What challenges are you facing when trying to connect with potential customers?
What’s your plan for optimizing lead engagement Post-Covid-19?
For many marketing teams, this pandemic posed one of the toughest tests in the history of digital marketing. Businesses reeled from the aftershocks and had their teams scrambling for all kinds of tactics to bring operations back to normal.
The focus now should be on rebuilding operations, recovering revenues, and adopting digital practices that support the first two causes. Practices that re-attract customers to your brand and encourage them to invest in your offering.
To that end, we’ll delve into five Post-Covid-19 lead generation practices that may help you load up your sales pipeline.
1. Improve Customer Experiences
Those B2B buyers may be professionals, but they also happen to be B2C shoppers in their free time, meaning they’re accustomed to superb customer experiences.
As you can imagine, their expectations of you are shaped by what they already enjoy in the B2C sector.
People who feel appreciated and find your purchase process efficient will probably stick with you, recommend you to others, and make repeat purchases.
Best practices include:
- Speed. We’re the generation that’s into instant responses and fast deliveries. A vendor who’s responsive and efficient is far more likely to get ahead. So, revamp your internal systems—customer support and tech stack to provide this.
- Simplify the customer’s journey. Lengthy processes that drag on and on will turn off customers. Optimize your site’s usability, minimize order errors, and leverage intuitive technology to improve experiences.
- Improve relevance. Use feedback and user stories to map the path used. This info can help you personalize your interactions and even proactively suggest related but relevant products/services.
- Facilitate transparency. What’s worse than being slapped with extra charges the vendor had said nothing about? Be transparent about your order calculations and shipping terms so people know exactly what to expect.
2. Lead Generation Software
Knowing your target audience, creating appealing content, and discerning the right engagement platforms are pillars of lead generation.
Yet up to 55 percent of marketers still confess that finding leads that can convert remains a major challenge.
This is where lead generation platforms can help.
This software attracts high-propensity leads allowing teams to zero in on them for conversion. It saves the time you would have spent manually (and possibly inaccurately) doing the same job.
Popular tools include:
- Content creation tools. From e-books to infographics, blogs, or white papers, these tools provide content creation templates you can use. You can gate this content to collect viewers’ contact info.
- Lead nurturing tools. By gathering information about the people entering your pipeline, the apps help you personalize your outreach campaigns, whether these campaigns are phone calls or email.
- Lead scoring. Through variables such as industry, company size, or website activity, these tools work out numerical values of your leads to help you prioritize. Those who are likely to purchase will receive higher scores than those with a lesser propensity.
3. Host Digital Events
From conferences to seminars, meetings, and trade shows, you can reach larger audiences in different demographics simultaneously. And let me add, without poking gaping holes into your budget or expending too much energy.
There are several factors that go into making these events successful, like compelling content and top-notch speakers.
But today, we’ll focus on virtual event platforms—the software responsible for bringing to life these digital events.
If your platform isn’t up to par, it won’t matter what topic or which speaker you have onboard—the event will flop.
Top considerations include:
- Ease of use. Who are your attendees? Are they tech-savvy? This should inform the platform you choose. To be safe, go for one that’s seamless and easy to navigate, even for new users. If attendees feel the learning curve is too steep, they might log off.
- Engagement opportunities. Live chat, polls, Q&A sessions, and breakout sessions give attendees the opportunity to voice opinions and network. How about introducing a competition? Gamifying the experience may also help engage attendees. Just ensure the gamified elements serve your event’s objectives.
- Analytics reporting. Customer experience credit tracking, real-time analytics as well as post-event analysis, and lead retrieval metrics provide insights into your attendees and whether the event’s goals were met.
4. Make Cold Calls
Traditionally the cold calling tactic involved phoning broad audiences without any knowledge of whether what you’re selling suits them.
If you’re still doing that—that’s dead.
Modern-day cold calling is far more targeted and consequently more effective. It starts with building a custom list of companies that may potentially benefit from your solutions.
You then call these companies with valuable and personalized messages that evoke interest enough to pursue the conversation. It’s an art.
Best practices include:
- Develop a script. Finding your individuality in selling boosts your authenticity, but until then, you’re better off using a script to guide your call. An effective script allows you to introduce your offerings and ask for your goal in a timely fashion.
- Navigate gatekeepers. It’s their job to ward you and the 50 other salespeople off. Practice sounding calm and senior and act like you’re familiar with the contact person. You’ll come off as an important person who shouldn’t be held up.
- Turn objections into insights. What do you hear? “You’re too expensive,” “We’re using something similar,” or “We don’t need your solutions presently” These responses may be useful in determining product pricing, targeting different customer bases, and working on differentiators to make your offerings more appealing, etc.
5. Adopt Account-Based Marketing
Account-based marketing brings together customer-facing teams to focus their efforts systematically on highly specific accounts using a variety of tactics.
The tactics used may include video prospecting, targeted advertising, social selling, etc.
Consider the following tactics:
- Develop prospect-specific offers. The idea is to focus on a few target accounts to maximize conversions. You then target these organizations with highly relevant and personalized offers to help secure meetings.
- Create account-specific content on your website. Your programs need to be geared towards conversion. Ensure the landing pages, offers, images, and copy a person from the target account encounters on your website is suited to them.
- Organize 1:1 C-level outreach. These campaigns start with personalized emails from a C-level executive in your organization to a specific C-level executive in the target account. In addition to cultivating a relationship, the email also states the business reason for connecting. Internally a salesperson follows up with the executive’s admin to fix up a meeting.
