When it comes to your website, we’ve provided you with tons of resources to make it function correctly from a technical standpoint. We’ve also given you the know-how to help make your buyer personas find you. But then what happens? How can you ensure that your site not only performs seamlessly, but also drives the bottom line? Because your website is your company’s most valuable marketing tool, it’s essential that you use it to proved your sales department with the qualified leads they need to continue to close business. So here’s how you make your website more smarketable.
Smarketing is a term to describe the alignment between sales and marketing processes and your website is the bridge that links the two together. Gone are the days of sales versus marketing. They belong together like peanut butter and jelly. By establishing an aligned strategy to attract, convert and close the most qualified leads, smarketing keeps both departments accountable for driving the bottom line. It’s a lot easier to do than most people think. It starts with a conversation about goals.
If you’re on the marketing side, talk with your sales team and find out who they’re talking to and what types of questions they’re getting asked on a regular basis. Are there any objections they have to overcome frequently? Who are they closing? This is where marketing’s knowledge of content strategy comes into play. Developing that content starts by knowing who your buyer personas are. Work closely with your sales team and your existing client base to make sure your marketing efforts are not only speaking their language, but are also addressing their questions and concerns through the buying cycle. By providing valuable information from the beginning of sales process through the close and beyond, you’re able to keep your sales team’s pipelines full while keeping up retention numbers. Get sales on board with helping you develop segmentation criteria, copy for emails and a cadence for drip campaigns so that the right content is getting to the right people at exactly the right time. Work together to create the content that will help move prospects through the funnel and see an increase in qualified leads.
And finally, use a marketing automation software to create a lead scoring system that works for your business. When you’re creating and distributing content, work together with sales to determine what actions indicate positive engagement with a prospect. What value should opening an email have? What about clicking through the email? How many forms for gated content should they fill out before they’re assigned to sales? By thinking through these (and several other) questions, you’ll be able to help sales know which leads are ready to close.
Keep the lines of communication open and create a standing meeting (monthly, quarterly, whatever works for your business) to analyze and evaluate the effectiveness of your efforts and tweak where necessary.
Go forth and smarket, friends!