Content Marketing for the Complex Sale
Content marketing is the art of creating and distributing engaging, relevant, timely and valuable content that will be of interest to your specific target market. It also goes by other names such as “branded content,” or “custom publishing.”
Vital to Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing approaches have consistently proven to reduce costs of lead generation by as much as 50% over traditional outbound marketing. Content is the key to effective inbound marketing. To read more about Inbound Marketing, click here.
Supporting Complex Sales Processes
Content marketing is critical to supporting the complex sales process. Research shows that 80-92% of senior business executives research business problems online and prefer to obtain information about your products and solutions through content such as white papers, blogs, articles, and educational materials.
This method of marketing continues to grow in importance, particularly for companies who manage a complex sales process.
Facilitating the Customer’s Buying Process
When marketing for the complex sale, content should facilitate and influence the customer’s buying process, positioning your company as the experts who are ideally suited to helping the customer solve complicated business and technical problems.
Done well, content marketing will:
- Help your customer better understand their business problem
- Guide their research into possible ways to solve the problem
- Shape their expectations for a solution
- Inform their evaluation process
- Position your organization as trusted advisors
- Generate a steady stream of well-qualified sales opportunities for your company
Content marketing can take many forms including:
- Company and individual blogs
- White papers
- Research notes
- e-Books
- Custom magazines (print or digital)
- Articles (for publication on your site or on third party sites)
- Events (live and online)
- Speaking engagements
- Videos
- Webinars
To learn more:
Thought Leadership to Support the Entire Buying Cycle
3 Case Studies on Inbound Marketing Content
8 Reasons Your White Paper Isn’t Working
Using Content to Drive Inbound Marketing and Generate Leads
7 Tips from Research on Marketing Budgets
