enablement content your team uses?
Having this in place will make it less of a guessing game.
Some questions and considerations include:
- What branded content can you attribute to sales?
- What was the key messaging in pieces that performed well?
- What formats had the best response?
- For those pieces that underperformed, can you determine why?
Start at the Bottom of the Funnel
Typically, content marketers look at a topic at the top of the funnel (ToFU). This content is easiest to create because it’s educational and introduces challenges and subjects to an audience. The targeted personas at ToFU are also easier to write for versus BoFU ones.
However, that’s the main part segment you’re targeting with content that sells. Consider the components at the heart of every buying decision — the cost, the functionality or benefits, how it works with current solutions or workflows, and brand reputation.
Don’t be scared to touch on these topics in comparisons, case studies, and other content that provides the user a preview of what to expect.
Integrate Your Sales Team into the Content Process
Should your sales team have input into your content strategy regarding sales enablement content? Absolutely.
It’s critical to close the feedback loop. You need to hear from salespeople about their interactions with buyers. They can deliver insights you can’t get from any other source.
Having regular meetings will help facilitate this. An idea repository as part of your content calendar is another way to keep the conversation going.
Develop a Learning Center on Your Website
A learning center is much more than your blogs. To create content that acts as a sales vehicle, you need to develop a community. With such a property, you have a place to share product information as well as thought leadership.
You can include articles, videos, interactive media, and a discussion center where users can ask questions and get feedback on various topics.
Look to Your Audience for Inspiration
Knowing your customers well can play into better branded content that sells. Understanding what motivates them to need your solution is possible by listening to their feedback and questions.
Then, take what you learn from this and develop content that addresses these things and illustrates how your product or service answers their challenges.
Some ways to apply this to content are through Q&As. You can hold a Q&A forum live on Facebook or a Twitter event. Q&As are also popular during webinars. You could edit just that part of the event and make a new video. You could also write a blog called “Our Customers Biggest Questions Answered.”
Tell Stories That Matter to Your Audience
Brand storytelling is a huge opportunity. People learn better and retain more information with storytelling than with any other communication format. Use this to your advantage. Brand storytelling humanizes your brand, and there are several ways to do this. Each story should be a topic that your buyers care about and find interesting.
Check out the video below for the basics of brand storytelling.
Tips on Storytelling
- Create success stories that allow your customers to be their own voice and show an audience how they found success. Sometimes it can be tricky getting customers to say yes, but if they do, make the most of it with videos and written pieces.
- Develop a narrative where your customer persona is the hero, and all the challenges they are facing manifest into a villain. You could tell this type of story in an animated video. It would draw traffic and attention.
- Turn the lens internally to tell the stories of your employees and how they help customers. You could spin this into a blog series of “A Day in the Life Of” and do short videos that have your team talking about how they work through problems. There’s no promotion here, just a glimpse into your company’s values and culture, both of which matter to buyers.
Lead with a Unique Point of View
No other company has your unique point of view if you’ve developed one. When you have one, then you need to express it in branded content. It would likely tie to your mission and vision statements since they are the guiding force behind your company. This can work well for niche markets.
A good idea here is to develop some thought leadership content in the voice of your leaders that expresses the “why” behind your company. Again, you’re not talking product here, just the vibe of your brand.
Writing Branded Content That Sells Is Easier When Teams Have the Right Tools
Developing branded content is hard work. Enterprise teams have much to juggle to ensure consistent publishing of high-quality content. You can do it with less stress and greater visibility when using content marketing software. Check out the DivvyHQ platform today, and experience how it can help you arrive at content utopia!