Online marketing is designed to do a couple of things in sequence to build your business. These things can be highly enhanced by partnerships between your sales and marketing teams.
First, a successful online marketing campaign attracts leads by ranking high in searches. Second, that campaign converts leads into customers by providing content that has value. Last, consistent, meaningful content converts customers into regulars. That’s a successful online campaign in a nutshell.
Partnership Between Sales and Marketing Teams
How do we make one of these successful online marketing campaigns? One of the ways to achieve this is for your sales and marketing teams to work together to tell the story of your business and its products.
There’s a real opportunity in many campaigns for sales and marketing teams to partner and move the ball toward success. Among them are:
- Build a narrative: We live in a culture of story and are immersed in, and mesmerized by, narratives that tap into our basest, most accessible emotions. Sales and marketing can partner to craft a campaign that gives your business personality in a way that works.
- Show your expertise: One of the most important things to do in sales or marketing is to get the point across that you’re good at what you do, and that’s why you’re in business. Cross-functional partnerships can ensure that the right things are said at the right times, and that those things put exactly the right face on why you’re the experts to whom your customers keep on coming back.
- Appeal to a wide audience: Broad-ranging, meaningful online marketing means not appealing to customers in a specific area of focus. One of the places sales and marketing can meet is the grey area between aspiration and achievement, where you know you can do business but it just hasn’t quite happened yet. Sales teams know those areas that haven’t resonated with customers yet, and marketing can craft the messaging to appeal to them.
Communication is the key to achieving this success. Your sales team is connected to the key demographic base, also known as those people who used to be leads, but who turned into customers. The marketing team can learn a lot about what success means, and what meaningful messaging is, from those who are already customers.
Flipping that customer-focused communication, the marketing team can help drive the strategy and direction for that key messaging, turning customer success stories and product descriptions into content that grabs attention and keeps it until the sale is closed.
Online marketing is about way more than just search engine optimization – it’s about building content topics that show your business’ expertise and down-to-earth, reality-based personality. The sooner you make that core connection with a potential customer, the sooner that potential customer stops seeing you as a faceless business that wants money and starts seeing the passionate, knowledgeable people behind that business.
Partnerships between your sales and marketing teams are critical for success in online marketing campaigns. The sales team has the relationship and the messaging, and the marketing team can craft that messaging into the best possible story that appeals to the emotions, both of the customers you have as well as those you want to have.
