Article's Content
Article's Content
It’s easy for marketers to get stuck in the mindset that “content” is what you publish to bring in site visitors and qualify leads. We write blogs, social posts, and gated assets for potential customers, whom the sales team then engages directly — you know, the funnel and all that.
But what about all that internal documentation companies create to empower their sales interactions? Well, that’s content as well. Sales enablement content.
B2B sales cycles are getting longer and more complex, so companies need solutions to keep their sales teams up to date. As a result, the sales enablement platform market is expected to grow from $3.4 billion in 2023 to $12.7 billion in 2030.
Today, we’ll look at how one of the leading sales enablement companies — the SaaS unicorn Seismic — has content excellence built into their DNA.
How Seismic Stacks Up in the Sales Enablement Space
Enablement started as a collaborative process of sharing information with sales teams to address common issues like a lack of product knowledge, consistent messaging, and repeatable processes.
As the tech industry continued to grow through the 2010s, sales enablement evolved. Sales cycles have moved almost exclusively into digital environments, so buyers can access company and product information without needing meetings with sales reps. That means by the time a potential customer finally meets with a sales rep, they’re looking for an expert on how that product solves their problem — the easy information is already out of the way.
With the sales process becoming increasingly challenging, more businesses have turned to sales enablement tools. Just look at the steady increase in Google search volume for “sales enablement” since 2010 — not to mention the spike during the pandemic as in-person sales meetings became impossible.
Not surprisingly, this steady increase in interest led to a proliferation of enablement platforms over the last decade.
Seismic, one of the leaders in this space, was founded in 2010. The company has grown alongside the enablement space, expanding beyond sales to include other business functions like marketing, customer success, and HR.
Fast forward 14 years, and the company checked a number of impressive boxes on the B2B SaaS success list:
- Reaching Unicorn Status after a $100 million Series E in 2021
- Over $446.5M raised across seven funding rounds
- Made number 40 on the Forbes Cloud 100 list in 2023
- 2,220+ customers, including IBM, American Express, and Wayfair
But Seismic is far from the only option in the sales enablement space. They’re fighting for SERP space and brand recognition with strong competitors like Mindtickle, Highspot, and Showpad. Not to mention, tech giants like HubSpot and Salesforce have also built their own enablement tools.
Among the top enablement competitors, Seismic is leading the way in direct search, with a 79% traffic share. “Seismic” as a keyword is searched over 24,000 times monthly — indicating that people are very familiar with the brand.
But while they lead in terms of brand strength, they are near the bottom of these leaders for organic traffic, with just 9% of their web traffic coming through organic search.
Despite these apparently low numbers, organic marketing is still a significant part of Seismic’s marketing engine.
Let’s look at how this enablement company supports their brand with top-tier content.
Content Marketing Pillars
As a platform that empowers professionals by providing up-to-date information on everything from customer preferences to brand messaging, content is part of Seismic’s DNA.
You can see just how important content is to Seismic’s success in their acquisition of Lessonly in 2021. If spending millions on a platform for developing, delivering, and determining the efficacy of training materials isn’t a vote of confidence in the power of content, then I don’t know what is.
Looking at organic performance, Seismic brings in nearly 60,000 monthly visitors through organic search. That’s traffic they’d have to pay roughly $110,000 to earn through paid ads.
One thing that immediately stands out about the Seismic site is the 10+ million backlinks they have directed to their site. This is actually due to the nature of their product — customers access their enablement content and other features through a Seismic subdomain.
It’s not an uncommon effect in B2B SaaS: companies build backlinks into their product offering and experience a massive boost to their web authority. Calendly, Yotpo, and Z all benefit from the same dynamic.
But those backlinks are what you earn after getting the big enterprise customers. The question is: how does Seismic get those conversions in the first place?
One avenue is by filling the top of their funnel with organic visitors. Seismic’s organic success is largely driven by three subfolders:
- Enablement explainers (50.3%)
- Lessonly (12.1%)
- Blog (5.3%)
Let’s look at the subfolder driving nearly half of all their organic visits.
Enablement Explainers
Resource folders are a well-established organic marketing practice. They let companies move beyond basic blogs to create topic-specific content hubs, from technical documentation and case studies to niche educational content.
