How content marketing drives sales in 5 powerful ways

Who in your business is responsible for sales? And what about your external partners: do they hold themselves accountable for helping drive revenue? 

Many content marketing agencies consider their job done once your content is out in the world. Not at Scribly! We know how great content marketing drives sales in B2B — and we partner with our clients for the long haul to help make it happen. 

Done well, content marketing and sales don’t just go hand-in-hand; they can be an unbeatable team, transforming your bottom line. Here’s a little of what that looks like in practice:

How content marketing drives sales:

1. Addressing customer pain points

2. Filling your sales funnel with prospective customers

3. Staying relevant and visible to prospects

4. Positively influencing buyers’ decisions

5. Encouraging repeat purchases
   

1. By addressing customer pain points

Empathy is at the core of all human connections. When we feel seen and heard, we feel valued and understood. The same principle applies in B2B content marketing — especially with content that’s designed to drive sales.

Content marketing works best when it’s targeted and tailored to your specific audience. That means being laser-focused on their pain points and using content to highlight how your product or service solves them.

Types of B2B customer pain points

You’ve heard of the 5 P’s of marketing. But how about the 3 P’s of B2B customer pain points? Generally speaking, a B2B customer’s pain points will fall in one or more of three camps: profit, productivity, and process.

Take an e-learning platform, for example. This product might exist to solve a customer pain point around the time and effort (productivity) it takes to set up and distribute engaging and effective employee training programs using outdated systems. They might also have a marketing message around getting ROI on L&D spend (profit).

You’ll likely have done the hard work in identifying your customer pain points already (how else would your business be as successful as it has been to date?). Now, it’s about making sure your content shows empathy for those pain points — and shouts about your solution from the rooftops!

How to use pain points in content to drive sales

Scribly’s Content Branching Framework is our way of expanding customer pain points and aligning them with high-conversion keywords.

The goal is for your B2B content marketing ecosystem to become a prospect’s go-to place to find out how to solve their pain points (and discover why your product or service is the solution for their needs). That’s why we:

• Dive into your customers’ pain points

• Identify content ideas that resolve these pain points

• Filter these content ideas down based on keyword research 

• Prioritize content production strategically.

Interlinking and interconnected content helps tie pain point-driven content together into a helpful and highly-converting research journey, as well as boosting your SEO.

2. By filling your sales funnel with prospective customers

Another key factor in how content marketing drives sales is ensuring you have content that speaks to prospects at every stage of the sales funnel. This puts you in a good place to capture (and then convert) leads wherever they are in the sales journey.

Content marketing through the funnel

SEO-optimized, top-of-the-funnel content helps attract potential customers who are just starting their buyer research process. Ideally, this content should be less sales-y and more informative to start to build trust, convey your brand values, and set the foundations for a future sale.

The majority of sales will be made toward the middle and bottom of the funnel. So it makes sense to have a content strategy that focuses on these parts of the funnel, without neglecting the earlier stages either. 

Scribly’s Middle Ground Keyword Framework has been proven successful in bringing content marketing and sales together. This framework challenges us and our clients to look beyond the obvious (usually top-funnel) keywords that competitors are going after. 

Problem-solving keywords (‘how to…’) and comparison keywords (‘[competitor name] alternative’) are both effective at the middle and bottom of the funnel, respectively.

3. By keeping you relevant and visible to prospects

Content marketing is not a once-and-done process. Committing to consistent, high-quality content is key if you want to drive revenue.

This is true for two reasons: one is for SEO, the other is about staying relevant and visible to the prospects in your pipeline. And that’s where evergreen content and content optimization come in.

Evergreen content is content that continues to be useful to readers in the months and years after it’s published (although it can and should be refreshed regularly to maintain relevance). Time-stamped content, like 2025 trends, plays its role too as it’s highly relevant and clickable in the moment — but it quickly becomes outdated.

How evergreen content marketing drives sales

A focus on evergreen content helps you rank higher on SERPs (search engine results pages) for terms that new prospects entering your sales funnel are always looking for. These might be pain points that are universal to your target audience, such as employee engagement strategies or definitions of important industry terms.

The bigger your keyword profile, the more likely your content is to be seen — and the more potential leads you can start nurturing through the funnel towards a sale.

