5 Steps To Better Content Marketing That Generate Sales
- Know your market
The first step in the process is about as simple as it sounds. Understand your market. This industry knows its target audience. With this being a legacy industry, there are decades of knowledge and experience that is at the fingertips of most established manufacturers. Use that knowledge to create target audience profiles and buying personas. Your content should speak directly to those professionals.
- Know the common concerns your customers have
When an engineer or operator reads your content rather than purchases your product right away, they are still undecided. Help make their decision by answering their questions and alleviate their concerns. Once you identify the common questions and concerns of your customers, your content can speak directly to their needs.
- Make a list of questions
The purchasing process can be a long one in the water and wastewater industry. The best way to start identifying what to write about is to simply track the questions your sales team gets at various points in the process. Create a list of the top 10 questions consumers have at each stage of the process when deciding to purchase your product/service and create individual pieces of content to answer these questions with as much detail as possible.
- Add a call to action
This is a must. Without a call to action, there is no direction or instructions for your prospect on what the most appropriate next step should be. Those calls to action will vary depending on where they are in the buying process but should be a part of all brand publishing activities from start to finish. Some calls to action may simply be continuing on to another piece of content, asking for their contact information or as forward as asking for the sale. The prospect or customer would like to know what’s expected of them either before or after they spend time engaging in your content.
If your content is informative and useful, a call to action is expected. You earned it by offering expertise, entertainment or an engaging story. As long as the call to action is done tactfully, there is no shame in offering to guide the customer through the process. In most cases, giving them a choice of multiple calls to action can give you a better idea as to where they are in the purchasing process.
- Nurture leads with regular communication
Once people sign up through your request contact information call to action, you should send them regular communication so that you stay top of mind for when they’re ready to purchase. The rules of engagement do not change throughout this part of the process. The communication needs to continue to be informative, engaging and valuable while helping to guide them to the next step. Nurture until the content they choose to engage with are the pieces designed to close a sale (i.e. datasheets, brochure, pricing information) and then continue to nurture AFTER the sale.