How to Create Interactive Content for Sales Enablement
Interactive content is the new buzzword in communication with 88% of marketers saying that it helps them stand out from competition. Engaging interactive content can transform conversations with sales prospects and convert them into customers.
Creating interactive content for sales enablement is an effective practice to convert prospects into loyal customers. It is important to differentiate between content for marketing and sales enablement. Content created for conversion and closing phases of the sales funnel is sales enablement content while that created to reach potential customers and initiate conversations is content for marketing.
That being said, if content for marketing and sales is well-aligned, the sales team can better leverage it across various touch-points on the buyers’ journey to convert a prospect into a loyal customer.
The interactive content you create for sales enablement should reflect your brand and be in tune with your buyer’s persona. When done right, sales enablement content can help you reach potential customers, improve conversions and close high-value business deals. So the question is how to develop interactive content for sales enablement that delivers on promise?
Top 6 Tips to Create Interactive Content for Sales Enablement -
1. Consult Your Sales Team
Your sales executives are the best people to know what works and what doesn’t. To create effective sales enablement content, first consult your sales team for inputs rather than spending precious time and resources in creating content you assume the team would use.
Also, consider your own business objectives: Do you want to educate and inform, mine for information, establish thought leadership, raise brand awareness, explore new possibilities, or generate and capture valuable leads?
For sales enablement content to work effectively, you must also ensure that your sales and marketing team are in perfect alignment. By seeking inputs from all stakeholders, you will be able to create customer-centric interactive content that can lead to more meaningful sales conversations.
Apart from your sales team, talk to anyone who interacts directly with your customers, for example, your customer service team can provide you valuable inputs to bridge any disconnects between your products/services and what your customers want.
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2. Create Customer-specific Content
Your conversations with the sales team will give you an idea of your audience and what they want. Accordingly, create content that is in tune with your buyer personas, relates directly to the individual customers and provides an experience that works for them.
Consider questions such as what messages are relevant to them, what will draw them in, convert them into customers, how they like to interact with technology and what will stimulate the desired reaction.
These objectives will help you map your business goals and align them with the needs of your customers. With this picture in mind, you can create interactive content for sales enablement.
Related: How to Deliver Retail Sales Training to Remote Employees
3. Analyse Your Existing Content
It may be that you have the right content for sales enablement but not in the right format. Perform an audit to see if there are any gaps you can fill and then map out what you still need to create.
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4. Create a Storyboard
Map your content with a storyboard to determine any gaps in the messages and experience. Review it with your sales and marketing team to ensure that you have got everything covered and how the conversation will flow with the customer. You can also seek the help of a professional agency to create the storyboard in case you are not creating the content for sales enablement in-house.
5. Choose the Tools to Tell your Story
The content that you deliver must be engaging. To ensure that the sales reps and customers both find the content original, emotive and effective, you need to add certain additional elements to it. Graphics are a great way to keep the content interesting.
You can include animations to tell your story. Animations have a way of capturing people’s attention and delivering information in an easy-to-understand manner. You can make use of augmented reality to further immerse the viewer. An effective story with the right interactive tools will not only help you connect with your audience but also strengthen your brand, enabling you to tell them exactly what you can do for them.
6. Type of Content that Enables Sales
Interactive content for sales enablement is any information that builds your brand narrative and provides a fulfilling online experience to your customers. Depending on whether you want to disseminate information, collect user feedback, generate or convert leads, or develop meaningful connections with high-quality prospects, the types of content you choose will have a major impact on initiating meaningful conversations and taking them to their logical conclusion. Here are some examples:
- Informative blog posts: Blog posts can serve as high-value reference points to educate sales personnel and empower them to nurture prospects and successfully close a sale.
- Use cases: High-quality, customer-centric documents such as case studies help the sales reps to better understand the needs, wants and preferences of customers – the struggle and challenges your customers are facing and how you can provide them the high-value services they are seeking.
- Video and other client testimonials: This type of content will help communicate the value you are providing, build customer confidence and provide them the proof they need on how your solution can be a game-changer for them.
- Competitor research and analysis materials: With this type of content, you can understand your competition and how they connect with their target audience. You can accordingly identify and plug loopholes. Competitor research and analysis materials can help the sales team to understand where your brand outperforms others. They are thus better positioned to convert a lead into a sale.
- White Papersand eBooks: These documents focus on the needs of the customers, most of whom are more likely to be found further down the sales funnel. These documents educate the customers on how your product or service will meet their Sales reps can refer to these content types for more information.
Conclusion
As a closing note, interactive content is not just a crucial tool for sales enablement but also has a lot of reusable value. It can be broken down into several movable parts, which can then be suitably used within various stages of the sales funnel.
For example, interactive content created for an event or a sales suite can later be updated and modified for another event, which means that your investment continues to deliver value in the long-term. It is believed that the human brain processes visual information 400 times faster than the static word, which means we are more likely to take in visual and audio information and retain it for a longer period of time. Interactive content is therefore an important tool for sales enablement, empowering your sales reps to better explain your products and services to prospective customers.
Learn More: How to Improve the Sales Process with Mobile Content Delivery
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