How to Use Your Marketing Materials as a Sales Conversation Starter

While your marketing is meant to gain attention and help people learn about you to either reach out themselves or respond when you do, it has additional functions by helping you get the conversation going or carrying it along.

Your marketing content is a tool in your sales toolkit. Using it properly helps you get the best return on your efforts. You can reach out to prospects and educate them without having them rely on speaking with you directly. Giving them the agency to learn on their own increases the time they think of your company and develops further credibility. 

Here are some helpful tips to keep in mind when reaching out to prospects, as well as how you can use your content to make a smooth process that helps your prospects.

Interact with Followers on Social Media 

Sharing content on social media is one of the best things you can do with it. It gives you valuable (and tangible) things to post that give customers and prospects something to engage with and discuss. No matter what you write and create, putting it out there and having people interact with it, read it, and interpret it is one of the best feelings you can have. Knowing that you have made that impact is incredibly rewarding, and it’s valuable to you, too, as the people who engage with you online often make good prospects and can become future customers.  

Responding to people on social media, especially in threads or in response to your recent blog posts, gives you a topic to discuss. It lets you see how much your company resonates with its customers and get a sense of how far your brand authority reaches. 

Refer Prospects to Content 

When speaking with prospects—or anyone, really—knowing you have a relevant piece of content to share can give you something to connect over and for them to remember you. If you have something you think is useful to them, you can send it over while speaking with them or as a follow-up afterward. These could be blogs, internal one-sheets, eBooks, or anything you’ve put together.  

Often, prospects need help understanding your industry or finding content for the services they need. Having these items on hand helps you educate them, showing them what you have to offer and actively demonstrating how helpfully you will behave as a client. Helping them understand builds rapport and credibility, making you their trusted resource. Furthermore, if you don’t teach them these things, they will either search themselves and form an incorrect opinion or turn to someone else (and likely a competitor) to teach them. 

Use Company Blogs as a Reference in Sales Conversations 

In addition to referring to prospects' content, you can use them as part of your sales process to give potential (i.e. future) clients something to read for themselves. Hiring outside help is a huge decision for people and giving them reference content gives them things to read as they consider and weigh their choices. You can help them gain more context and keep them thinking about you long before they take the huge leap to financially committing to hiring you. 

Whether you directly send them posts or content, you can include them in a reference section solely to make them easily available to clients. That will make them feel more supported and help them seek answers or deepen their knowledge of what they agree to purchase. 

Re-Connect Using Relevant Content 

Whether your prospects didn’t have the funding or moved on to other decisions, it’s unfortunately not uncommon for communication to fall by the wayside. Contacting them out of the blue is tricky, but content can give you a steady excuse to re-connect. It can help them think about your services again while offering helpful and relevant guidance. It may not immediately get the conversation going again, but it will keep your company relevant and on their mind.  

What’s crucial when reaching out for the first time in a long time is differentiating this communication from standards or ongoing communications, like email marketing or your social media feed. You can avoid this by making your marketing directly personalized or sending them something before it goes live, or sending it out to everyone else. Emphasize that you thought of them and thought it could help while presenting it with no strings attached or insistence on them contacting you back. 

Help Prospects and Grow Sales in the Background 

Sending prospects educational content helps prospects learn on their own time, giving them the agency to research and think for themselves without you directly selling to them. It also increases the effectiveness of your efforts to reach out to prospects to connect with them, as they have a lot to review and think about while having additional materials to feel supported.

Content is another tool in your toolkit, and using it to its full extent helps you grow your sales quickly and develop lasting connections with prospects. 

Conclusion 

Showing up is one of the most crucial aspects of success and developing a content strategy with a large number of materials behind it helps you be present and helpful with less effort needed on your part. They can help you spark conversations and help others spark conversations with you.

By putting your materials out there or following up with clients using them, you can figuratively “show up” without taking the time to explain things to them. Having that degree of flexibility is invaluable because it helps you grow your company with greater efficiency.