3 Content Marketing Actions to Improve Your Customer Acquisition Strategy

Content marketing is a core feature that acquires your business with new customers. By providing relevant and original content that answers the common questions from your customers, you can win the hearts of those who take an interest in your company. This blog will discuss three ways to deliver content effectively, uniting the marketing and sales team to improve customer acquisition goals. When these two teams work together, it can create a magnificent ROI, which provides a better experience for the users. Here are three approaches to crafting content that improves your top-of-funnel marketing efforts and sales alignment for a customer acquisition strategy!

APPROACH #1: Account-Based Marketing Content Strategy

Firstly, what is ABM? And how does it supports the sales perspective? In other words, how can a strong ABM content strategy push acquisition to generate greater heights?

Forbes defines the definition of AMB this way. “AMB is all about shifting your focus from lots of leads to highly targeted accounts that are very specific organizations and companies that are the best possible fit for your product or service.”

Understanding AMB, checked! Now, how does content marketing push the needle for it?

Karl Naim, co-founder, and CEO at ChefXchange, explained Content Marketing (We also provide an article on content marketing here!) by this:  “…a long-term strategy to build a strong relationship with your target audience by providing them with high-quality content that is very relevant, as often as possible. Basically, content marketing is a way to show your customers that you care about them, which is not the case of one-off advertising that just puts a product or service in front of your eyes.” 

Using ABM strategy with content marketing enables a business to present their targeted customers with their brand and content relevant to pain points. For example, a case study on a similar company that achieves a greater success with your product or service, or an e-book based on their website behavior? Are they searching your product pages, support pages, or blog posts for specific types of content? After establishing what they’re looking for, they reach out with the right message related to their business model. High-touch mar-sales works! Frequently, sending automated emails to a long list of customers isn’t the best choice.

Research from Sales For Life believes that within the next four years: around one million sales will lose their jobs to self-service e-commerce. Approximately nine out of 10 of top-level B2B decision-makers simply do not respond to cold outreach. 74% of buyers choose the salesperson with great value and insights. Only 1% of calls actually lead to meetings. Despite this, the sad truth is that many B2B organizations still try to sail their ship, knowing that there is a storm ahead of them. 

With these findings, try to be honest with yourself and ask these questions: Are your marketing efforts and sales goals synchronically working? By improving customers’ behavior, delivering relevant content to their business goals (not yours!), and establishing these goals at every stage of their buying journey with your product or service, your ABM efforts are likely to succeed.

 

APPROACH #2: Survey Your Loyal Customers 

It’s simple to understand your loyal customers if you simply ask them what they like, dislike, and what they want to see your business doing more. 

At Leadfeeder (website tracking software), they recently surveyed about 20 of their most dedicated users by phone. They offered them incentives for their time. There’s nothing wrong with providing them incentives since their input can improve the current customer experience and acquisition efforts.

The survey showed that their users wanted more personalized tutorial information and a thorough guideline to use all the new and existing features Leadfeeder offers, but most importantly, how these aspects could be related to a specific job function and business goals. There’s a huge gap in their content strategy so they are filling it with more case studies, customer guest bloggers, and product guides.

And for incoming customers, personalized content will generate product efficiency for sales and customer service teams. By creating an alignment strategy that focuses on customer needs and comprehending the why of retention, we can better understand the top-of-funnel journey and improve it for customers. It’s a win-win for both marketing and sales!

APPROACH #3: Measure How the Sales Teams Use Content 

Now, you’ve discovered ABM, and your sales teams are working to connect with hyper-targeted accounts. You’ve finished your survey for your existing customers and better understand their needs to create better branding for your business. All the time and effort (not to mention your content budget) are put to generate these insights. Well, it’s time to audit your efforts!

Katrina Pfannkuch of Kapost states, “Optimization is key to maintaining the up-front cost of your content ‘investment,’ and it allows B2B organizations to collect metrics that show how content is tied to ROI by demonstrating the impact of a specific content piece on a prospect’s purchase decision.”

Metrics are problematic for marketers to establish, especially for content. That’s why Pfannkuch offers beneficial methods to track the ROI of your content strategy efficiently.

• Measure the results of content performance at each stage of the buying process
• Determine how your teams use and share content
• Use content as a recording model to see how certain marketing pieces convert
• Conversion metrics allows marketers to pinpoint content holes and inefficiencies to set clear performance benchmarks
• It allows you to see how each piece fits together and refills the sales/conversion funnel (or not)

 

Google Analytics (GA) is a great approach to discover these metrics as well. For example, are the visitors on your website downloading a particular case study often than the others? Highlight on this, and create more content to pair it. You can generate personalized goal reports in GA to help you see these metrics clearer. If you see your site visitors reading particular blog posts more than the others, try to create more on these topics, and discuss with your sales teams. Sales teams have great insights as to why a customer is interested in a particular type of content than the other because they are the ones who talk to the customers all day! Working together will provide insights that studies or analytics reports may never be able to articulate.

 

These three approaches might not be the ultimate solution to generate a content strategy that improves customer acquisition numbers. However, these three approaches can guide you and your sales team in a more strategic and right direction. I cannot stress this enough, marketing and sales work BETTER TOGETHER. There are times the goals shared are different, but if both marketers and sales agree and align on customer personas, ideal customers to customers, and metrics for success — incredible things do happen!

 

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