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What do you suppose is typically expected of a marketer?
Find (lots of) potential buyers with problems your company can solve, demonstrate how awesome your B2B solutions are, and close the deal. Repeat the cycle and keep doing so to grow the business.
Sounds easy enough except with stiff competition, buyer skepticism, and economic meltdowns, there are sweat, tears, and sleepless nights involved in bringing in new business.
Marketers are consistently looking for exceptional lead generation strategies to keep your funnel chock-full with the right leads.
Here are tactics worth considering
1. Understanding Buyer Intent Data
Thanks to technological advances businesses can now obtain granular views of prospective buyers’ intentions. Teams then dig deeper to understand the prospect’s pain points, motivations, budget, and decision-making power to gauge their suitability.
Without this, you might find yourself prospects who look fantastic on the surface but never purchase.
How can leverage buyer intent data work for you?
- To personalize content. Part of attracting people intent on making purchases involves creating content that resonates with their interests. Include strong CTAs to encourage engagement and promote the content through advertising, in your community groups, and email broadcasts.
- To identify prospects early. Data tracking tools pick up the signals buyers leave indicating their readiness to buy and alert you. These signals may include leads visiting your pricing/product page more than once. You can then send hyper-personalized emails or make calls to lure them.
- To increase customer retention. buyer intent tools don’t just track people visiting your pricing/product pages, they also check visits to the “cancel my subscription” pages. This helps you capture customer dissatisfaction quickly and remedy the situation before losing the customer.
2. A/B Testing
Your relevance, ability to attract leads, and drive conversion rely on your willingness to test your efforts and check audience response.
Here are some ideas
- Articulate your value proposition. Doing it in a way that persuades visitors to engage and carry on conversations with your time is crucial. Share how your solutions may impact their business.
- Landing page layout. Some audiences have no problem with general landing pages and others prefer detailed ones. Test with different layouts to pick out the one that improves conversion rates.
- Contact form and fields. Many marketers swear by fewer fields, but nothing is linear. You may find long-ish forms exhibiting a high conversion rate. Test with different lengths to know which one attracts quality leads and provides the info you need to pursue the lead.
3. Cold Calling
If there’s a skill that’s vital to modern-day sales professionals, it’s cold calling.
Over 50 percent of senior executives prefer conversing on the phone over other techniques.
There’s a reason.
You’ll have spent time prospecting and building a custom list and now it’s their turn to gauge your expertise and the viability of your solutions.
Emails, marketing materials, and ads can be curated but the raw interactions of a phone call help them consider or eliminate solution options. Without investing too much time, I might add.
Best practices include
- Deliver your best. First impressions come around once, so you’ll want to sound confident and useful. Dig deeper to uncover useful information for solidifying your case, mirror your prospects, and opportunities to push for your goal.
- Optimize your environment. Constant disruptions are distracting meaning you might not understand something the prospect said or ask the same questions repeatedly, annoying your listener. Keep distractions minimal and invest in a solid pair of headphones to block external noise.
- Open-ended questions are great, use them. Use intelligent open-ended questions to lead the conversation and encourage participation. When the prospect raises a question, patiently and accurately answer them to build trust.
- Listen and take action. Analyze your conversation to identify snags and how to improve them. If the prospect asked for something or suggested rescheduling, take the appropriate action and in the manner they requested.
4. Host Virtual Events
Long after businesses opened their doors and in-person meetings resumed, virtual events are still making their impact in the digital space.
They enjoy longer shelf lives, with participants experiencing and learning from the online sessions months after the actual event took place. This makes them a continuous lead magnet.
To help you maximize your events, you’ll need a virtual event platform, Consider the following:
- Does the platform provide end-to-end management? A system that manages invitations, registrations, and payments and collects attendee data is preferable to ensure seamless experiences. Where you’re using multiple systems, check system integrations to ensure you don’t lose crucial data and functionality.
- Ease of use. You’ll have sponsors, exhibitors, speakers, and attendees logging in (using different devices), making a user-friendly interface necessary. User experience will determine attendance and engagement. You don’t want people fumbling around to get things working.
- Support fluid content delivery. From panel sessions to workshops, debates, etc, identify a platform that allows people to play back pre-recorded and live content. It ensures those who didn’t attend can still access and benefit.
5. Create Interactive Content
A survey by Demandgen Report revealed that over 90 percent of buyers take preference interactive and visual content over traditional formats.
Yes, we’re in the era of swiping, tapping, and clicking to find information quickly. And here’s where the interactive content gets its appeal.
A user must actively participate to consume it. Since the content isn’t sales-y, it piques their curiosity and helps hold their interest to the very end.
The user receives value for their time while you gain insights into challenges, preferences and other profitable information to help you target them more effectively.
What interactive content can you use for your marketing funnel?
- Awareness stage. Quizzes and personality assessments, interactive emails/newsletters, interactive ebooks, and blogs may help prospects understand their situations better and potential solutions.
- Consideration stage. Interactive calculators, infographics, webinars, and recommended quizzes may help prove your value proposition aka why you and not the competition.
- Decision stage. Interactive case studies and ROI/Cost calculators are perfect for assuring prospects of your performance subtly.
Disclaimer: For more interesting articles visit Business Times.
