Telemarketing Content Distribution: a Perfect Pair

Man talking about content distribution

If you want to generate leads with your content, you’ll need the right content distribution strategy. There is a wide range of ways to distribute and promote your content, from PPC advertisements and social media to email and guest posts.

However, there’s an often overlooked method of content distribution that can be extremely effective: Telemarketing content distribution.

We’ll show you the top reasons to use telemarketing for your content distribution, share insights on how B2B companies can benefit from creating and distributing great content, and talk about overcoming the common barriers to content distribution through telemarketing.

Let’s get started.

What Is Telemarketing Content Distribution?

The concept of telemarketing as a content distribution strategy is simple: You pick up the phone, call your target customers, and ask if they’re interested in your content. Better yet, you ask qualification questions to make sure they meet your “best client criteria” and ensure that you want to engage with them, and then provide a value proposition to demonstrate the benefit they can expect when you receive your content.

It sounds simple enough, but in practice, it can be a bit more challenging. Not everybody is a natural at making stellar phone calls, and it can be challenging to source direct dials so that you can get directly to a decision maker. It can take up to eight attempts for a telemarketer to reach the right person.

But is it worth it? Yes.

Related: Get Your Free Content Distribution Ebook Here!

Effective Telemarketing Content Distribution Improves Sales

There is no shortage of opinions about how much money should be spent on marketing or how much should be apportioned to each aspect of marketing. However, there has lately been more attention pointed toward content marketing distribution. Is it time for you to focus on how the message is delivered?

Even the best marketing ideas fall flat when they don’t reach the right target audience. While it’s still important to be creative in developing content, it’s only part of the puzzle. Some marketing experts believe half the marketing budget should be directed at distribution. One of the apparent channels to utilize in distributing content is telemarketing. What other channels should be in the consideration?

Channels That Work Alongside Telemarketing

To make sure you are creating content that will reach your target audience, you need to use tools to analyze how your content is impacting people. Analysis tools found in Google+ reveal information about what is influencing people and what’s not. Through this, you can better understand how you can create more meaningful content and where to distribute it with more effect. Instead of aiming to go viral, more emphasis should be placed on how to connect with the audience you know will be interested in your brand.

Some of the top channels for content marketing distribution include your company website, which today needs to be built for mobile and traditional browsers. Email campaigns rank high on the list, as do public relations strategies and social media integration. Focus on organic search is also a significant part of most distribution tactics. Online advertising, microsites, channel partners, and offline advertising are also familiar places for content marketing distribution.

What about the tried and true method of telemarketing? Yes, it’s a decades-old method of getting information out to potential leads, but it continues to offer an excellent return on investment.

Telemarketing agencies focusing on implementing the latest software and hardware that helps them connect to leads more effectively are proven to be valuable to organizations utilizing these services. While other channels benefit from lower cost, telemarketing is unmatchable when connecting with leads. The training agents get on communicating pays off handsomely when they connect with a qualified lead. It’s a proactive process that can lead to nurturing relationships that provide more value than a quick sale.

Woman smiling while talking on the phone
Woman smiling while talking on the phone

Telemarketing: The Perfect Partner for Content Distribution

You’ve likely seen and read many suggestions about getting attention on social media, such as including images and videos wherever possible to maximize your impact. But, in addition to these kinds of suggestions, it’s also important to pair your social media strategy with a highly personal way to reach your target audience.

Content marketing distribution in the B2B market benefits from including person-to-person communication occurring alongside digital marketing channels. Telemarketing implements this benefit, allowing human interactions to build relationships and answer some of the challenges of using social media to promote content.

Your potential buyers want to know that their business partners are not simply engaging in a transaction but have a personal interest in their business thriving. They want to feel important to your company, but they also require a certain level of trust before loyalty can develop. The proactive relationship-building element of telemarketing promotes the personal connection that your buyers want.

Many good arguments exist for implementing a multi-channel approach in your content marketing distribution strategy. Each member of your target audience has personal preferences about how they connect with their vendors. You’ll need to have a thorough understanding of your target audience, and waiting for individuals to like or share your content may be too passive of a strategy for your growth plans.

Instead, why not include the perfect partner to social media and use telemarketing to gain critical information about your target audience members? Telemarketing is proactive, allowing you to gather information about your audience’s preferences. For example, you can find out which format of content they generally prefer, whether they have a specific time of day that they are more likely to consume content, and whether they have accessed your content before.

