Interactive Content Bridges the Gap for Marketing and Sales

Your audience has taken over the driver’s seat in the education of your brand. Are you ready for the ride?

The way consumers purchase products has changed dramatically all because of the progression of content marketing. Over 60% of the buying process is done before even speaking with a salesperson. Over 60%.And we all do it—we research and compare every option until we find the information we need to make a purchase. And if we don’t find all the information we need, we do our best to narrow our choices down to the best few… and that is the moment when we reach out to sales.

It’s almost as if we need another salesperson “on the floor” before the initial conversation to be able to engage with the online visitor and retain the information that they’re interested in or concerned with while researching your product or service. But if you think for one moment… maybe it’s not exactly another salesperson you need, but interactive content.

Interactive content can be a huge aid in bridging the communication gap between sales and marketing, allowing marketing to have further insights into what content your audience is interested in and allowing sales to see what your audience needs or wants. Both sides are provided with an additional level of insight that is often missing with static content.

All this month, we are focusing on interactive content for sales enablement, which means ion’s Director of Customer Engagement Audrey Ross is teaming up with ion’s Director of Account Development Asa Hochhauser for the Ask Audrey series to talk everything there is interactive content for sales.

This week, we dive a little further into how interactive content is able to bridge the gap between sales and marketing communication. Check out the video below!

Interviewer:

So, how can interactive content bridge the gap between sales and marketing communication?

Audrey Ross:

So, I think the biggest way that interactive content can impact the bridge between those two entities, sales and marketing communications, is I think with static content, you really only ever know what someone read or what someone downloaded. But, with interactive content you’re actually able to see what they engaged with, what they clicked on, and that can really surface some things that you didn’t know before, like maybe pain points that you didn’t even know your audience had or solutions that they were looking for with your product or service that you didn’t even really know people were looking to your brand or to your product to be able to fill that need for them. What that does for marketing is it allows them to create better, more tailored content that can then speak to those specific messages or things that you’re learning about your audiences as they’re taking in that interactive content.

So I think that that is, I think, where interactive content and what you’re learning through their progression, through the sales funnel, and bringing that feedback loop to the marketing communications team through what you’re learning about your audiences along the way. What do you think Asa?

Asa Hochhauser:

Yeah. I think the feedback loop there that you mentioned is really important. Oftentimes I know here at ion, sales is collaborating with marketing, providing feedback on what’s working, what’s not, what’s resonating with our audience, but oftentimes, that’s only going to come through the conversations that we’re having with prospects and customers.

What interactive content does, it allows marketing to have another salesperson on the floor, to get an additional level of insight that maybe isn’t provided on the phone through conversation. So that’s one way that marketing is able to get some visibility into insights that usually come through sales conversations. Because by the very nature of interactive content, it acts like a salesperson if you’re creating the right type of stuff.

Additionally, you can see, as a salesperson, the types of ways people are engaging with content with interactive content, so that we can start to see what’s really resonating. If someone is downloading a white paper and a salesperson sees that they’re a marketing automation platform or something along those lines, then there’s not much insight that we can bring back to marketing beyond maybe they just downloaded that. So I think having the insight to actually see what people are engaging with at a deeper level and bring that back to marketing as well just keeps that line of communication open and deeper.

Audrey Ross:

I like your point too about it being sort of another salesperson on the floor, because what we’ve seen customers do is actually, when they’re creating things like assessments, actually look to talk to a member of their sales team, or a couple of members of their sales team to see what are the questions that they’re asking as part of that discovery conversation, actually bringing those types of questions into the assessment experience so you can have an interactive piece as well as the actual conversation that the sales team’s having too.