by Ben Schumacher (3Rhino Media Intern)
Businesses are always trying to figure out how to increase sales or how to increase traffic to their website. One of the answers according to Marcus Sheridan, founder of The Sales Lion and author of the ebook Inbound and Content Marketing Made Easy, is good content marketing.
Simply put, content marketing is teaching people how to do things through text, audio, or video. When it comes to teaching people about your business or product, who are the best teachers? The sales people right? They are the ones talking to customers every day. They are the ones listening to customers questions and they are the ones with the expertise to answer these questions.
So many companies operate in silos where the sales people only do sales, the marketers only do the marketing, and the developers only work on creating the product. In order to provide the best service to your customers and to provide them with the most information, all of these employees should be developing content for your business, whether that be through a blog, or tweets, or podcasts. This gives the people who are interacting with the customers the ability to use their expertise to answer all of their questions. Instead of a sales person answering the same question day after day from different customers, it would be much more efficient to just create the content to answer these questions. This way, customers can explore and answer the question themselves. If the answer to hundreds of common questions is provided on a company’s blog, you are now creating a more informed customer. If they are more informed, they will feel more comfortable with the product or service and be able to more effectively judge if it is right for them. This will also shorten the time it takes to make a sale because you won’t have to answer as many questions. This saves you time and money.
Marcus Sheridan explains why it’s important for your sales people to blog for your business. He also explains how content marketing helped his pool company become #1 on Google and how ONE article helped to generate $1.2 million in sales for his swimming pool company just because he listened to what the customers were asking. Check out his interview with Michael Stelzer
