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“Content marketing” and “sales enablement” are buzz phrases that are becoming more and more prevalent in the world of digital marketing. Your agency has no doubt heard of these before. You are wondering, perhaps, what these terms mean and how they can help you in your efforts to win over new clients and keep them on retainer.

The 411 On Content Marketing

There’s a saying that “content is king,” meaning how important it is to create and publish relevant and engaging content in digital marketing efforts. Content comes in many forms, including blogs, website content, ebooks, case studies, social media posts, emails, whitepapers, infographics, videos, and more. 

Content marketing, by definition, is the process of creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and acquire ideal audiences. 

Your content marketing needs a strategy that will ensure available content for each stage of the buyer’s journey. Ultimately, your content can and should drive profitable customer action- in your case, becoming a client of your agency. 

Content marketing aims to provide relevant and valuable information to the right audiences. While old-school, traditional marketing uses a more blanketed approach, content marketing attempts to target the “right” people with the right content. It is a way to interact with prospects without hard selling. Rather than television commercials that say “Buy! Buy! Buy!” or sending a postcard to every address in town, it educates prospects before, during, and after interactions with your sales team. 

Content marketing is customer-facing collateral, but there’s more to it than that. It is also the voice of your digital marketing agency. It has a powerful influence on public perception of a brand well before the sales team ever has a chance to speak with someone.

Your digital marketing agency could be doing more to reach today’s consumers, here’s how:

Sales Enablement: The Connecting Piece

On the other hand, sales enablement is the strategic process of providing your sales team with what they need to do their job better. These resources could be content, tools, knowledge, and information to effectively sell your PPC product or other digital marketing services to clients. Whatever is needed to consistently have valuable conversations with customers at each stage of the buying cycle is what sales enablement provides.

Hopefully, besides telling prospects what you can do for them, you can also show them. This is achieved through sales collateral, anything from customer case studies to whitepapers and more. Case studies are the most critical content in a sales team’s document library. Nothing speaks as strongly for your business as a previous customer’s success! If you don’t have any, you should make it a point to develop them as soon as possible.

How Do the Two Complement One Another?

When you look at the two definitions, you probably already observe some similarities jump out at you. You see the word “content” mentioned in sales enablement. At the same time, the whole point of content marketing is to sell. It is still marketing, after all! Where do these two terms connect, and where are they different? You may be wondering, “Is content marketing a part of sales enablement, or is sales enablement part of content marketing?” Great questions!

Content marketing is a larger subset that aids the sales process. For this reason, it helps sales enablement and is a big part of a well-done sales enablement strategy. Your content contributes to the first and second stages of the sales cycle, Attract and Convert. Once this has happened and a potential client goes through the sales funnel, sales can step in. Sales enablement practices most often occur in the second and third stages, Convert and Close.

What Are the Differences?

That’s not to say they’re the same. Content marketing focuses on content creation for buyer consumption. Sales enablement is all about ensuring your sales team can effectively access, promote, and distribute the content. Content marketing may have a big hand in a specific subset of assets within a sales enablement platform, such as the collateral library.

Leverage Content Marketing and Sales Enablement

If you’re worried about getting your sales enablement process and collateral right, don’t be. That’s what we do best! We can handle the aspects of selling digital marketing services that may be a little out of reach for you right now.

When you sign up for Compass by White Shark Media, you have access to a library of white label case studies, Google & Microsoft vertical trends, pitch decks, one-pagers, videos, and more. You will find all the support you need to pitch or upsell PPC, plus all Google & Microsoft products in our hub. It’s updated every week with ready-to-use decks to facilitate digital marketing pitches during each sales cycle stage.

Having a complete library that enables your sales team to close one deal after another is priceless. With all content white-labeled, prospects your sales team is presenting to will only see your company branding, including name, logo, and colors. Learn more about our sales enablement solution.