How content optimization drives sales

Making sales through your content means returning to high-performing content and either updating it and/or optimizing it for performance. Say you write a great blog and it becomes a go-to resource for prospects learning about the problem you solve. They might use your blog as a resource again or share it with a colleague or boss to help build the business case for signing up for your product or service. If it’s a useful piece of content to help drive sales, you better keep that content fresh!

You may also choose to repurpose successful content in a different format (taking a popular whitepaper and making it into an email sequence, for example) so that it reaches more people.

4. By positively influencing buyers’ decisions

Looking again at the overall sales funnel, content marketing drives sales by influencing a buyer’s decision-making process at every phase. Again, this is more likely to convert into a sale in the middle and bottom stages of the funnel, so let’s look at those in more detail:

Driving sales with middle-funnel B2B content

At this stage of the sales funnel, prospects should already be aware of your product or service and have a pretty good idea of how you can solve their pain point(s). Now it’s time to hit them with the detailed information they need to evaluate you versus an alternative solution and believe in the value you’ll deliver.

Successful middle-funnel content formats:

• In-depth comparison guides pitching your solution against others in the market. The key here is to remain as impartial as you can, so that you retain trust. It’ll be blindingly clear to a potential prospect if you’re making other options look bad to make yours look good.

• FAQ pages that answer burning questions prospects may have about how your product or service works. Use these to eliminate any doubt and help build the business case.

• Email nurturing sequences work because, often, it’s just a matter of time and resources before a B2B lead converts. Appearing frequently in a potential buyer’s inbox with useful, relevant content could be all it takes to get that sale over the line.
  

Driving sales with bottom-funnel B2B content

Seeing is believing. That’s why social proof and demos make for such effective bottom-funnel content marketing strategies.

Successful bottom-funnel content formats:

• Product demos help prospects experience your solution before they hit ‘buy’. These can be contained within a well-crafted email sequence or on a conversion-focused landing page.

• ROI calculators paint a clear picture of the financial gains your product or service will bring.

• Case studies and customer success stories draw on the behavioral psychology of social proof to reaffirm your value, secure trust, and position your product or service as a must-have. If you have that social influence to use, use it to your advantage!
  

Making sales without being sales-y?

It’s good practice to weave CTAs (calls to action) into all of your content marketing to help close sales. But remember, readers will know when they’re being sold to too hard. Like the cold caller who just won’t stop blowing up your phone, it’s off-putting and erodes all trust.

Authentic and empathetic pain point-focused content gets prospects to convert. You really don’t have to push for the hard sell. Scribly’s Authenticity Framework is designed to keep content marketing aligned with your unique brand voice to build true, emotional connections with customers — the type of connections that sell.

5. By encouraging repeat purchases

The sales funnel doesn’t stop once a prospect becomes a customer. In fact, in the book ‘Marketing Metrics’, research shows that businesses have a 60 to 70% chance of selling to an existing customer (5% to 20% for closing new deals).

This is another good reason to invest in consistent B2B content marketing. The Scribly team is here to help you produce high-conversion, SEO-focused blog and website content to get those sales. But we can also support you in elevating those blogs across social media and email so that you stay top of mind for people who already follow and buy from you.

With that in mind, let’s explore how those channels can be used to engage existing customers:

Driving upsells and resells with your content marketing

• Email nurturing sequences can be used again here to send regularly scheduled educational content post-purchase. The goal? To increase product usage and customer satisfaction.

• Repurposing existing SEO blogs into newsletters can also be effective in promoting complementary products or upgrades to your customer base. It’s your classic ‘land and expand’ sales strategy.
  

Driving customer loyalty with your content marketing

• Create loyalty-focused content such as how-tos, hacks, and advanced tips. This helps customers feel they’re getting the most value from your product and service, so they never want to leave!

• Case studies showcasing the long-term results that other customers have achieved can be inspiring and influential to encourage ongoing product use. These stories can also highlight other aspects of your product or service that customers might not be using today, helping them engage further with your brand and bring you more revenue.
  

We create content marketing that drives sales

Not all content marketing agencies hold themselves accountable for the sales their content drives. We do. It’s just one of the key content marketing KPIs we track on a regular basis.

Are you ready to boost the ROI of your content marketing budget, by working with an agency that knows how content marketing drives sales? Get in touch with Scribly today.