Editor's note: This article was first published on HackerNoon in March, 2023.

In 2022, the lead content strategist at an agency I worked with complained about our work. One of our loyal clients had stagnating conversion rates despite an increase in organic traffic.

They soon realized there was a gap in their content strategy.

During one of their meetings, they realized that their prospects had questions about some features— even existing customers asked how they could use the tool to achieve a specific result they once marketed.

The problem was that prospects didn’t understand what to do with a feature until they played around with the tool. This was a friction that needed to be addressed.

At the time, I was just a good writer with ideas about content marketing and strategy. My portfolio isn't what it looks like right now.

So, I told my boss to get the client to tell us the major concerns prospects raised on sales calls. I said we could figure out keywords to optimize for these “frictions,” and even if the content doesn’t rank organically, the client could refer prospects to these assets.

Over the next few weeks, we gathered questions, recognized the pain points, and created content that addressed them.

This gave the sales team more talking points. It also meant prospects could self-educate at their own pace (without necessarily speaking to the sales team).

As I gained more experience, I realized that creating case studies and comparison articles was only one of many content formats prospects need.

But they need more. And the only way to know this is to talk to prospects or current users to learn what they worry about and let your marketing team create content that solves these concerns. Here are some pointers for you:

5 Ways to Create Content That Helps Your Sales Team

While working on this article, I read a LinkedIn post by Niels van Melick, founder of Leadwave. He wrote that the best way to align your content strategy to include customers & prospects is to:

“Conduct interviews with your 10 best customers and analyze 20 recent sales call recordings to identify pain points and objections.”

After reviewing these recordings, take the following actions to create sales enablement content:

1. Create Communication Channels Between the Sales and Marketing Teams

Unless your prospects or customers know you personally, your support and sales team are the closest to them. These teams answer questions about what a feature does or how the product can help your users.

To make their work easy, ask your sales team what the usual queries are and “develop content pillars and topics that revolve around these pain points and objections,” says Niels.

I stumbled on Content Camel over a year ago. It’s a product that syncs communication and published content with the sales team, growth teams, prospects, and everyone who should see your content.

For the sales team, here’s what I mean:

Content published by marketers is automatically updated on Content Camel and grouped by category.

The category grouping helps the sales team filter through the content library and find an article that best suits a prospect’s needs. After a sales call, the salesperson can send a few resources to explain how their product works, and the prospect can easily access these resources.

These resources help the prospect understand how you work better.

The sales team can also log on to their account on Content Camel to make a content request from the marketing team. Here’s what that looks like:

In the Make a Wish box, the salesperson can indicate the level of urgency, choosing between “Need” and “Urgent Need.” They can also mention the type of content they need—a video, webinar, case study, eBook, blog post, etc.

There’s an option to state why they need it, the suggested title, and what the content needs to contain. In other words, additional details that can help the marketing team know what they need and why.

You can do all these without Content Camel if you're a small team. However, you need to ensure consistent communication between the sales and marketing teams so you can be more intentional about your content output.

2. Create Bottom-Of-The-Funnel (BOFU) Content That Shows How the Product Works.

I read a BOFU blog post from a SaaS company about customer onboarding processes.

The piece explained how SaaS brands can onboard new customers but didn’t mention how their product could help. The writer inserted a paragraph about how the product works at the foot of the article, where fewer readers care.

That’s not the purpose of BOFU content. But I'm not surprised. One common problem I see on blogs is that the content doesn't weave the product/service into the piece, so readers pass by the anchor text that's supposed to convert.

The best BOFU pieces explain how readers can tackle a challenge and show how the product can help them tackle it.

Your product-led how-to content should include screenshots, GIFs, and short videos of your product in action and how it solves a challenge.

In a 2023 announcement, Salesforce revealed its plans to integrate ChatGPT into Slack direct messages (DMs). To illustrate how this integration will function, they released an engaging GIF:

They knew that including visuals about how a product works, according to Venngage, could increase interest in the product.

Rainforest, a no-code QA testing tool, excels at BOFU content. Their BOFU article is about the top automated testing tools in the market.

Instead of simply asserting their product’s superiority due to features like pixel matching and video playback for debugging, they provided a more in-depth analysis of how these features work.

They included screenshots and videos like this:

Here’s another clip explaining how their video playback works:

This doesn’t mean you should plug your product into every BOFU piece. You shouldn't plug it in when it won’t fit naturally. But if it can, insert your product, just like this writer did for Ahrefs.

Now, how does this kind of content help the sales team?

Your sales team can include links to these pages while communicating with prospects.

In a Dock case study, the Director of Sales at Nectar mentions that their follow-up emails include demo videos, slides, testimonials, pricing info, and other supporting sales collateral.

That’s because these resources help prospects access all the information they need to make a decision about you. And you don’t need to intervene in this process because your resources are detailed enough, thanks to insights from the sales team and content from your marketers.

3. Create Case Studies/Guides That Show How Existing Customers Use the Product.

Interviewing 10 of your best customers is a great way to attract new clients.

