Using Web Content in Your Sales Process

Considering a website redesign? While how the site looks is key, and the navigational structure is crucial, the most important aspect of a website redesign is the content you create.

Client-Focused Content

Why? Done correctly, the content created for your website serves as the base for the entire customer journey. Make sure your new content is simple, concise, and written from the customer’s perspective. How do you know if it’s hitting the mark?

• If the content mostly starts with “we” or “our”, you are probably talking more about yourself than the customer’s problem
• If it doesn’t address a specific person or audience, your content is probably too general for anyone to have an emotional connection with it
• If it discusses “what” you do versus “why”, you need to rethink how you are solving problems for your customers

While it’s important to use your website redesign as an opportunity to create a solid content base, the reality is that most of that content will not be consumed on your website.

Attribution

Instead, it will live in the scary, non-attributable worlds of social media, word of mouth, sales presentations, and online and offline networking — places that you don’t directly own but are key to conversion. Customers intentionally avoid company-owned assets during their discovery process to prevent tracking. They spend time in other parts of the digital ecosystem to vet your company before venturing onto your site or other digital properties.

In fact, the number of touchpoints required to ultimately convert a prospect to a buying customer is ever-expanding, currently requiring 22 to 27 touchpoints from awareness to close. The investment in purposeful content is crucial to support this long sales process, and carefully curated base content serves to support the invisible handoff between marketing and sales.

How do you ensure that you get the most from your content?

Consistency in Content

Everything should sound and look the same across all of your content — from social, your website, placed content, and sales presentations to your contracts and the way your support organization interacts with your customer.

How do you do this?

Establish a brand voice with brand attributes and agreed upon blocks of content that discreetly describe what you offer. When you talk about your products and services, these blocks can be slightly modified to work for each part of your organization.

They can be tweaked to speak to each of the decision makers along the journey — from the person responsible for finding a solution, to the person vetting its appropriateness, to the ultimate decision maker. Each cares about a slightly different aspect of what your company and its products and services can do.

Having this baseline of content ensures the entire team is using the same language, whether it be those in sales, marketing, or project management. It means that when a customer is handed off to different departments, they still feel as if they are in the same ecosystem and are well taken care of — even if the person working with them is new.

The development of a new website is an exciting and challenging time for any organization. A thoughtful approach to developing your content will benefit your company long after the site launches and well before the first customer visits it.

This article was written in collaboration with Chris LaFay of Classic City. He talks about this topic more in-depth on his blog.