Out of all these options, it’s the enablement explainers hub that drives Seismic’s organic success.
The subfolder, which they started in 2022, consists of 134 pages (about 5% of their indexed pages) but makes up nearly 50% of Seismic’s organic traffic. Considering these pages rank in the top 3 positions for over 400 different SERPs, it’s not surprising that this subfolder brings in over 28,000 organic visits every month.
This resource subfolder takes site visitors on a “deeper dive” into enablement content that teaches readers how this practice improves results for departments like sales, marketing, customer service, and HR.
Looking at the top traffic magnets in this subfolder, you see that all of them are top-of-funnel, educational pieces targeting high monthly search volume (MSV) terms like:
- “Sales enablement” (6.9k monthly searches)
- “Corporate culture” (4.8k monthly searches)
- “Difference between training and development” (3.4k monthly searches)
Now, let’s take a closer look at these Enablement Explainers to understand why these pieces are so effective at bringing visitors to the Seismic website.
SEO Copywriting
There’s an art and a science to SEO copywriting. We’ll get to the art of it in the next section, but for now, let’s focus on the science.
The success of your organic marketing relies on your ability to identify, incorporate, and win the SERP battle for keywords relevant to your product.
That’s why the first and most important step of enterprise content marketing involves intensive keyword research. The Enablement Explainers subfolder ranks for over 14,000 keywords, so I’d say the Seismic marketing team has figured this out.
The median number of keywords ranked for by the top seven pieces in this subfolder is 743. The top keyword for each piece is a top- or mid-funnel term, with higher MSVs that translate into thousands of visits each month.
Seismic’s piece on the importance of training is an outlier, even among these top performers, ranking for over 3,000 keywords.
While it currently sits just outside the top 3 for the “importance of training” SERP, the page is in the perfect position to climb the ladder — especially given the recent increase in volatility.
Each page has numerous internal links to resource, product, and landing pages across the site. This lets them pass link equity and, more importantly, interested visitors to pages further down the funnel.
UX Copywriting
We covered the science of SEO copywriting. Now, let’s look at the art.
Just like a good SaaS product should be easy to use, the content you create to promote and support that product should also be user-friendly. This includes the simple UX copywriting tricks that every content marketer knows:
- Using bullet points and numbered lists to break up text
- Separating distinct ideas with headers and subheaders
- Adding pull quotes and text boxes to highlight key points
Then, there’s also the readability of the text. Many writers and creatives, myself included, forget that your target audience is coming to your content out of necessity, not for fun. They have real issues they want addressed and don’t have time for (or want) artistic flare.
But check out Seismic’s reading level difficulty according to the Hemingway App:
- Difference Between Training and Development: 2,000 words, Grade 13
- Corporate Culture definition: 1,500 words, Grade 11
- The Importance of Training: 2,000+ words, Grade 10
- What is Sales Enablement: 2,500 words, Grade 11
- Customer Service examples: 2,200 words, Grade 10
Though the standard goal for readability is closer to Grade 8 or 9, according to Yoast, the copy is decently accessible to Seismic’s primary audience.
These pages are also very well done from a web design perspective. The Seismic team incorporates interactive modules to make the experience more engaging for users while strategically highlighting important concepts.
For example, in the explainer piece defining corporate culture, Seismic uses an interactive, flashcard-like module to help explain the four types of organizational culture.
The information is based on a 40-year-old concept from organizational psychology — not exactly light reading. These modules help highlight novel concepts and increase the extent of reader engagement with the page.
Supportive Graphics
The enablement pieces also include custom graphics to help drive home insights and make pieces more skimmable to people who might not have the time or desire to read the full explainer.
The What is Sales Enablement? piece — a high-priority piece — includes four different custom graphics that help to convey definitions, key concepts, and stats.
For example, they use a custom graphic to help readers understand the difference between enablement, operations, and training in the sales context.
These types of graphics are helpful in content and can easily be reshared across social media or repurposed for other assets. The Seismic team even uses well-designed CTA modules placed throughout these pieces to highlight ebooks, landing pages, and demo signups.
Embedded Videos
Where possible, the Seismic team has embedded YouTube videos into these pieces as well. The explainer pieces on sales enablement and the importance of training both feature YouTube videos like the one below.