In addition, telemarketing allows you to begin a professional relationship with a potential buyer. While it is possible to make connections on social media, it can be a painstakingly slow process. When you’re on the phone with a target audience member, you can hear their concerns, answer their questions, and offer them access to your content. It’s immediate and allows you to respond to their concerns.

Additional Benefits of Telemarketing Content Distribution

Now, let’s talk about some other benefits of telemarketing content distribution other than improving your sales:

Build Better Relationships With Your Prospects

Possibly the most significant benefit of distributing content through telemarketing is that it makes it easier to build a genuine relationship with your potential customers. On average, people send and receive 115 emails each day, and it’s not hard to ignore cold outreach.

A phone call is more personal and cuts through the email clutter.

It’s easier to ignore an email than a phone call, and many people don’t mind sparing a minute or two to listen to your pitch. And if it goes well, your relationship with that prospect will be stronger from the start. Not to mention that cold calling gets more responses than direct mail and email. In addition, around 68% of B2B sales involve some form of human interaction — the sooner you talk directly with your prospects, the better.

Identify People’s Intent Faster

If someone fills out a form on your website to download a whitepaper or ebook, it’s hard to know exactly why they requested that information. They might be a qualified lead, or they could be someone doing research without the intent to make a purchase or even a bot.

Over the phone, you can instantly qualify your prospects to see if they’ll turn into a genuine lead. Once you get talking, you can quickly verify who you’re talking to, find out if they’re a decision maker, and determine if they’re interested in your content.

Share More Info With Your Leads

Cold emails between 50 and 125 words do typically get great response rates. However, that doesn’t give you many words to get your message across and convince someone to engage with you. While email is a viable content distribution strategy, it’s not easy to craft a compelling message that short.

On the other hand, telemarketing presents an opportunity to share lots of information in a short amount of time over the phone. When someone agrees to talk to you, you’ll get a few minutes to build buy-in and share plenty of relevant information about your content and how it can benefit them.

Answer Questions That Lead to Conversions

Personal phone calls can turn into a productive conversation when talking to a lead. Most people are more honest over the phone than through email, and you can take care of any objections on the spot. And being open to objections is great — people who end up making a purchase tend to have more objections than leads that don’t convert.

Plus, once you build rapport, it makes your “ask” sound more natural, leading your prospect to be more likely to agree to view your content. Once they verbally opt-in over the phone, it’s simple to confirm their email address, follow up with your content, and manage future communications with that person.

Verify Contact Information Easily

Sourcing accurate contact information (especially for B2B companies) is challenging. If you’ve tried cold email outreach, you’ve likely experienced this challenge and the effort it takes to reach prospects. With even the best email databases decaying by 22.5% each year, lost opportunities and bounced emails are common even when using the best email finder tools.

A key benefit of telemarketing content distribution is that you can ensure you reach the right people by verifying direct dials. If your prospect works in a different department or you encounter a gatekeeper, you can easily get their new contact details from the person who answers the phone.

An arrow guiding the way to content
An arrow guiding the way to content

Using Telemarketing to Refine Your Content Marketing Process

You’ve developed an exceptional strategy for creating high-quality content for your B2B marketing audience. You’ve got a great mix of formats, with blogs, white papers, videos, and infographics all working in balance for various preferences. However, no matter how great your content is, you’ve just begun getting that content into the right hands. Getting your content into the right hands means including telemarketing content distribution in your plans.

Along with producing excellent content, your focus needs to be on connecting with your target audience so that they are consuming your content. For that connection to happen, you’ll need to spend your time and resources on content promotion.

  • The importance of balance: Many distribution plans for content marketing lack the balance between digital and traditional methods necessary for reaching a target audience. Using digital marketing tools alone results in a passive approach, where you may be forced to wait for shares and likes rather than being able to have a more proactive role in content promotion. Most digital tools result in a one-sided conversation where the marketer keeps publishing content but with little opportunity to interact in meaningful ways with the audience.

To develop an effective promotion plan, you need to include a promotion tool that allows immediate feedback from potential buyers. A telemarketing content distribution strategy gives you the ability to gather the information that gives you insight into the decision-makers at a company, along with their budgets and future spending plans.

