Watch a quick demo or schedule time with us.
Schedule a demo, or contact support.
Is your sales team struggling to generate leads and bring in revenue? Maybe it’s the way they conduct the conversation. Or maybe, they don’t have the right assets to encourage a conversion.
In this case, content marketing can be the answer.
Typically, sales and marketing teams aren’t aligned because marketing wants brand awareness, and sales want leads. But, by creating middle and bottom funnel content—they both win.
Most companies have already recognized the power of content, as it has helped close deals and improve customer engagement. To give you an inside look into how they did it, we’ll look at seven examples of sales content that companies used to drive their business forward.
From engaging storytelling techniques to creating thought-provoking content, these examples show how effective MOFU and BOFU content can be when converting leads into sales.
Let’s dive in.
Type of business: AI-powered content and image-generating tool
Target audience:
Goal:
Content formats:Company blog
Why it works:
Jasper’s team knew they needed to reduce their reliance on their sales team. In addition, they also wanted to stand out from the rest of their competitors due to the increasing interest in AI content and the number of new players in the market.
To facilitate that, the team focused on high-converting content like comparison blogs, product-led content, and thought leadership pieces to create product awareness. Plus, their keyword strategy focused more on industry topics instead of branded keywords (despite the heavy brand presence) so that they could capitalize on trending topics.
What’s more interesting is how their current blog page is designed. It’s highly focused on conversion (as seen in the image below). They published highly focused comparison blogs comparing their products to established and up-and-coming competitors.
Moreover, users can easily access an on-demand demo or directly sign up for a 5-day free trial right from the same page—making it easier to mark it as a touchpoint. Users can immediately book a demo or review the product’s capabilities as they already have the options right there.
This approach resulted in a 415% growth in organic sessions and 121x growth in product sign-ups in just one year.
A breakdown of Jasper’s blog and how it’s focused on conversion
Source
Impact on revenue:
Type of business: Email marketing platform
Content formats: Webinars
In early 2016, many professionals felt the effects of webinar fatigue. These webinars were basically a pitch to sign up for a product or service. This is what ConvertKit’s founders capitalized on.
They created a webinar strategy to create awareness by doing things differently. Instead of focusing on how their products benefit their target audience—they chose to show them
Taking advantage of their affiliate program, they invited existing users to conduct webinars irrespective of their audience size. This meant that people would sign up for webinars that were meant for creators of all sizes. By shining a light on their current customers, they could show the actual use cases of the product without making a direct sales pitch.
Plus, by narrowing their target audience to only bloggers, they created a hyper-focused strategy. Due to their interest in these webinars, they could host 150 (averaging about 2 to 3 a day) that year.
At the end of it, ConverKit and its creators received massive awareness and interest in their business. While the company increased its MRR by 637%, the creators earned a nice 30% commission for each sign-up they influenced—resulting in a win-win situation for everybody involved.
What tools can help you streamline the sales enablement process? Check out our CEO’s recommendations: What sales enablement tools should you have in your sales stack?
Type of business: IT services and consulting
Content formats: Blog posts and LinkedIn posts
Capgemini’s content wasn’t generating revenue because it wasn’t targeted toward its customers. They were focused on promotional campaigns that did more for employee engagement than their bottom line. When Rena Patel, the company’s then-digital campaign manager, conducted customer interviews, she found that most customers were looking for specifics on their services—not random awareness campaigns.
Soon, she focused their campaign on Capgemini’s offerings and answered common questions on Big Data, Cloud, Technology, and consulting services. She promoted this via their website and LinkedIn because most of her target audience was already present on LinkedIn.
Within a year, the company booked projects worth $1 million, and a year after that, they could 8X their revenue through content.
The main reason this strategy worked was that Rena focused on catering to the burning questions of her target audience—and presenting it to them where they were already present.
Type of business: Enterprise software
**Content formats:**Blog posts, guides, webinars, and daily newsletter
Initially, SAP’s generous spending on advertising wasn’t getting them the results they expected. With a 95% bounce rate on landing pages and a lack of organic search traffic, Michael Brenner, then marketing leader at SAP, convinced executive leadership to give him half the advertising budget. It was necessary as he didn’t have executive buy-in or the budget to run a successful program.
Using the allocated budget, he created a content marketing platform that focused on three things: increasing organic traffic, increasing social shares, and reducing the website’s bounce rate. After that, he conducted extensive competitor research to determine what their audience was looking for and started targeting early-stage buyers who needed more product education.
Soon, he realized that those who did become product-aware through a webinar were more likely to convert. This was when he created content that focused on the middle of the funnel, like ultimate guides and company events. Due to this, in the first year, the programs generated 1000 leads, leading to $750,000 in revenue.
This approach worked because Brenner focused on what his audience wanted at a particular point in time. Only when he knew they were slowly moving down the funnel he switched his strategy to capitalize on warm leads—which worked.
Curious about the top sales enablement tools in the market? Check out our article here: Top Sales Enablement Tools
Type of business: Customer support SaaS
Content formats: Blog posts
Groove’s success can be attributed to solid audience research and robust content distribution.
Considering that Groove was in a crowded space with competitors like Zendesk, the team had to take a different approach. Alex, the CEO and co-founder, started the process by investing a lot of time in small business communities and social channels where they hang out. The goal was to understand their problems and use that as a source of content ideas.
Based on what he found, they created a blog that specifically spoke about the challenges and journey of their own business to create a space where founders could learn from their journey. Within 24 hours, they hit 1000 email subscribers and, in a month, 5000 subscribers.
It led to increased brand awareness, and more readers turned into paying customers. But Alex didn’t stop there. He personally wrote to them to ask them what kind of challenges they were facing so that Groove’s team could address them.
An example of a sign-up confirmation email that Alex sent to his subscribers
Eventually, Groove was able to build a readership through content that resonated with its audience, leading to word-of-mouth and more business. The team also spent significant time in link building and distribution efforts with the right people—which built their topical authority. Within three years, the team built a readership of over 250,000 readers resulting in $5 million in annual recurring revenue.
An example of a blog comment that indicates how Groove’s content was resonating with its potential customers
Type of business: B2B lead generation SaaS
Target audience: B2B medium to enterprise-level companies (US & Europe)
Content formats: Blog
In 2017, Leadfeeder focused on a storytelling approach that got them many social shares, resulting in market awareness. But, they were facing two problems: minimal organic traffic and a lack of revenue from the blog.
They worked with their agency to move towards a pain point SEO strategy to fix that. This meant they focused on bottom-of-the-funnel keywords, which barely had search volume (according to keyword tools) but had a high purchasing intent.
For example, product comparison posts, how-to posts, alternatives posts, etc. Within four months, they increased readership by ~1000 visitors. It didn’t make a huge difference—and that was for two reasons:
A marked increase in blog visitors once Leadfeeder shifted to a pain point SEO approach and moved their blog to a subfolder
Once they moved the blog to a subfolder, the numbers shot up by ~4000 visitors. Within a year, the blog was amassing 21000+ visitors per month—resulting in 215 product sign-ups each month. To date, they follow this approach and publish pain point SEO posts which you can see in the image below.
An example of blog posts that Leadfeeder still publishes to date — with a focus on conversions
Type of business: No-code website builder
Content formats: Blog and templates
Webflow’s increase in revenue can be attributed to its product-led SEO strategy. The company leveraged topics tailored to their buyers' intent, created detailed user personas, and segmented them to identify their needs. You can see this by the fact that they created a content library that was diverse in its formats too. For example, they published multiple e-books, videos, and newsletters too.
Webflow’s blog library offers additional content formats for their increasing audience
First, they had to ensure they had the right pages to drive traffic to. They created a library of website design templates and conversion-focused blog posts. To allow users to find relevant topics easily, they segregated the template library and blog based on specific audiences and use cases.
Webflow’s library of website design templates categorized by use case
Webflow’s blog library is categorized based on specific topic clusters
By building a vast content library of conversion-focused assets, they could generate thousands of site visits every month. Also, because they had a freemium model, it educated customers while encouraging them to sign up for the products. It resulted in thousands of dollars each month—contributing 21% of total revenue. Ultimately, this strategy led to Webflow becoming one of the leading no-code solutions for building websites without HTML/CSS knowledge.
Creating a sales-focused content strategy can be an effective way to generate revenue. But it’s important to learn what your audience wants and needs.
Taking the time to listen, observe, and understand your customer base creates a solid foundation for a revenue-generating content engine. As a result, even brand awareness-creating blogs can be turned into a channel that contributes to your bottom line.
If you need help managing or tracking all your content under one roof, start a free trial of Content Camel today.
Not there yet? Sign up for our newsletter instead to access curated best practices to manage your content internally.
Personalize follow up. Easily share content. Track results.
Developing a comprehensive sales content strategy begins by setting specific and measurable goals. It could include increasing website conversion rates, generating more leads, or boosting customer engagement with the product or service. You will then need to do the following:
Based on that, create content for channels where your audience is present and iterate as you evaluate the data.
Content Camel is a sales enablement tool used for sales content management. High-growth sales teams use our system to quickly find and share the right content for each specific sales situation and measure content use and effectiveness.