This third post in our series on bridging the gap between marketing and sales discusses ways to leverage customer-facing content. By presenting content in a variety of forms and formats, marketers can make it easier to connect with prospects in the ways they prefer.

You’ve completed the white paper. The heavy lifting is done. You could breathe a sigh of relief and turn to the next project – or you could take a tip from savvy marketers and make that content work in multiple ways.

Start by identifying the 3-5 key messages in the paper. Map them to as many audiences as you can. For a business white paper, this could mean anyone from C-level executives all the way to end-users and partners. If it’s technical, perhaps the key messages could be up-leveled to appeal to more than the initial target audience, or broadened to resonate with different market segments.

Now comes the fun part: how can you convey the key messages to your audiences? Think visual: an infographic, a presentation, a short video, a website banner. Consider audio: a podcast or webinar. Quick hits could be a social media post (make sure you cover all social channels), a short FAQ or a blog post. Naturally, the white paper can be part of a demand generation program, but so too can be the spin-off content pieces such as the infographic or a video. Make life easier for the sales team by putting together a set of talking points and an email template. Try to map the content and vehicle to buyer intent, taking into consideration which types of content are most valuable for each buyer type.

Leveraging content can involve condensing it (by creating a short blog post or infographic) or expanding it (as in a podcast, webinar or presentation).

• To condense, focus on the 3-5 key messages and make them visual. Bring up an example, an analogy to a recent news item or a catch phrase that will make the message easy to grasp.
• To expand, go back to your notes and look for those topics, statistics or anecdotes you gathered but were unable to include in the paper because of space constraints, or because they just didn’t match the topic exactly. Now is your chance to bring them in and make the content even more interesting and relevant.

Don’t lose out on an opportunity to make your hard work go the extra mile for you.

About the Author

Tanya Candia is the author of several engineering and marketing books, including the five-book series “Starting Your Startup” published by IEEE. She has held senior executive positions in technology companies, and works with organizations around to world to develop and implement winning strategies.