One of the reasons the Inbound Marketing Summit (IMS) conferences are so unique is because of the community and digital content that is established among participants. The Pulse Network helps to foster this with their Spotlight on IMS video series, where they ask thought leaders from the IMS community to share best practices and tips for modern marketing strategies.
Marc Hausman, President and CEO of Strategic Communications Group (Strategic) and conference speaker, shares his 5 tips for aligning content marketing with a measurable sales return on investment:
- Think like a publisher: Prospects, buyers and customers are spending more time than ever “doing their homework” and researching before reaching out to any sales team. This creates an opportunity for companies to publish thought leadership information – insights and best practices – to create a community of readers. Being established as an industry expert helps to differentiate and hold the attention of prospects.
- Promote content through multiple channels: Take advantage of the various social channels out there. Distribute your content using marketing automation systems, email messaging, SEO, and ask your sales team to spread the word.
- Collaborate with sales: Engage with your sales team and understand where their priorities, opportunities and challenges are. That will inform the direction of your content and help you to understand what information to put in front of your prospects. If sales is involved in this process, they will also have more talking points once they’re in contact with buyers.
- Study the analytics: Use analytics so you can learn who’s coming to your site, what they’re reading, how long they stay, how they found you, and what actions they take. People tell you what they think by how they spend their time; studying analytics will help provide information on which prospects are really interested.
- Translate analytics into actionable sales intelligence: Don’t just study readership and the numbers you get from analytics, but think about the priorities of the sales team, the pipeline, prospects, and the community. Really dive into what the readership means and then provide meaningful insight and guidance to sales to translate into actions.
