Whether you work in a startup or an industry leader, building a content strategy and reevaluating it on a regular basis is crucial for consistent, cost-effective growth.
To begin, your content strategy should focus on the main points of the customer journey. These include their initial interaction with the company, their progression through the sales cycle, and, the one most often overlooked, post-sales communication.
We’ll go through each of these together:
Understanding the Process Behind Capturing a Lead
This first step is one that is pursued across every industry and as such has a wide variety of terminology associated with it. You may hear it called top of the funnel marketing, marketing acquired lead, or any variation of this.
Simply put, it is the strategy by which you capture the relevant contact information for your target customers. Some examples of this may be their:
- Name
- Job Title
- Company Name
- Business or personal email address
- Phone number
- Address
- Business revenue size
- Number of employees
- Other custom qualifying information
Collecting this data is a crucial first step because it gives you the means to communicate with the lead and eventually sell them on your product or service. Beyond that it can give you valuable insight into the target personas that convert at the highest rate.
Some examples of content that can help you acquire these leads include downloadable resources (ebooks, white papers, infographics), webinars, digital ads, website landing pages, event registration, pop quizzes, tools, and many more.
Progressing the Lead through the Sales Cycle
Once you’ve acquired the lead, it’s important to appropriately nurture them along the sales cycle. However, this isn’t a one-size-fits-all strategy, so be wary of cutting and pasting templates even within the same industry.
Some examples include email nurture campaigns, weekly blog posts, newsletters, white papers, sales content, social media posts, events, referral campaigns, podcasts and more.
While some sales cycles can be completed in a day, others take months and sometimes more than a year to complete. As a result, the content marketing for these different sales cycles should be just as unique.
A good content strategy provides relevant content to the right audience. A great one, provides value and in doing so builds a long-term relationship.
The probability of selling to an existing customer is 60 – 70%, while the probability of selling to a new prospect is 5-20%. (Khalid Saleh, Invesp).
Keeping these stats in mind should help you build a content marketing strategy that does more than just progress the lead to its final sale.
Leveraging Post Sale Communication
Which leads us to the final stage in the customer journey, what happens after they’ve converted into a paying customer or client.
At this point many marketing teams have passed the baton to the account management department, never to interact with the lead again, or so they think.
However, that lead that you once converted still has the same browsing habits that they had before they converted. If they consistently read your newsletters or blogs, they’ll continue to do so, and that’s something you can leverage.
Existing customers are 50% more likely to try new products and spend 31% more, when compared to new customers. (Khalid Saleh, Invesp).
This is where businesses can find hidden growth and great margins if they plan a strong content marketing strategy for it.
Post-sale content can take many different forms including personal communication between representatives, custom guides, customer only groups, emails, help centers, case studies, and more.
Building a Content Strategy that Wins Awards
With so much content thrown in front of your target audience every day, you need a content strategy to help you stay relevant and valued in their eyes.
When you invest in good content marketing, you’re also investing in your future customers and brand ambassadors. Virality can help you with that.
Schedule a free consultation with our team to learn how we are helping our clients attract more and higher quality leads at a lower margin. Contact us today.