Meta: Digital marketing doesn’t need to be a complicated strategy best left to those in the big leagues. Here are simple digital tactics you can use to improve sales leads.
Businesses across the board rely on their sales, and marketing teams to generate sales leads and close deals.
Yet, for some marketers, investing in digital marketing strategies feels like a mountainous task that requires plenty of resources to work.
Any strategy (digital or otherwise) worth its salt will require time, planning, and finances to work. So, you might as well join the bandwagon.
If your team isn’t ready to dip their toe in seemingly complex tactics, here are simple but effective digital tactics for improving sales leads.
1. Focus on Creating Positive Experiences
All the interactions that potential customers have with your business impact their perception of you.
If their perception is negative your marketing efforts will be dampened.
Here are some actions you can take to create positive experiences among potential customers.
- Understand your buyer’s journey. In an era of self researching, much of the prospect’s journey happens without a salesperson. You can influence their decisions by paying attention to the content they read and pages they linger on and initiating meaningful conversations based on this.
- Be agile. Buyer needs and interests can change in the course of the purchase journey and you should be agile and flexible enough to accommodate them. Sticking to strictly laid down procedures may mean missing opportunities to engage, innovate, and grow to meet growing demands.
- Personalize experiences. Relationships are everything. Improve your “likeability factor” and make your sales leads feel special by personalizing their experience. Craft messages that resonate with your leads, remember names and details, ask insightful questions, and be an active listener.
2. Use Email Marketing
Don’t underestimate email marketing’s power to promote goods/services, develop relationships with leads and keep them updated.
According to research, properly executed email marketing campaigns can earn your business $36 – $45 for every dollar you sink in.
These returns are great but pay attention to the words properly executed—because that’s what will earn you $$
Here are tips to help you get the strategy right:
- Know who is in charge. Most of us email CEOs believing them to be the right contact persons, which may not always the case. Before emailing, find out who the decision-maker is and target them directly.
- Create profit-oriented emails. Brands are constantly looking for ways to boost revenues. Let your emails clearly demonstrate how your solutions can help your target company maximize profits.
- Offer your leads something. Give out free consultations, trials, or training, useful checklists, templates, and industry reports to incentive prospects to try out your solutions.
- Work on your subject lines. Most people skim subject lines and only open those that pique their interest. Let the subject line communicate the purpose of the email, keep it short and avoid using click baits. In the latter’s case, your email might appear like spam and find itself in the trash.
3. Create Relevant Content
People don’t buy because they have found content on your website. They buy because the message you’re sharing is relevant to them.
How do you ensure your content is relevant? By, first understanding who your message needs to appeal to.
Here are people within an organization who may influence the purchase process and the content they might want to see:
- End-users. Most teams overlook this lot, forgetting that they are the ones interacting with the business solutions you offer. They may be interested in watching demos, reading unbiased customer reviews and case studies, and attending webcasts.
- This group comprises junior staff instructed by their bosses to research solutions and report back. They scour the internet looking for these solutions, so grab their attention with white papers, demos, and product overviews.
- Finance decision-makers. The finance team doesn’t necessarily look at the technical aspects of your solutions but they want to know if it’s worth paying for. ROI calculators, datasheets, and webinars that demonstrate value are good choice content.
- This group juggles your solution’s ability to help them attain their goals and the financial implication of the investments. Share content that discusses key business challenges your solutions can tackle and expected outcomes. Executives look at white papers, industry reports, case studies, and ROI calculators.
Use Web Forms
Here’s an interesting stat from Hubspot.
Up to 74 percent of marketing teams include web forms in their lead generation strategies. And as far as lead generation tools go, 49.7 percent indicated that web forms offer the highest conversations.
Web forms work.
Embedding web forms on websites is a near-effortless way of connecting with interested visitors.
Place them in strategic places to help site visitors access gated content, sign up for a service or newsletter, and get in touch with you.
Here are some benefits of incorporating web forms
- Automating lead capture. Manually checking which offerings/web pages appeal to your visitors can be tedious and a waste of company resources. Web forms smoothen the process by bringing interested parties to you.
- Improved targeting. Web forms provide data that reveals visitor interests and needs. You can use the information to improve your buyer personas and share highly relevant content with subscribers.
- Utilizing passive data collection. Through web forms, website activities like downloading content or signing up for webinars, your team can activate workflows to nurture and convert these leads.
5. Make Cold Calls
Making real connections is a tough but crucial starting point for business relationships.
What better way is there to initiate conversations with sales leads than through cold calling?
Research by RAIN Group backs this. Senior-level buyers prefer being contacted through the phone while 82 percent of buyers agree to meetings with vendors who contact them.
If you want to improve sales leads and generate revenues, put together your value proposition and pick up the phone.
Best practices include:
- Change your mindset. Long have salespeople struggled with the “nagging salesman” title. When you pick up the phone, you’re not a nag, rather a professional who can solve problems and help partner companies thrive. Go in with this mindset.
- Research your prospect. You want to connect with brands that may be interested in the solutions you provide. Look up their industry, the challenges they endure along with their expectations, and your capacity to handle them.
- Leverage sales triggers. Is your target company expanding? Have they secured new funding? Perhaps new C-suite executes have been appointed? Look for events that may create opportunities for you to work together.
- Try not to overwhelm the prospect. While trying to win over the prospect, many salespeople overshare information, leaving the prospect a little giddy and not knowing what to think about. Share just enough information to interest them in a second conversation/meeting where your team can provide more details.
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