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Content Marketing Tactics to Improve Your Sales Funnel Efficiency

May 30th, 2023 by Nikola Sekulic
A drawing of a chart on a piece of paper. Photo by Isaac Smith on Unsplash.

We can safely say that the modern sales process is a multi-faceted one that involves much more than your typical outbound strategies. Nowadays, sales experts understand that they need the support of their colleagues from other departments to achieve their goals, particularly from marketing experts.

Your content marketers can play a vital role in your entire sales process, empowering and improving your sales funnel through all its stages. This is because quality, optimized, and personalized content can serve any lead, guiding them gently but efficiently toward conversion

That said, you need to have a good strategy in place if you’re going to use the content for sales enablement, and that’s what we’re talking about today. 

Convert files into sales-ready digital content

First things first, if you are to use quality content to boost sales funnel efficiency, you have to think about content diversification. In a nutshell, content diversification means using different types of content to engage potential customers relative to their position in the funnel.

You will find that not everyone responds to the same type of content in the same way, which is why we have dynamic content on our websites and personalize our marketing material. This personalization aims to give every potential customer exactly what they’re looking for based on their interests and behavior.

The same should go for all your content if you don’t want to leave sales potential on the table. For example, if you only have a product infographic, you might find that potential customers would actually love to have your entire catalog to peruse in a digital format instead. 

Issuu is a powerful tool you can use to create engaging and diverse types of sales content for potential and existing customers. Issuu allows you to bring your files to life and turn your typical content into engaging social posts, digital flipbooks, entire articles, or even simple visuals like GIFs.

It should go without saying that this platform is a great way to provide more engaging, tailored content to different types of customers based on the stage they’re at in your funnel. 

Turn quality content into online courses

With all the great content you have made over the years, why not use the opportunity your platform provides to share your knowledge, educate your audience, and become an authority figure in your industry? It pays to be the go-to source for reliable information, and it can have an immense impact on customer acquisition in the long run. 

This is your golden opportunity to use your knowledge base to create and sell online courses that are either in video/visual format, textual format, or even a combination of both. You can create video courses backed by a wide variety of supplementary materials like eBooks, infographics, and cheat sheets.

While you’re charging for your courses, you can give your customers these valuable materials for free to build brand loyalty. You can always tie all this content back to your website, your product pages, and memberships or subscriptions through storytelling and real-world related content. 

Monetize your content quickly

Without a doubt, one of the best ways to empower the sales process and lead prospects to conversion faster is to simply monetize the content itself. This method is another way to use the power of Issuu’s platform through its dedicated Digital Sales feature. 

The Digital Sales feature allows you to monetize your digital content and sell it around the world, commission-free. You can choose to sell single issues or create paid content subscriptions to generate recurring revenue by continuously producing exclusive quality content. 

You can distribute your content, such as the flipbooks you’ve created or your digital magazines, via email and other sales and marketing channels. You can then work on making these sales channels more efficient by using email tracking to gauge your email performance to refine your messaging and inspire sign-ups. 

All of these strategies tie together into a well-balanced approach that instantly monetizes your content and starts generating revenue from day one. It also helps get people to the conversion stage faster by delivering value at every turn. In fact, thanks to monetization, content creators and businesses can invest in producing high-quality and engaging content that matches the needs and interests of their target audience.

Use the right apps to connect sales and content experts

Technology plays a pivotal role in creating, optimizing, and disseminating great content, and it also empowers different teams to achieve better results. When it comes to sales and marketing, it’s important to have the right tools on hand to support both in creating content that sells.

For example, some of the best sales apps out there provide your sales experts with features that allow them to streamline their daily tasks and pull data from marketing. A sales rep can then use the marketing department’s data to create better product pitches and prep for prospect meetings.

At the same time, your content marketing experts can pull the data from these sales apps to optimize and personalize the content for each prospect or a group of prospects. This personalization will allow you to effectively nurture all prospects depending on where they’re at in your funnel.

With options like Issuu for Teams, you can empower multiple users to create, publish, share, and analyze assets in private workspaces and own your digital distribution in a seamless workflow.

Empower your products with engaging storytelling

In stark contrast to technology and hard data, we have the creative aspect of content: storytelling. Effective selling goes beyond customer data. As a result, incorporating engaging storytelling tactics can work well, even for products that may seem boring, making them more engaging, relevant, and desirable.

This is the case, for example, with Volvo’s trucks. Without a doubt, trucks aren’t easy to market, as the product class doesn’t inspire that much imagination, nor is it particularly interesting. But Volvo came up with an angle. 

In their video marketing strategy, they emphasize the educational aspect we discussed earlier, answering common questions about trucks. These short tutorials are just what their audience and prospects need to develop a relationship with the brand and become interested in a seemingly uninteresting product. 

With that in mind, find your angle, use a variety of formats, and focus on quality storytelling to bring your products to life.

Use artificial intelligence the right way

On a final note, let’s address the elephant in every conference room—what about AI? Artificial intelligence has become a hot topic in content marketing, and many business leaders are confused about how to approach the subject.

Should you invest in AI for sales and content or skip the trend? The short answer is that sales AI is here to stay and that artificial intelligence is the future of sales and content. These technologies are not set to replace humans; they’re meant to supplement their efforts.

Right now, you should use AI for content ideation, as well as for sentiment and market analysis and predictive analytics. This approach lets you optimize your content output and personalize your sales pitches for every customer. 

Over to you

Without a doubt, content marketing can be a powerful tool that you and your sales experts can use to acquire more customers. That’s just the beginning because content marketing also builds brand reputation, loyalty, and long-term customer retention. 

To unlock its sales potential, you need to optimize and align your content for sales efficiency through every stage of the funnel. With that in mind, use these tactics to create amazing content that will help guide potential customers toward conversion while making it easy for them to make the right decision.

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Nikola Sekulic is a seasoned brand developer, writer, and storyteller who turns fresh ideas into engaging stories for the online community.