Educate your sales team: Does your sales team know for what purpose your blogs exists? Does your sales team even know that you have a blog? Chances are there is a sales meeting coming around the corner and I encourage you to incorporate content marketing in your meeting agenda. The more your team can understand the “why” behind this essential marketing tactic, the greater buy-in you will get.
Enable your sales team: Encourage your sales team to be co-creators in helping come up with blog topics. If there is a centralized location for capturing recent questions they have encountered in the field, or a wish list of content ideas that would be helpful in enabling the sales process to close, having a “living document” on your Google Drive for these ideas will create a library of content possibilities.
Incentivize your sales team: What sales team doesn’t love a good competition? You can have some fun with this and create a healthy rivalry that not only rewards the individuals who contribute the most ideas, but because all things digital can be measured, you can tie incentives for the topics that perform the best. It won’t take long for other contributors to get in on the action!
Empower your sales team: Chances are you have some writers or “actors” on your sales team! Encourage your team to write their own articles or solicit volunteers for your next video blog shoot. If your sales reps are willing to be regular contributors, you can assign them a day of the week or month and you can even assign them a “beat” like a television news or magazine assignment editor. Give them a chance to be recognized and shine.
Socialize your sales team: In order for your content to get in the hands of the right audience, it’s important to share your blogs on the social media channels of your target audience. Encourage your sales team to either post your company articles on their own social media sites or centralize your publishing process using social media tools like the publishing tool in HubSpot.
Inbound marketing success is a team effort, and it requires strong alignment between Sales and Marketing. The organizations getting the most out of their marketing budgets (and getting more of it) tend to be partnered tightly with Sales. According to the 2016 State of Inbound Report published by HubSpot, organizations who had a formal agreement between Sales and Marketing were more likely to see higher ROI on marketing dollars in 2015, receive a budget increase, and expand their sales teams. Sales and Marketing alignment could be the key difference in 2017 and take your digital marketing results from good to great!