  • A strategic partner: All distribution channels have their unique benefits and drawbacks, so it makes sense to combine two or more for better execution. When you combine promotion channels, you optimize the benefits of each. For instance, when you use an email newsletter, you can distribute it to a large crowd, but you are forced to wait to see if it introduces a conversation between you and your target audience.

When you implement the promotional possibilities of telemarketing, though, you introduce live conversation into the relationship. The natural flow of the interaction provides you with immediate feedback, letting you know how your target audience prefers to receive content and whether they are considering a purchase of your service or product.

  • Getting personal: One of the most important benefits of using telemarketing content distribution is the ability to form a personal connection. In a conversation, you can communicate your brand message in a natural way and in a way that is tailored precisely to your audience. After all, telemarketing is simply a conversation between two people.

Telemarketing gives you a human connection to your target audience in a way that other channels do not. When you’re on a telephone call, you can read the tone of a person’s voice and listen for their reservations and respond to them as you hear them. As a result, you finish the interaction with a significantly better understanding of your potential buyer.

No other channel gives you the personal connection that you can achieve with telemarketing content distribution. It makes a perfect partner for more passive strategies and gives you immediate feedback about your potential buyer. You can learn about your contact’s content preferences, such as whether they prefer blogs or infographics and what time of day they tend to consume content.

  • Know your audience. You may have a basic understanding of who you are trying to reach with your content. In a B2B marketing strategy, you have designated targets that you are marketing to, but it may be time to learn more about those potential buyers.
  • Are you looking beyond job titles and roles when targeting company decision-makers? Find out more about their demographic traits and what their jobs consist of daily. More specifically, find more about them, their purchasing authorities, their business needs, and more importantly, their wants.
  • What are you trying to accomplish with your content? Are you trying to encourage a particular emotional response or a particular next step?
  • What do you hope will happen with your content once your audience has read it? Are you trying to get them to share it, print it for reference, or use it to purchase from you?

In short, you need to have highly developed buyer personas for your target audience data. This helps you create specific topics that answer your audience’s challenges in their jobs.

Related: Learn How Content Distribution Can Enhance Your Data Cleanup Efforts

  • Create your topics: The easiest way to create more refined topic ideas is by creating clusters. Using the simple activity tracker example from above, you might start by considering the problems that your particular tracker’s problems for the end consumer. For instance, you could create topics that highlight your activity tracker’s ability to work 30 feet underwater and the physical benefits of swimming and other water sports. You might also highlight your tracker’s variety of options for recording different types of workouts. For example, does it recognize running versus walking or allow you to edit an entry to get credit for raking leaves for two hours?
  • Use tools to see if you’re on the right track: It’s easy to get started on a particular topic cluster and later realize the topics had nothing to do with what your customers needed. Therefore, it’s important to utilize tools that help you zero in on your audience’s preferred topics. Many tools are helpful for seeing if you are on target:
  • Twitter Polls: Besides creating a great place for marketing activity, social media also helps you measure how your content is faring. Take an informal Twitter poll to get some ideas on what you should be writing about. Ask your target audience what kinds of challenges they are currently facing or if there are any new trends that they’ve heard about but want more information on. Maybe your audience will tell you they’ve stopped clicking on your links because your titles aren’t grabbing their attention.
  • Blog comments: Every piece of content you post should have an opportunity for your readers to engage in conversation. You need always to include a call to action that invites comments on your blog. You can use the call to action to ask readers to weigh in on the topics they’d like to see covered in the future.
  • Telemarketing: What was missing from the HubSpot article was telemarketing. Telemarketing is one of the best tools available for refining your content marketing strategy. This tried-and-true method of connecting with your target audience has several benefits that cannot be matched with other forms of contact with your customers:
  • Telemarketing provides an opportunity to learn highly-detailed information about your potential buyer. You can learn whether the decision-maker is receiving your content, whether there is more than one decision-maker in the buying process, and how they prefer to receive content.
  • The feedback is immediate and proactive. Unlike posting a call to action in your blog, telemarketing doesn’t force you to sit back and see if anyone bites. You can call and contact your potential buyer and learn about their preferences and needs when it comes to content.
  • You build loyalty and trust. A person-to-person conversation is a superior interaction to the conversation in a comments section. You can hear the person’s warmth in their voice, interpret their satisfaction level and immediately answer any questions or concerns.
  • It’s a great way to follow up, too. If you are regularly sending content to your potential buyer, and then they begin to purchase from your company, telemarketing provides a great way to call and follow up on any orders or deliveries.

