Mention cold calling in a room full of salespeople and you can almost touch the tension you’ve stirred up.
Naturally so, since cold calling involves ringing up consumers who haven’t expressed a direct interest in your solutions.
Through these calls, you talk about your brand and the products/services you offer.
You generate just enough curiosity in your listener to get them interested in moving to the next step.
Sounds easy enough, right?
Only it’s not.
Because listeners object, reject, or simply agree with you but take no further action. So, how can you improve your success rate?
We’ll look at the intricacies revolving around cold calling and how they contribute to your success or lack of it.
We’ll also cover other digital marketing strategies that may help scale up your business.
Cold Calling
Since many companies shun cold calling, this strategy is less competitive and one you can leverage to make human connections with potential customers.
Let’s dive straight into how you can make cold calls the right way.
- Have great research skills. Your ability to effectively gather information about your target company and the contact person improves your conversation. Look up needs and problems they are trying to solve and match that with your ability to meet them.
- Know how to prospect. Social media channels like LinkedIn are great places to look for new clients. Join communities and forums to identify business contacts you can pursue.
- Be persistent. The “nos” will come, prospects will hang up and you may receive not-so-kind responses. Don’t allow these incidents to pull you down. Work towards improving your calling skills and look forward to the customer who will say yes.
- Stay calm. Cold calling comes with a lot of pressure. You have targets to meet, gatekeepers to navigate, and prospects that can interrogate the life out of you. Remain clear-headed at all times to ensure what to say or do doesn’t tarnish your image.
- Think quickly. Calling scripts are great, but you can’t always direct the response you’ll receive from the prospect. Being able to think on your feet will help you respond effectively and capitalize on opportunities.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
SEM encompasses activities you can use to improve your brand’s visibility in online searches. These activities can be paid strategies, organic strategies, or both.
The higher your business ranks on search engines, the more likely people will find your solutions.
Here are practices to consider.
- Define your strategy. Zero in on customer needs, motivations, and challenges and how your solutions match up. What’s your brand’s position in the marketplace. Who are your main competitors? What’s your advantage?
- Set specific goals you want to achieve. Are you looking for increased website traffic? Perhaps higher sales lead volume? It will help you measure the success of your SEM campaign.
- Choose appropriate keyword phrases. Without proper research, your SEM campaign won’t meet its goals. Identify the keywords your target audience use to refer to the solutions you offer throughout the purchase journey.
- Use these keyword phrases in your site copy, heading tags, alt tags (for images) page title tags, and meta takes. As you incorporate these keywords in the copy, remember to write for humans.
- Aim for quality backlinks. Authoritative sites relevant to your industry are great for inbound links. Go further and list your company on online directories, including your industry-specific.
Content Marketing
This long-term strategy focuses on delivering relevant, high-quality content regularly.
In creating a content-rich resource page on your website, you’ll be showing off your expertise while building trust with potential customers.
Content marketing helps improve your ability to communicate with B2B customers by effectively answering the questions they may have.
It allows you to show them you care about the very things they do.
Here are content types you can incorporate into your strategy:
- Blog posts: Corporate blogs share informational content across the board. You can use them to offer advice to common problems, share how-to tips, industry trends, company news, and event recaps.
- Case studies. Customer stories that show before and after comparison demonstrate your capability to potential customers with similar challenges. This proof may help nudge them towards committing to you.
- In-depth Studies and Industry Researches. This prized content allows you to go beyond the shallow everyday content others put out and provide an in-depth analysis on a particular topic. You can share your findings on your website and social channels and publish them in industry portals.
- Explainer videos. Explainer videos help your users understand how to use your products/services to maximize benefits. You can also explore other forms of video, like brand or product demo videos to increase awareness.
- Product comparisons. This comes in handy when you offer multiple products/services in the same category. It helps customers understand the differentiating factors and make the best decisions.
Email Marketing
B2B email marketing involves setting up and sending emails to businesses and professionals who aren’t just good fits but also engaged with your brand.
Since the audiences opt-in, they want to hear from you and you can speak to them directly without worrying about algorithms or invisibility.
And the returns. According to Campaign Monitor, your business can make up to $44 for every $1 you spend.
Sounds good, right?
Here are other benefits of employing email marketing in your overall strategy:
- Providing value. Audiences understand value when they see it and they will keep coming for more. It builds loyalty even among those who aren’t ready to buy, and when the time is right, they will buy from you.
- Improving sales. Featuring your products or services in email marketing campaigns may help influence purchase decisions and nudge those who abandoned carts to re-engage.
- Driving traffic to your company website. Sharing great content with links to your website allows audiences to click through and learn more. In so doing, your SEO improves.
- A platform for collecting feedback. Customer satisfaction surveys help keep a pulse on experiences. You can use the information to put together strategies that make for better customer experiences.
Marketing Analytics Tools
There are tons of digital marketing strategies you can employ, but you need a proper way of measuring performance, trends, consumer patterns, and opportunities.
Without this, then your strategies won’t do much good.
Marketing analytics tools streamline marketing data to help you critically assess existing strategies against pre-set KPIs.
They uncover insights into how teams use data, track campaigns, may even reveal untapped opportunities. You’ll have a deeper understanding of who your customers are, what they want, and why they buy from you.
This way you can make smarter data-backed decisions. Decisions that consider vulnerabilities, competitor actions, and how to out-stand them.
Examples of marketing analytics tools include Hubspot, Buzzsumo, Pardot, Tableau, Mixpanel, Netbase Quid, PowerBI, and Looker.
