B2B Content Marketing Without the Marketing Team

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Prospects and customers often value content from you, more than from your marketing team.

If you work in B2B sales and your role is inside sales, key account manager, business development, sales leadership or some other variation, you can easily create or share content via email and LinkedIn. The best part about sharing content is you can accelerate the sales cycle and win rate of emerging and current opportunities.

Doing your own content marketing as a sales professional is not hard, but it does require a bit of planning and discipline.

To get started, you will need 2-4 hours to get organized. If that does not scare you, keep reading.

The process is straight-forward:

1.  Decide how often you want to send content to your customers or prospects: 

You will want consistency and repetition to demonstrate that you are committed to sharing relevant content. To start, I recommend monthly, and no more than weekly.

2.  Research, bookmark or inventory types of content that others have created you can share: 

Examples include:  

• Statistics and research related to your industry
• Visual Content (Videos, infographics, slides)
• Company culture, news, reviews, and product information
• Specific content that revolves around your customer journey or buying process (this you will likely create on your own)
• Third-party industry related content

3.  Determine if you are going to deploy content via email, LinkedIn, or both. 

To start, I would pick one or the other. Once you are in your rhythm, expand to the other channel. 

4.  To develop content, set-aside an hour for each email/LinkedIn post. 

You need to block your calendar for content marketing development, and you will need at least an hour. If you don’t block your schedule, you won’t be able to achieve consistency and repetition. Schedule a time where you won’t be interrupted.

 5.  Content development tips:

• Keep it short, 2-4 minutes to read
• Always provide some original content from you personally. Invest in your personal brand – others want to hear what you think. Even a few relevant and intelligent sentences introducing a shared article counts.
• Shared or original content must be gender neutral, professional, relevant, and credit must be explicitly assigned whenever you share a piece of third-party content.
• Don’t spend too much time on graphics and design. There are thousands of templates available on the Web, Pick one and go with it.
• Use Grammarly or similar service to check for grammar and spelling before you click send.

Marketing and sales should work closely together to do content marketing. 

However, marketing resources are often constrained, so you may not be getting the content marketing support you need.

Doing your own content marketing as a sales professional can lead to robust results, help you get a leg up on the competition and strengthen your personal brand, regardless of how much content marketing support you receive from the marketing department.

 Why not start now?
 

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