What Is Discoverability?

Discoverability is the ease with which your target audience can access your content. When they visit your website, can they easily find what they need to solve a problem, get more information and utilize your resources for their solution?

Discoverability is one of the key ways to become indispensable to your potential customers. If they can easily access your resources, they’ll come back the next time they need to solve another challenge. You’ll quickly become their go-to location, and then they’ll turn to you when it’s time to make a purchase, too.

Steps in a Discoverability Strategy

  1. Take inventory and assemble your content: You don’t need to reinvent your content if you’ve already got numerous items that can be organized for optimal discoverability. Take time to do an inventory to evaluate your content in a number of categories, including topic, problems and challenges, buyer, targeted format, and date published. Next, determine in what ways the content items are related and create a diagram of connections between the pieces so that they can be cross-linked or used in a call to action.

In this step, you may also discover some holes where you’re not addressing the particular challenges of your industry. You may find that additional content needs to be created in order to cover all areas that are of interest to your target audience.

You can also determine which items of your content have been most successful in terms of the audience engaging with the piece or going on to visit your website. Evaluate factors like retweets, shares, click-throughs, and comments. This is the time for extensive analysis, determining which words in your titles led to the most click-throughs or where in the piece you should put your call to action in order to lead to more activity.

  1. Plan your discoverability strategy: Be sure that you are organizing your website to make it easy to access the information your B2B audience needs. You can create a menu on your site that makes your content available in a number of categories:
  • Buyer persona or company role
  • Archived dates
  • Format type
  • Problem or challenge
  • Topic

It’s also important that you focus on keyword optimization so that your website search function is a valuable tool for you and your audience. Make sure that you are informed about the critical keywords in your particular industry and that they show up in your content. They should appear in your title, your subtitle, and several times in your content piece in order to maximize their searchability on your site.

The Role of Telemarketing

Now that you’ve set up your website to make your content easily accessible to your target audience, you can do more than invest in the wait-and-see type of discoverability that comes with website design. Instead, partner your website strategy with a proactive approach that comes with telemarketing.

Telemarketing takes your discoverability and launches it into the view of your target audience. For instance, you may create a white paper that answers a particular challenge facing your potential buyers. You post it on social media, send it out attached to an email newsletter, and cross-link it several ways on your website. It’s a high-quality piece designed to build your reputation as a trusted industry leader, and it provides valuable information to your target audience.

Even with all these great qualities making it a valuable resource for your target audience, you’re still taking the risk that most of them will never see it. All it takes in this instance is one headline that doesn’t quite hit the mark or poor timing in your posting, and you’ve completely missed your target audience.

When you add telemarketing to your discoverability equation, however, you are able to tell your potential buyer directly about the content that may be helpful to them. A one-on-one conversation provides you with important information about the challenges or problems your potential buyer is facing, giving you the opportunity to direct them to valuable resources.

Telemarketing also allows you to refine how you organize your content, as well as produce topics that are most relevant to your target audience based on the feedback you receive in conversation with potential buyers. Instead of analyzing and guessing about what your next step is in your content marketing strategy, your potential buyers give you critical feedback informing your content creation.

Telemarketing Content Distribution for News Releases

The roles of telemarketing and news releases are similar: getting the word out about your content. They each alert your target audience to the existence of your content and increase the likelihood that your content will be consumed and that your potential buyers will be moved forward in the buying cycle. They have different benefits and when used in combination, they can create a lot of buzz for your brand.

Much like your content itself, your news release needs to have some critical elements to get the attention of an audience that sees a lot of news releases. Here are a few steps to crafting a news release that will get noticed:

  1. Focus on who your target audience is. Know who you are writing to, and make sure your news release contains information that is important to them. Even within your target audience, you may have one or two buyer personas that your release is targeted, and you need to write specifically for them. How does your content piece solve a problem or otherwise interest this audience?
  1. Include a hook. This is where you grab your audience’s attention, and it’s where you include the information about what your potential buyer will find in your content. It’s important not to create a false hook here, though. If you promise to solve a problem for them in your news release, you need to have the solution in your content, or you may alienate your audience.
  1. Simplicity is best. Don’t create a complicated news release that has your audience wondering what you’re trying to say. Include a simple summary of what your content will deliver and how they can get to it.
  1. Include a call to action. Give your news release audience the invitation to view your content. Simply telling them that you’ve created a great video is like telling your friends that you’re having a party but never giving them an invitation. You’ve got them interested; now get them to your content.