Case studies are stories about your client’s experience and how you helped them

It tells the reader about the problem, the client's thought process in finding solutions, and how their experience could help other companies.

73% of marketers agree that case studies guide prospects through a buyer’s journey more effectively than other content assets. And that’s because they show how your product works.

More importantly, they show how companies with similar challenges have overcome them using your solution.

Mutiny HQ has a process that works.

More than 90% of their content consists of case studies and playbooks explaining their processes and the importance of their software. Mutiny HQ, according to YCombinator, uses AI and data to convert website visitors into customers. They create personalized experiences to “help marketers convert their top-of-funnel demand into revenue.” Because they are an expensive product ($17,800 to $32,000/annum), they needed a different approach to content.

They excel by creating content that prospects need in a format that showcases their expertise and the capabilities of their no-code software. This was likely achieved by involving the sales team throughout the process to gain alignment on the pain points.

Here’s a little overview of their content library:

These are not blog posts. These playbooks and frameworks address pain points and show how their product (or processes) can help prospects achieve their revenue goals faster.

In explaining how to build a revenue-generating ABM program, they explain what their process is and why:

They also have different case studies. They use these to integrate their visitors into the experience they provide their clients.

In their case study on how Amplitude got 40% more inbound leads, they included a toggle that shows separate landing pages for Amplitude's different target audiences, such as B2B (HOME) and CONSUMER TECH (FORM). The goal is to personalize each visitor's experience based on their industry.

Their content strategy is designed to tailor content to prospects' needs rather than creating top-of-the-funnel content that often fails to drive conversions.

Another example is Frontify.

They created an in-depth guide, broken into 5 sections, on how to use brand-building software to save money.

In the guide, they discussed how their product helped their clients and explained how it worked.

Case studies are an important part of the sales journey because they provide insights into important features of a product that meet specific use cases.

More importantly, they help prospects understand the experience of other companies and how it relates to their experience. This can increase the product's perceived value.

So, how do case studies and guides help the sales team?

Frontify generated over 25,000 visits and 550 leads from the long-form guide they produced. Kevin Ailloud, the Head of Demand Generation at Frontify, said the guide “allowed them (sales) to develop conversations with prospects around ROI in a more structured and supportive manner.”

In other words, it made the “selling” easy.

To create a super helpful case study:

• Focus on the customer’s story

• Lean on how your team helped, and

• Focus on the features + benefits that the customer received.

I love this detailed resource on Animalz for writing a brilliant case study.

You can also watch Alex Cattoni here:

4. Create Content That Covers All Sales Funnel Stages.

Your content must serve pre-purchase, purchase, and post-purchase purposes. It must create awareness, nurture & engage your prospects, show how your product works, and help them see why you’re the best.

It must also clear all doubts and encourage them to buy.

A marketing leader I can’t remember right now said:

“You need to have content for people who are not yet customers, content for people who are close to becoming customers, and content for people who are already customers."

That sentence describes how your content efforts can help your sales team.

So, create product demos, comparison pages, and tutorials (if your product is quite complex to set up). Create content assets covering everything your users need to know to maximize your product. This will help prospects in the decision phase decide if they like your product enough to pay for it.

5. Use Data to Inform Your Content Strategy.

Data should inform content strategy. Tracking metrics like engagement rates, bounce rates, and conversion rates (especially on high-value pages) can help you spot which types of content resonate with your audience and how you can optimize your strategy.

After all, I think it was Rand Fishkin who said, “The best content is that which speaks to the needs and desires of your audience.”

These content types should also help sales, and analyzing your website data can accelerate the strategy of creating helpful content. Here’s what I mean:

1. Data helps you understand your audience and where web traffic comes from. Understanding this helps you distribute content to those channels so you can increase overall conversion rate.

2. Data helps you track content performance. By monitoring content performance in traffic, engagement, and conversions, you can identify what's working and what needs to be optimized.

This means you need to ask questions like:

• Which posts have high conversions?

• Which page is the last touch point that motivated the purchase or request for a demo/sales call?

• What does the qualitative website audit tell us about user experience? Based on the conversion rate optimization (CRO) audit, how can we use the psychology of colors in our CTA to improve conversions?

These can help refine your content strategy and create compelling content that drives sales.

3. Data helps you spot gaps and opportunities. You need to analyze trending keywords and topics to identify gaps in your content library. Then, create content that differentiates your company/product.

For instance, if you're a marketing agency and everyone is leaning towards AI content writing tools, ‌ do a comprehensive case study comparing the quality your team can produce to what AI does.

Take it further: publish the pieces and show results on which ranked and converted more.

You can share the results of this experiment on LinkedIn and Twitter polls and watch people choose which content resonates with them the most.

This strategy differentiates you and shows your team in action.

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I specialize in creating content that meets search intent and drives conversions. Let’s work together; book a call here or fill out a form to tell me your project. I look forward to chatting with you soon.