Incorporating video content not only makes the user experience better for readers who prefer this medium over text, but it provides other benefits as well:
- Aligning the page with Google’s Helpful Content Update and improving SERP ranking
- Driving visitors to product demos and other videos on the Seismic YouTube channel
Embracing the 4E’s of Content on LinkedIn
Considering LinkedIn is one of the most popular social media platforms for sales teams, it’s an important space for SaaS brands like Seismic that cater to them.
So, it should come as no surprise that LinkedIn represents nearly 90% of Seismic’s social referral traffic. That’s around 15,000 people who fit perfectly into Seismic’s target audience.
Social selling is an increasingly important part of the B2B sales and marketing strategy, specifically from an enablement perspective.
LinkedIn’s Social Selling Index page highlights how important this tactic is to success in the world of sales, listing the following benefits of being an active social seller:
- 45% increase in sales opportunities
- 51% likelier to reach quotas
- Outsell those not on social by 78%
While this is in reference to using Sales Navigator, it also applies to organic posts on social. It’s the same dynamic as the difference between organic search and paid search results. The latter increases your chances of making an impression, but the former is a more sustainable (lower cost) form of selling.
It just so happens that social selling is a major part of Seismic’s marketing strategy as well. Particularly by getting their organizational leaders active on relevant platforms like LinkedIn.
The Seismic team is quite active on LinkedIn, but it’s really their C-suite team that puts them ahead of the competition. Two prominent examples are Paige O’Neill, CMO, and Steven Watt, Director of Market Insights. With nearly twenty thousand followers between the two of them, O’Neill and Watt have massive reach — and they’re using it effectively to engage the Seismic audience.
How do they do this? By masterfully embracing the 4Es of Content in each and every LinkedIn post, whether it’s for native thought leadership or asset distribution.
Take the post below by Watt on the importance of embracing social across all departments — not just marketing. He comes out strong with what seems to be a highly controversial take:
“Social is too important to leave to your marketing team.”
The hook is undeniably engaging and entertaining. After all, who doesn’t love a little inter-department bashing? (Watt softens the blow by highlighting that he is, at his core, a marketer as well.)
The post is also educational in nature — with an embedded video going on to outline the benefits that sales, marketing, customer success, and HR professionals unlock when they’re active on social media.
More importantly, this is an empowering post for professionals and executives who are playing around with the idea of building their own brand and network.
And before you think that every social post needs a professional video to succeed, don’t worry. A Seismic video budget isn’t the key to social selling success (though it does help). The native post below features another one of Watt’s hot takes and a simple meme.
It probably took no more than ten minutes to create, and it’s getting even more engagement than the social selling post.
O’Neill is also active on LinkedIn and the event circuit. Seismic recently launched a global thought leadership campaign called Generation Enablement (Gen E). This is part of a larger push in the SaaS niche to make enablement a priority for more than just sales teams — essentially, it’s a big growth area for Seismic and their competitors.
By posting about the event, O’Neill brings the campaign (and Seismic brand) to the forefront for her large LinkedIn audience. The post has nearly 250 likes, 18 comments, and a few shares, but that’s just the start of the impact potential. We don’t know how many people:
- Followed through to download the Gen E ebook
- Looked up the Seismic City Tours schedule
- Reach out to O’Neill about future events
That’s just one of the many examples of the Seismic executive team distributing key assets and building their personal brand on LinkedIn. We’ve seen lots of SaaS brands do well on social media, but this is next-level.
Seismic’s leaders are really living their brand values, enabling their sales team by embracing social selling at the highest level.
Learn How to Fire Up Your Content and Distribution Engine
Reaching the highest levels of success in your industry doesn’t mean you need to complicate your marketing and growth strategy. Yes, you unlock new doors with larger budgets, but you shouldn’t forget what brought you there.
Seismic’s organic marketing strategy is a perfect example of this:
- Optimizing an “Enablement Explainers” subfolder for organic search traffic
- Incorporating SEO best practices, engaging UX elements, and multimedia in their content
- Leveraging LinkedIn for social selling and thought leadership
- Empowering executives to build personal brands and distribute key assets
By focusing on content quality and social engagement, Seismic effectively drives growth and brand awareness. For more examples of brands exhibiting excellence on the organic and social marketing side, check out these breakdowns:
