Let's talk about Content Development

Picture this: you’re on a call with a promising lead. The conversation flows smoothly, and you’re confident you’re about to close the deal. One second later, the prospect objects—one you’ve never heard of before. What was turning out to be a good sales call, soon turns into a mess as you struggle to offer a convincing response while watching that deal slip away. If this sounds too familiar, you’re not alone.

As you know, for marketers, effective organization is key. It’s not just about creativity; it’s also about having a clear system for your marketing materials. This makes your work more efficient and helps in tracking the performance of different assets over time. Imagine having a straightforward folder system where every type of asset has its place. For instance, separate folders for images, videos, and marketing collateral. This approach is foundational, especially if you’re that marketers, sales rep, or customer success manager hunting fo various types of materials and need quick access.

Improve Your Product Messaging with our Product Messaging Template Here’s the situation – you sell products or services, but we’ll just call them “products” for simplicity here. Most of the Sales and Marketing team are on the same page about what your product does – some of the values and benefits it provides, how it’s a bit different and generally how to talk about it. But, you know that consistency is key to driving understanding with your buyer and that only consistency brings the repeatability that drives word of mouth and smooths out the purchasing cycle.

Organizing and tracking sales documents is a powerful component of your sales management and sales enablement efforts. You can save your staff a lot of time by getting organized while making sure your best content is being used correctly. If done right – with the right tools – you can also gain critical insights that will shape your content marketing efforts. Still managing sales assets the old way? Share and track collateral with Content Camel HubSpot has sales document tracking features and this article goes deep on how it works, the benefits, the cost, and the limitations as well as comparing it to Content Camel’s sales enablement tool.

Every content manager we’ve spoken to has one issue with production: terribly written first drafts. Does this sound familiar to you? Then you’re not alone. It boils down to a lack of standardized content production processes. The production process is tedious, and that only worsens if you don’t have the right systems in place. To avoid this, create a solid content production workflow, and incorporate a key ingredient to set your strategy into motion: the content brief.

When it comes to sales enablement, there are plenty of tools in your arsenal. Highly trained sales team members. High-functioning, fast-loading sites. Landing pages that collect all the qualifying information you need and live chat options to grab users while they’re on the site. All these options… and yet video is still one of the most powerful sales enablement tools at your disposal here. When used correctly, video can help you do everything from educating and training your sales team, to supporting your marketing efforts.

Your sales documents help you convert your leads into customers 🎉🙌 They do, right? Of course! You can easily prove it by measuring which documents are used most by your sales team, which ones your prospects open and read, and… Umm, you are tracking them… aren’t you? OK, whether you track them or not, don’t worry. You’re in the right place now, because we’re reviewing how you can analyze usage by creating short links to track your sales documents.

Google Drive is probably the most frequently used content management tool. I’m sure that’s no surpise to you 😎. From our perspective, sales teams are the ones constantly creating and sharing your Google Drive files with your prospects to move them towards conversion (closed-won!). The challenge is, that sharing your sales content in google docs, slides, or sheets can give a messy experience for the reader/viewer. The login requirements, the menus, and all the options hanging around just make it…not cool.

Content creation can feel like a game of telephone. Without the right process in place, it’s easy to lose track of what an article’s original intent was, and that can severely affect your efforts to generate solid content and rank on page #1. Further, without the right context for your piece, you won’t be able to strengthen it with top keywords, internal links, and other SEO tricks and techniques. While a regular content brief can capture the spirit of a piece and provide essential context, an SEO-focused content brief is geared towards getting to the front page of Google, with all the bells and whistles required.

Content marketing can be an enormous goldmine of potential leads and sales. It can increase site traffic, educate users about your product, capture lead information, and push people through the funnel. All content, though, is not created equal. This is something I’ve seen time and time again as a content marketer. All too often, there’s a misalignment between sales and the marketing department, and the content just doesn’t quite bring in the type of actions or leads that sales needs.