We read way too much about how marketing is disconnected from the front-line, boots-on-the-ground world of sales. Sadly, much of that is true in many organizations. Even worse, there are many other missed opportunities for content marketers – and traditional marketers – to make themselves and their work more relevant. Here are a few.
Help Your Sales Team
Not surprising that this would be at the top of my list. Yes, your sales team should know your audience better than anyone else in the organization, but that doesn’t mean they won’t find more information useful.
How can you help? Monitor how your content is being consumed. If you seen an uptick in interest in a particular area, discuss with the sales team. They may already be aware of the interest – meaning your content is a trailing indicator, but if your content is a leading indicator, your sales team will be able to take advantage of the trend that much sooner. Either way, any excuse to keep the lines of communication open with the sales team is an excellent way to make your marketing work matter more.
Help Your Customer Support Team
Too often, customer support is relegated to afterthought status. That’s too bad, since customer support people are typically second only to the sales time in terms of their contact with clients.
How can you help? If you’re capturing search data on your site, or traffic numbers for various FAQ sections, you should be able to help your customer support team beef up the information that customers are asking about most. It’s not as sexy as helping generate more leads and better qualified leads, but increasing customer satisfaction is nothing to sneeze at.
Help Your Product Development Team
As I noted above, your sales team should know your clients better than anyone. So they should be working with product development teams as the folks who are in closest contact with your customers and prospective customers. Still, you and your marketing team should be able to add perspective to the conversation via, say, the data you’ve collected on your prospects’ engagement with various pieces/classes of email marketing, social media campaigns, and website content.
For services organizations, you can help the powers that be decide how to position your offerings so that client interests are reflected in the individual services being offered, and in how they’re packaged to offer the ever-popular “complete solutions.”
Not all of the above may apply to you and your work. But no matter which direction you head, your goal must be to break out of the marketing silo, reach across departmental lines, and make your work more useful to others in you organization.