News releases are a powerful tool for getting your content noticed by your target audience. It is seen by a variety of influencers and journalists and can create the digital buzz you need to promote your content on multiple digital channels.

Man tangled up in phone cords
Man tangled up in phone cords

How Telemarketing Content Distribution Delivers Your Leads

Digital channels are a critical part of any modern content marketing distribution plan. They get the word out to a wide audience and ensure that your company name comes up when a buyer goes looking for a supplier online. However, the major drawback to digital marketing channels is that they are passive.

  • Focusing your distribution strategy on email and SEO alone may only secure 15-25 percent of your target audience. Adding social media to your distribution strategy can increase that percentage slightly. However, if your goal is to have over 50 percent of your target audience exposed to your news release, you can take a more proactive approach and integrate telemarketing into the mix.
  • You can decide to add outbound calling activities at any time during your marketing campaign. You may want to post the news release on your website and LinkedIn and send an email to all the people in your marketing database first. At one point or another, you should introduce outbound telemarketing as a proactive outreach process.
  • Professional telephone representatives can ensure that about 50 percent of the people on your list will receive your news release. Furthermore, they will personally talk to many of them and will be able to gather a great deal of valuable information in the process. Not only will they make sure the person receives the content (by email or otherwise), they can strike up a conversation with them to find out about challenges the prospect is trying to overcome. Furthermore, the representatives can gather information about the likes and dislikes of the audience when it comes to consuming content. Information that will greatly assist you in creating even better content next time around.

The difference is that telemarketing offers some opportunities that digital marketing channels do not. When you use telemarketing to reach your target audience, you receive immediate feedback and harness a powerful lead generation tool.

Here’s how telemarketing is superior in its lead generation capabilities:

  • Telemarketing is proactive. Rather than posting your content on a site and waiting for your target audience to notice it, telemarketing gives you the opportunity to invite a potential buyer to view your content personally.
  • Once the content has been consumed, you have a perfect opening for a follow-up conversation. You can ask if the content was relevant to their situation, whether they prefer a different type of format, and if there are other topics that they’d like to see covered in future content pieces.
  • You can move potential customers further along in the sales funnel. When you’re in a conversation with a potential buyer, you have the ability to move them forward in the buying cycle and gain important information for your sales team, including:
  • Determine whether they are the sole decision-maker or if there are other contacts that you should include in your content distribution
  • Find out if there are any reservations, questions, or other topics of discussion that would delay a purchase decision.
  • Build trust and loyalty that allow a sales representative to enter into what is already a solid relationship between you and your potential buyer

News releases and telemarketing are each effective ways to reach your target audience to alert them to your content. When you use these two methods in combination, you significantly increase your likelihood of connecting with potential buyers to build your reputation as a trusted expert in your industry.

Challenges of Telemarketing Content Distribution

The most significant challenge of telemarketing content distribution lies in the fact that many companies don’t have in-house telemarketing experience. Picking up the phone is one of the biggest barriers to getting started.

Your sales reps are already busy, and training them for successful telemarketing isn’t easy. Prioritizing content distribution is a struggle for in-house teams.

There are two options to overcome this challenge: work on training your in-house sales reps or work with an external team like our content distribution experts at Blue Valley Marketing.

Distribute Your Content With Blue Valley Marketing

If you’re looking to execute a telemarketing content distribution campaign to gain more leads and conversions, you’re in the right place.

At Blue Valley Marketing, we work with leading B2C and B2B brands to help them increase their reach and ROI on their content by conducting highly-targeted telemarketing campaigns.

We can target your ideal customers across every touchpoint and channel to generate the highest levels of engagement with your content. And once they engage, we’ll send them back to you and your sales team to close the deal.

Ready to see how telemarketing can improve your content distribution strategy, sales, and ROI? Reach out to us at Blue Valley Marketing and learn how we can help.
Related: Telemarketing Content Distribution With Blue Valley Marketing

Last Updated on August 24, 2022 by Ronen Ben-Dror

1 thought on “Telemarketing Content Distribution: a Perfect Pair”

  1. Telemarketing is required in all forms of marketing channels and I didn’t know about telemarketing in content distribution as well but after reading your article I have gained knowledge about content distribution through telemarketing.

    Thank you for sharing this information with us.

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