Have you figured out your digital marketing strategy for 2022 yet?
Here’s a great idea for you: Embrace collaborative marketing. Aligning your different teams is likely to open up many new opportunities for your business.
According to the recent research by Convince and Convert and Ascend2, 50% of marketers claim that integrating marketing and sales teams has proved to be very successful at achieving strategic goals.
This is huge.
Here’s how to align two of your most isolated teams: Sales and SEO.
Foster Content Marketing Collaboration
All marketing is driven by content and that includes SEO and sales. For both teams, content is fundamental. Without content, there are no rankings or sales:
- Google relies on content to identify if a page is relevant to a search query and if it satisfies a searcher’s intent. Relevancy and search intent are two key ranking signals.
- In sales content is the most important driving force behind buyers’ journey. Content can directly impact purchasing decisions, as many studies confirm. According to Forbes, more than 60% of B2B buyers say they are able make their purchase decision exclusively based on digital content, without talking to sales reps or going through demos.
So why is there such a huge disconnect between SEO and sales content? Why do these two content strategies often exist separately without informing or helping each other?
“Content is King” has long been a marketing buzz phrase, especially in the B2B industry. However content is only King if it enables sales.
Too often there’s a discrepancy between those producing content and organizational teams who are trying to leverage it.
The resulting problem is two-fold:
- Sales reps lack the right content they can use to effectively engage with prospects
- SEO content creators lack sales reps’ insight which would enable them to create content that addresses real struggles of their target audience.
Ways to Integrates SEO and Sales
Content can be the driving source for removing your organizational silos and encouraging cross-team collaboration.
How can SEO and content marketing teams collaborate on creating an integrated content strategy?
- Encourage the two teams to brainstorm on content ideas together
- Let the customer support and sales teams keep a shareable record of questions your actual customers are asking them. Any of those can and should be content ideas for the SEO team to research in terms of demand (search volume) and difficulty.
- Foster creativity from both of the teams: What are their thoughts on content promotion opportunities. Do they have any viral content ideas?
- Let both the teams explore further opportunities. For example, let your SEO team figure out ways to reuse sales enablement content for ESP purposes. Many of those sales demos can be used as public content that can target all kinds of long tail ranking opportunities.
Help Them Understand Your Customers Better
When you work on traffic numbers all day, it is too easy to forget that there are real people behind those numbers.
Both SEO and sales team have unique access to valuable insights on who is your business’s target customer and how to serve them better:
- Sales teams talk to your current and future customers on a daily basis. They know their struggles and what they are looking to solve. Sharing this information with the SEO team will empower your SEO strategy with more data your competitors have no access to.
- Your SEO team knows exactly what your customers are searching and which questions they are asking. They know the demand behind each search term and they can report on how your competitors are targeting each search query.
Text Optimizer allows you to better understand concepts behind any search query and help you find the ways to meet your customers needs easier:
Share Your Web Analytics Insights
Let the SEO team share their web analytics insights: What are the effective paths that bring those leads through the site down the conversion funnel? What works best in terms of engaging your site visitors and turning them into leads?
All of that information will help your sales team focus on what works best and nail their lead generation and onboarding strategy.
Encourage your SEO team to create custom analytics dashboards and hold regular meetings to give. This will give your sales team access to web analytics data they can understand. Google Analytics is the first option that comes to mind. But there’s also web traffic statistics solutions offered by your hosting provider, as well as many Google Analytics alternatives.
Whatagraph is an easy way to create custom reports that are delivered weekly and are very easy to understand even for a non-technical person:
You can also integrate your web analytics into your website dashboard using these templates to let your whole company access it at any time.
Open up More Business Opportunities
Cross-team collaboration will likely discover more unexpected opportunities for you and your business. For example, letting your sales team access your SEO data may help them identify industry gaps and define your product’s unique value proposition.
You can also discover new product or service opportunities. For example, this SEO lead generation tool can help you expand your services pretty easily.
Widgets like this help integrate SEO into the sales process in the most efficient way.
Conclusion
The power of cross-team collaboration is almost limitless. SEO and Sales collaboration can give you that competitive advantage your business needs. By combining numbers with actual sales experience, you can empower both the teams.
The concept of unified communications has become even more important for business survival after COVID hit and many teams moved to work from home. Finding more ways to let your (remote) teams keep in touch and collaborate is more important than ever. Hopefully the above ideas would come useful!