Product-Led SEO, Sales Enablement Content, and more.


Hi Reader,

I love the beginning of new quarters and new years. There’s just this special feeling of starting afresh, brainstorming new strategies and evaluating goals and key results for the next quarter. Marketing is a continuous learning journey. For me, I can never learn enough. So I’ve spent the past few days learning about new strategies that can help me drive my Q2 goals home.

Just because I actually want you to grow as a stellar marketer, I’ll share some of my research with you in today’s edition. Without too much shalaye, let’s get to it.

In today’s edition:

  • Product-led SEO: What is it and when do you need it?
  • How to get started with sales enablement content

Estimated read time: 8 minutes 10 seconds

Is product-led SEO right for you?📱

Many marketers practice content-led SEO. Which is, as the name suggests, building an SEO strategy around creating several content pieces (blog posts, e-books, whitepapers) that are relevant and valuable to your target audience. This way, you start with keyword research and gradually build authority for your website through great content.

Product-led SEO is more about leveraging the features and unique user experiences of your company’s product to drive traffic and conversion. This strategy isn’t as easy to achieve as content-led SEO because it involves in-depth integration with your product. A perfect example of a company getting product-led SEO right is Zapier. Here’s why:

If you google the keyword ‘how to connect google sheets to slack’, Zapier ranks on the first page. Some YouTube videos rank first but it’s the landing page we’re concerned about here.

Clicking on the search result takes you to a landing page centered around Zapier’s ability to create a Google Sheets and Slack integration and a few use cases for it.

The idea here is that since Zapier is a product that allows users to connect thousands of apps with their integrations, many users are probably searching for ‘how to connect A with B’. Zapier has created landing pages under their (/apps) category that can rank for these keywords.

As seen above, they even highlighted their most popular integration template, and gave examples of several other results that potential users may be trying to achieve. Each with CTAs that can drive conversions to signups.

Now, because I’ve explained what product-led SEO is and gave a great example doesn’t mean that you should jump right into implementing product-led SEO for your company. Here are a few signs that product-led SEO is right for you:

  • Your team has a deep understanding about what your users love about your product and all its use cases.
  • Your team has the technical resources (people and know how) to execute a programmatic SEO strategy.
  • Your team can create ample time across several departments to dedicate to a new SEO strategy.
  • Your company already follows a product-led growth strategy.

Product-led SEO can be very effective for conversions, especially when done right. I came across a bunch of articles about this when considering a product-led growth strategy so this will be extremely helpful for product marketers and marketing managers.

Sales enablement content: Where to begin ✍️

On the other hand of product-led growth, we have sales-led growth. In a previous newsletter edition, I shared why content marketers in sales-led companies need to prioritize creating content to enable their sales team to perform better.

Sales enablement content is basically content that helps your sales team close deals. In an ideal company, the content marketing team creates resources like videos, articles, product guides and more, that the sales team can share with leads and customers to help them make a decision to convert.

Sales enablement content can come from a number of sources within or outside your company. Here’s my process for creating sales enablement content for B2B tech companies:

Audit existing content

If your organization has existing sales enablement content, review each piece and identify which assets are still relevant. If you work in a fast-paced company like I do, then some of the content may need to be updated or even discarded.

Identify your user personas

You probably already have user personas, but it’s a good idea to double check if they’re as detailed as they should be. Your B2B user personas should answer these important questions:

  • What are their interests?
  • What’s their job title and what industry do they work in?
  • What are their personal values and motivations?
  • What are their challenges?
  • How do they consume information?
  • What pain points are related to your product?

Talk to the sales team

Nobody in your organization knows your users better than the sales team. They’re a very important resource for determining what type of content you need to create to aid conversion.

These three actions will help you understand exactly the type of sales enablement content you need to create. Now, let’s get to creating.

Gather your sources

Hearing challenges and pain points directly from your users are a great place to start. If your sales team has some recorded sales calls, then this makes your job easier.

Product documentation and help centers are also good sources for sales enablement content. You can always repurpose these sources into pitch decks, how-to guides and articles that compare your product to competitors.

Outline content formats

This is where your user personas come in. How do your users like to consume information? Video? Blog posts? Reports and white papers? Concise landing pages? Your personas tell you where to start and what’s most important. Outline these formats and their respective channels so it’s easy to know what to create.

Map content ideas to a stage in your buyer journey

You’ve laid out your content formats now, so I’m sure you have loads of content topics and ideas flooding your mind. Before you start, write down the different stages of your buyer journey, i.e. awareness, consideration, decision, etc, and start to map out your content ideas in these different buckets. This helps you create a clear sales enablement content strategy across the entire journey.

Create and repurpose

With the sources provided and your outlined content format, you should have quite a bit of sales enablement content to help your sales team succeed. The great thing about content like this is that it can be easily repurposed into different formats. For instance, a product guide can be repurposed into a how-to blog post, which can also be repurposed into a script for a product explainer video. It’s a never-ending cycle of content!

I hope my ramblings have made you reconsider creating some sales enablement content if you work in a sales-led company and have never prioritized this. The process above should get you started on a great note!

I’m super excited for a couple of things I’m working on for my audience in Q2. If you’ve been reading consistently, then you already know about the email course I’m creating. I’ve finally found the perfect topic and I can’t wait to get started on creating. The second is a resource that I think everyone is going to love. But I’m not ready to share what it is yet 🤫 Just like I do, I hope you have big things planned for this quarter too.

Until next time,

Olohireme

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