This is the third piece in our series on repurposing content. In the past year, we’ve written about how to repurpose audio content into text and how to turn blog content into videos.
Today, we look at how to repurpose blog posts into sales enablement emails.
At Propllr, we aren’t email marketers by trade, but we know that expert blog content can make great fuel for your sales team. Here, we share five tactics from clients who have done just that.
1. Write Strong Blogs to Fuel Your Content Ecosystem
This may seem self-evident, but it’s worth emphasizing that you need to have strong blog posts before you can repurpose them.
If you’re already creating blog content that’s designed to generate and nurture leads, you’re also creating great fodder for your sales team’s email outreach.
Before that outreach can happen, though, your sales team has to understand what each post you publish is about and which prospective customers it’s most likely to help.
The easiest way to make that happen? Write summaries for every post. Keep reading for details.
2. Write a Summary to Accompany Every Blog Post
Every time you write a new blog post, make a habit of also writing a summary to share with the sales team. These summaries should answer the following questions:
- What’s the post about (in one sentence)?
- Who might benefit from reading this post?
- What’s the next appropriate action for a prospect to take after reading this post?
A strong advocate for using summaries to prop up content is Emily Coughlin, formerly the Senior Marketing Manager at Knowledgehound. In her role there, she regularly used blog summaries to help salespeople understand which posts were best to send to prospects.
Why do summaries work so well? They give your internal team the ability to quickly digest what a post is about and who can most benefit from the information it contains.
What these summaries can’t do is actually get the essential information in front of prospects. For that, you’ll need an email. Read on for details.
3. Create an Email Version of Every Blog Post
The original blog post drives inbound leads.
The summary helps your internal team quickly grasp the post’s value.
The email version of the blog post helps get its key insights and calls to action in front of actual prospects.
Most salespeople aren’t writers, though, so creating the email version of every blog should fall on the content team. Getting the content of emails right matters a lot.
According to the folks at the Email Experience Council, “The success of a good email marketing campaign depends on three things: content (40 percent), audience (40 percent) and images (20 percent).”
Content plays a huge role in the success of emails.
Whether or not sales emails are considered part of a marketing campaign, the message is clear: what you say and how you say it have a huge impact on whether these emails lead to conversions.
Not sure what the email version of your blog posts should look like? Hubspot says that every sales email must contain five elements:
- A subject line
- A strong opening line
- Helpful body copy
- A CTA in the closing copy
- A professional signature
Each of these (except maybe the signature) should tease or summarize the post’s thesis so that prospects are getting the key message no matter how much they actually read.
We’ve found that email versions of blog posts can be particularly useful for companies with long sales cycles.
For example: One of our clients has an eight- to 12- month sales cycle. During that time, they rely heavily on blog posts featuring client stories to keep conversations alive.
For them, the email version of each blog is perfect fodder for sales outreach. It gives their team a chance to talk about how a similar customer recently implemented their SaaS product. Sharing these wins in a format that emphasizes takeaways can jumpstart the conversation that turns a warm lead into a paying customer.
Email warm leads to speed up the sales process.
4. Tie Each Email to a Goal in Your Sales Funnel
If the email itself is the “what” of this sales enablement effort, tying each email to a sales funnel goal is the “when” and the “why.”
Connecting emails to goals is key to making blog content succeed as part of sales enablement.
If you aren’t already familiar with your sales team’s funnel, find out what key goals they work toward as they aim to turn prospects and leads into customers.
Then, do a high-level audit of your content.
In this audit, you’ll want to look for pieces that could help your sales team reach their funnel goals. For example, if the goal is for the prospect to set up a product demo, you might highlight a case study that illustrates how your product helped a business in the prospect’s industry.
Even if your sales team doesn’t have granular funnel goals defined, their outreach likely fits into one of the three classic phases of a sales funnel:
- Awareness
- Education
- Decision-making
As you get into the habit of creating content with the intention of repurposing it, it may also help to identify where in the sales funnel each new piece you create fits.
Over time, this practice will help the sales and marketing parts of your organization work together seamlessly.
5. Include the Sales Team in Your Internal and Social Promotion Strategies
As the above section hints, a healthy content marketing program doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Your blog can function as the fulcrum where new messages surface before they’re sent out through different channels.
With this approach in place, a little effort – like a commitment to generating and sharing new blog summaries outside the marketing team – can have a huge impact.
To ensure that your blog promotion strategy serves your sales and marketing goals…
- Write copy for your company’s social media channels whenever you publish a blog post. Let the sales team know when it’s live so they can interact with it if it’s relevant to their current work.
- Write summary text for an email to your list. This summary makes it easy to let your subscribers (i.e., an external audience) know what’s happening on your company blog.
- Share links to fresh blog content and summaries internally to make sure the sales team knows when something new goes live. This doesn’t have to be a formalized process. As Emily said, it can be simple: “Put them in cadences in the Sales team Slack channel and [Sales] can just pick what they need from there.”
- Make sure your blogs have appropriate CTAs asking visitors to reach out to the sales team.
- Set up tracking to ensure you know where exactly your prospects are converting on your website.
It doesn’t take much extra time to execute on these additional steps, but they go a long way in supporting your sales team’s understanding of new product initiatives and the language their prospects and leads may be seeing in the company’s external marketing every day.
Use Your Blog Content to Generate the Right Sales Collateral
On its own, your blog can help drive organic traffic, establish thought leadership, educate prospective customers, and so much more.
When you proactively repurpose every post to fuel your sales team’s efforts, it has an even bigger impact – and therefore a bigger ROI.
Of course, if your sales team doesn’t think the information in your blog is well suited to nurturing leads, your best bet is to ask what kind of content would be useful. And then add that to your editorial calendar.
If you want to discuss how your content program can power conversations with prospects and customers, reach out to talk with us today!