Last week, Christine Brozek shared research findings and advice on how to make your thought leadership and marketing content stand out in today’s mostly digital world of social distancing as the fight against the coronavirus pandemic continues. To catch buyers’ attention and draw them into conversation, marketing content must do double duty: inform prospects and make sellers more relevant (subscription required).

B2B buyers want to work with sellers who help them, not sell to them. While buyers may want to self-educate and remain anonymous in the early stages of discovery and explore, they will engage more with empathetic sellers who understand their industry, business, and the issues buyers face.

To arm sellers properly, B2B marketing content providers need to partner with their sales management colleagues to create content that focuses on customers (subscription required), is chock-full of relevant examples, includes stories that resonate with buyers’ issues, and shows how to achieve desired results.

Tip The Scale In Favor Of A Sale

Marketing content that answers the question “Why change?” is instrumental to heightening buyers’ sense of urgency. Give sales reps content brimming with data, stories, illustrations, and examples that recommend new approaches to solving customers’ issues. This more empathetic and credible content helps facilitate new conversations or keeps a dialogue going by giving reps material with which to have more relevant conversations and create convincing arguments that help to close more deals.

Unfortunately, when it comes to content topics, marketing and sales are seldom on the same page. Fewer than half of marketers say they truly understand what sales needs from their content. To address this gap, meet with sales twice a month or more often at first to collaborate on creating ideas, auditing results, and measuring results based on an integrated content marketing plan and set of metrics. Marketers who do this see increased credibility and alignment between marketing and sales when sellers move from presenting product features and functionality to providing key insights, knowledge, and value.