3 Ways to Leverage Sales in Your Content Marketing Strategy

When you develop a content marketing strategy, it can seem like a project for marketing. You’ll likely be the ones developing and distributing the content.

But if you have a sales team, it can be helpful to consider ways you can leverage that team to help with your content marketing strategy. Here are 3 ideas.

1. Ask your sales team to contribute content.

This is pretty basic, but a lot of companies aren’t doing it. I’m not saying you should ask your sales team to write and design eBooks, but there’s a lot you can have them do.

Consider interviewing your sales team on the top questions they get from prospects, or asking them to solicit testimonials and success stories. Ask them to contribute draft content for part of an eBook or blog post. You can then leverage your marketing team to edit and improve it for publishing.

Your salespeople are generally the people in your company who are closest to your prospects and customers – make sure they’re contributing to your content marketing.

2. Extend your content marketing through the sales team’s social networks.

Once you’ve developed content, don’t restrict yourself to only the corporate marketing channels. In addition to publishing content on your website and corporate social sites, develop strategies for your sales team to publish it on their own social networks.

This will help your salespeople develop reputations within their social networks of being subject matter experts. Soon, people will begin to look to them to provide valuable content. It will also extend the distribution of your content beyond your company’s network.

3. Work with your sales team to provide content directly to prospects.

While content marketing is primarily an inbound strategy, where people proactively identify the content they want, it can also be used as an outbound tool.

When you develop content, identify pieces of content that could be valuable to prospects at different stages of the buyer journey. Develop scripts and templates for sales reps to send content directly to their prospects. Help the sales team brainstorm the best ways to leverage this content to move prospects through the pipeline.

I hope you find these ideas helpful as you work to leverage your sales team in your content marketing strategy. For more ideas on sales and marketing alignment, check out our eBook.