10 Tips to Spruce Up Your Sales Materials in 2021
An argument can be made that your brand’s sales materials are more important than your product. Sales enablement tool usage in offices has jumped significantly from 6% to 40% (a 567% increase!) which means people are getting smarter about how they create, disseminate, and utilize sales materials. You could have a product of immense value to your target audience, but it will be difficult to make sales if your sales materials do not communicate that to the customer as accurately and enticingly as possible.
Your website, whitepaper, company brochure, presentations, and other sales materials are crucial to helping customers decide whether they want to do business with your company or not. To attract these customers and make sales, let’s look at 10 ways that you can boost your sales enablement materials.
10 Tips To Boost Your Sales Materials
1. Humanize Your Website Copy
Your website is essential sales material. 92% of first-time website visitors are not looking to make a purchase but it only takes about 0.05 seconds for users to form an opinion about your website that determines whether they’ll keep reading or click away. That’s why your website must be designed and developed to grab - and maintain - customer attention as quickly as possible.
Web content is increasingly benefiting from using informal, conversational copy. Design your layout in fun, engaging ways and incorporate copy that makes your prospective customers see you as an authentic, friendly brand instead of a stiff, salesy one that only wants their money. Yes, you want customers to give you their business, but you want them to be happy and confident in their choice.
Focus on words that create an emotional bond with your target audience, while also communicating your brand message clearly. A confusing website with unclear value propositions could lose your customers, but compelling copy and a great website design could increase your conversion rates significantly.
2. Use Beautiful Product Photography
According to a survey, images are more important than product descriptions to 63% of online consumers, and 53% believe that visuals influence their buying decisions more than ratings or reviews.
Visuals influence emotions and consumers’ decisions are more influenced by emotions than by logic. Just consider how many times you read a negative Amazon review but you still went ahead and purchased it.
Creating original, customized photos allows you to create a distinct brand identity separate from others. If you sell windows, don’t pull up generic home photos from the internet and slap them on your sales materials. Instead, invest in professional photographers to take interesting, catchy photos of your product.
3. Tap into the Power of Video
With online consumers’ attention span continually declining, videos have come to save the day. According to Forrester Research, a minute of video is worth 1.8 million written words. Videos are an engaging way to educate your customers about your product, in far less time than words can.
Videos are crucial to an interactive customer experience now more than ever as the world is adhering to social distancing and physical meetings are restricted.
Depending on your brand identity, you could use one or combine all of these impactful video formats:
Storytelling Videos
To showcase a product, create a story around it and tell that story to your target audience with videos. Get creative and delve into the backstory of your creative process: how the idea was founded, the work that goes into making the product, and more. This can help customers to create an emotional attachment to the product, not only facilitating sales but also customer loyalty.
Explainers/Tutorials:
Explainer videos bring a level of high-impact interactivity to your sales strategy. You can demonstrate how your product should be used, and even showcase how to use it in unique ways that users may not have thought of. Or, create a series accepting entries from users that have used your product in creative ways which facilitates a healthy interaction between your brand and your customers, and generates interest in potential customers.
Canva does this well, using videos showing users how to create fun designs with their elements, and organizing contests for users to send in their best entries too.
Animation
If your product is an intangible concept, an animated video could be the perfect way to communicate its value to your target audience. Not only does this give you limitless creative opportunities, it also allows you to break down what could be a complex idea into simple, digestible bits.
4. Use Interactive Elements
To deliver a sterling customer experience, make sure that your content elements allow users to engage seamlessly.
Your product photos should be aesthetic while strategic; capturing the best angles of the product while showcasing its functionality. Let’s say you have a window installation company, it is important that customers are able to zoom in to see the intricate details such as the trim or clarity. By implementing a digital sales presentation that offers interactive tools like call-out buttons to zoom into or highlight specific areas, you can create a truly customized offer for each customer.
This kind of artificial Intelligence is powering a more interactive online shopping experience, and your online sales materials can benefit from it.
5. Break It Up
Avoid long walls of text by combining video elements, photos, and text creatively. This creates more aesthetically pleasing sales materials and makes it easier for prospects to scan through your content. It also removes the mental barrier to reading and delivers an immersive, engaging experience for viewers.
6. Design with the Target Buyer Persona in Mind
It is highly important to ensure that every piece of content you create aligns with the needs of your ideal buyer persona. Marketing professionals often make the mistake of writing material that is centered around the brand story and the product that they have created, instead of focusing on how it can benefit their target audience.
Create content that guides users through every step of the sales funnel on all your sales materials. This includes everything from presentations to your social media posts.
7. Repurpose Content
Always be on the look out for ways to incorporate your content across multiple channels. Interactive videos can be shared on social media and embedded on your website, or even sent as part of an email newsletter.
Pull quotes from a case study or ebook to share in emails or on social media platforms to encourage more brand trust. Once you have content that generates leads on one platform, you can use it to improve reach and conversion on another.
8. Personalize Everything
Google reports that 61% of people expect personalized experiences and interactions from brands. Consumers want to feel seen and know that you truly understand their pain points. Streamlining your target audience with potential customers who have the same problems and specific needs makes it easier to deliver content that feels personal, without taking precious time away from your other work.
Build a content library for each target market, with specific needs and problems in mind. For example, if your target market is owners of old homes who are interested in updating their windows, create blog posts, sales presentations and social media posts that talk about the issues these homeowners might face. By doing so, you’re making the individual reader feel seen while also being able to reach a wider audience. This type of personalization is key to driving business and building trust with your customers.
9. Carry Your Team Along
It is important to give feedback to and receive feedback from your sales team. Because they’re in direct contact with customers, they can provide valuable insights into what content channels are generating more leads so you can optimize under-performing content to rise to the same level. They can also help identify what aspects of your sales funnel is lacking useful content; one of the best places to generate new blog content ideas is listening to the questions your customers ask.
Make sure you create a sufficient body of content that equips your sales reps with information that they can use to guide your prospects through the sales funnel.
10. Always Update Your Sales Materials!
The sales enablement process isn’t a one-time job. It is as the name suggests; an ongoing process. As you and your team acquire new information and create more customer profiles, you should expand your sales enablement content to meet these new needs as well.
Ingage provides a platform that allows for easy creation and customization of engaging presentations. Learn more about what Ingage can do for your sales presentations.