Separate but equal. The traditional business model keeps sales, marketing, and customer service in independent, exclusive departments. Each operates in its own silo, and there’s little need for crossover and collaboration among the three.

The advent of the Internet and the subsequent social media boom have all but dissolved that model. Today all departments — sales, marketing, and customer service — should find common ground in content marketing.

Sales

Author Heidi Cohen says, “Whether it’s B2C or B2B products, customers research their purchases online first. They seek non-promotional, informational content to help assess their product needs. Effective creation and distribution of content marketing supports this process.”

To support sales, content needs two qualities: value and prominence. Your company’s content must be easily found when a prospect researches a specific product or service. That content also has to provide value, including real explanations, industry trends, and specific solutions. If your content is in the right place at the right time, the prospect is more likely to consider your company. Plus, he or she is already qualified by the time a salesperson gets to work.

Marketing

Content marketing is vital to helping companies reach targeted prospects and customers and establishing brand identity among them. While it doesn’t entirely replace traditional advertising (print, digital ads, etc.), it can drastically reduce the dollars spent on media buys without sacrificing effectiveness.

“Content marketing builds internal media in the form of websites, blogs, email files, text files, and social media outposts,” says Cohen. “Through these vehicles, marketers can distribute their message in a contextually relevant way to a broad audience.”

Social channels like LinkedIn allow marketers to define audiences by an array of broad or narrow categories: geographic location, industry, position, etc. It’s truly never been easier to customize and craft meaningful marketing content for a highly targeted, narrowly defined audience.

Customer service

By nurturing the company-customer relationship and providing post-purchase support in a variety of media platforms, content marketing can help a company shine long after a sales lead transforms from prospect to customer.

According to Mukesh Gupta for SocialMediaToday.com, when a company embraces content marketing and social media for the purpose of servicing customers, two important things happen:

• “You are now forced to have an exceptional service (as the reputation of your business is at stake, and in the open), which in the long term will help the business.
• When other customers see that you are providing a great service, this improves the brand value of your business and creates a positive spiral.”

Additionally, customers love to feel that they are part of building brands they love. Creating ways for customers to engage and participate in the process of improving your offerings can go a long way toward retaining customers and gaining repeat business.

Dividing the pie

Clearly content marketing provides a host of benefits for sales, marketing, and customer service.

“Content marketing is only as effective as the internal community that supports it, and that community is bigger than just the marketing department,” says Rick Allen of the Content Marketing Institute.

When all three departments act as stakeholders in their company’s content marketing strategy, each department can more efficiently meet its own objectives while at the same time elevating the overall company image.