Financial technology marketers are steadily improving at creating awareness-stage marketing content. Many who were once verbose and blustery are now producing more customer-centric thought leadership. The white papers, blogs and articles they produce today provide substantially more value to the audience and are doing a better job of attracting leads into the funnel.
However, fin-tech marketers’ ability to convert those leads into qualified sales opportunities and revenue is still lagging behind other industries. They need to get better at nurturing mid- and late-stage leads.
Awareness content may attract leads, but if marketers really want to contribute to revenue, they have to keep leads engaged and influence buyers deeper in the evaluation process. For content to deliver ROI at these later stages, it has to answer the questions that prospective customers are asking as they progress through the decision process. But Marketing can’t create this content on its own. Success at this stage demands closer alignment with Sales.
How is this done? Well, here are some simple ways you can work more directly with your sales team to source content that is directly relevant to the questions buyers are asking at these later stages.
Capture Questions and Answers
Start by developing a process to capture every question asked and every answer delivered to prospects, clients, and even to reporters. You can use this to nurture leads as they progress in their buying cycle.
Sales, Professional Services, Customer Support, and even Media Relations are answering questions every day. Find a simple way for them to loop Marketing in on the email threads (include both the questions and the answers).
If Marketing has access to the company’s CRM, and if the CRM is synched with the salespeople’s email, you can generally comb through important conversations directly to identify key content. If not, then have the Sales team add Marketing as a BCC or forward pertinent emails.
In addition, ask sales people to quickly record notes immediately after a sales meeting or phone conversation. This can take the form of notes typed into the CRM, or quick recordings into their phone’s digital recorder that they send over to Marketing (which you can have transcribed and then add to the CRM notes). Ask them to include both the questions asked by prospects and their responses.
Marketing should collect and categorize the responses and schedule regular meetings with Sales to review them and analyze trends. Collaborate to identify the most relevant topics and important content needs.
Use Q&A Content to Nurture Leads
We repurpose this type of content to update product pages on the website and product sell sheets, we create online FAQs, develop blog posts, and prepare emails to include in ongoing lead nurture programs.
Sales Email Templates Help Sales Nurture
Start by developing reusable content for the Sales team. This is how you create immediate value. If Sales sees you finding ways to make their jobs easier, they’ll stay engaged in the process.
We create sales email templates right in the CRM that answer common questions. This allows Sales to quickly find frequently used content and create personalized responses quickly when someone new asks a similar question. (Most CRM systems allow users to customize text in a sales email on the fly for a specific customer without impacting the template).
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Candyce Edelen
PropelGrowth
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+1 303.882.8871 (mobile)
www.propelgrowth.com/blog
