How to Enable Salespeople With Content Marketing

A Data Geek With a Passion for Content

To many of us, Cox Media conjures up images of a huge company, with tons of people, processes, and departments. Merrie Beth works in the B2B side of things, however, preferring to think of her department as a ’boutique ad agency’ within a big company.
Merrie Beth seeks to connect local advertisers with local consumers, offering on air advertisement as well as accompanying digital marketing. Her target proposition for businesses is to reach a particular audience in the time and place they want to be reached. She attributes much of her team’s success to their use of an editorial calendar, planned 18 months in advance to ensure both continuity of the narrative they’re telling as well as the ability to track its progress.
Sales enablement is extremely important to her process, though she recognizes that your average sales person doesn’t want to sit on the phone with marketing talking about strategy; they want to be selling. In order to work effectively with the distinctive nature of her salespeople, Merrie Beth has designed several strategies for creating open and effortless dialogue with the sales team at Cox Media.
Through creative internal marketing, team building, clear communication, and documentation of goals, Merrie Beth has helped her team at Cox Media gain a sterling reputation.

In This Episode

• How to use editorial calendars to your advantage
• How content supports the sales process
• The demand generation waterfall
• WIIFM? What’s In It For Me?
• The importance of visual content: G-Books (comic books of the marketing world)
• How to get content and lead generation departments to work together

Quotes From This Episode

“Our goal has been to build up the confidence of the local sellers, both in the process of content marketing and in the content that goes within the specific tactics that we put out. So we’ve developed kind of a multi-touch campaign, if you will, that’s almost internal marketing about what we’re doing and how it helps our sales people.” —@mbsala
” WIIFM: What’s in it for me? The very first part of the story that we’re telling is helping people to connect with why they should care what we’re talking about.” —@mbsala

“I read a stat that said a certain percentage of people say they have a strategy, but a very small percentage of them actually document it. And I think if you can invest time in getting in the same room with all the key stakeholders that bring this to life, and investing the time in documenting that strategy and really making sure that everyone’s on the same page and you’ve answered all the questions and you know how the process is going to work.” —@mbsala

“It’s really just this pressure, not only to create content, to fill the pipe on an ongoing basis, but it has to be creative and it has to be relevant and it has to be timely and it has to be engaging. To get off the content treadmill, I think something that we’ve had to realize is our competitors, and even our peers, everyone is going to have a really great idea… And just because someone else came up with an idea that’s different than ours, or they did it first, doesn’t mean we need to run and catch up and do what they were doing.” —@mbsala
“It goes back to that editorial calendar that really helps steward and guide the process throughout the year. It not only shows us where we need to go next, it keeps us hyper-focused on what we’re doing, and it gives us a sense of accomplishment, that we actually achieve what we wanted to.” —@mbsala

Resources

• Merrie Beth’s Twitter
• Cox Media, Where Merrie Beth is Director of Marketing Communication
• More Thought Pieces from Merrie Beth at Cox Blue
• Hootsuite
• Uberflip
• Cox Media Holiday Ad Countdown
• Cox Media Instagram

What did you want to be when you grew up?

Growing up, Merrie Beth loved reading, specifically the Little House on the Prairie books. She loved how through this girl’s writing, a whole world was created in a very visceral way. “I thought it was just fascinating how this girl had this life and she was able to write about it in a way that made it so real for me. So I’ve always been interested in kind of the facts behind the story and these real-life things that you can pull others into by bringing the story to life for them, through visuals or though words.
“I didn’t end up being Laura Ingalls Wilder,” Merrie Beth jokes, “It was a little late for that. I don’t have a covered wagon that I drive down the giant interstate here in Atlanta every day.” But she ends with, “It’s been a great journey to really help words and content come to life and really help people make smarter decisions for their business and I couldn’t be more pleased.”