How to generate more sales leads into your business? writes Jonathan Burston, Managing Director of the marketing agency Hartley-Stone.
Marketing has become increasingly complicated – more channels, touchpoints, data and technology. It’s a challenge for companies to stand out in a crowded marketplace. But with every challenge, comes opportunity. An opportunity to drive better engagement and increased sales with your customers and prospects.
Here are four key areas that can drive more leads and opportunities into your business.
1.Website
Your website is your showroom to the wider world. But is it performing at its best? It may look nice and have all the information about your business, but does is it provide you with a return on your investment? It should! A website is more than just a corporate brochure online, it is a sales engine. Unfortunately that objective often gets lost in translation between marketing and the digital agency. It’s not long before the original objective gets lost.
So what can you do? Put yourself in the shoes of your customers and prospects. Now ask yourself the follow questions:
•Is our site easy to navigate? Can we make it even easier (with less clicks) to get to the information a customer or prospect might want?
•Is our site eye catching? Does it have original, engaging imagery with benefit led headlines?
•What’s our call to action? What do you we want visitors to do when they hit our site? How do we get visitors to provide their contact details, so that we can nurture them and build awareness and engagement.
These three points can transform your site into a powerful sales lead generation engine.
2.Lead nurturing
More often than not we hear marketers say, ‘once we’ve got the lead we pass it to sales for them to follow up’. That’s great, but that doesn’t mean that marketing’s relationship with that lead ends. Marketing must put in place a lead nurturing programme – to deliver relevant, timely content and communication. Why? So, that your customers and prospects are constantly aware of your organisation. But that content needs to be relevant and appropriate to their interests. It’s no good sending information about apples when all they are interested in is bananas. The wrong content can have the opposite affect to what you’re trying to achieve.
So put the following two recommendations into place:
•Create customer and prospect journeys that highlight the communications (channel and content) that will be delivered to your (segmented) customers and prospects.
•Create great content that differentiates you in the marketplace and showcases your brand personality.
3. Content
As Marketers we love buzzwords. And Content is one of the latest buzzwords. There has been an explosion in content created by companies. It’s the latest bandwagon to jump upon. That’s great. Or is it? I’m a big advocate of creating content. But it has to be the right content. Too much content created by organisations is either irrelevant or far too bland.
When you’re creating content for your company, ask yourself?
•Does this address a REAL need of our customers and prospects?
•What can they do with the information?
•Does it showcase our brand personality?
If you’re not able to answer these questions, then don’t start creating content until you can. Creating content takes time, effort and resources. It’s important to create the right content that you can be proud of, rather than just be an also ran.
4. Social
The social channel is growing in influence and impact in the buyer journey process. Few B2B companies do this well. They have a tendency to use the social channel like a ‘hosepipe’, pumping out lots of content, just because they can. That’s not ideal. Social needs a strategy and it needs to be integrated with your other channels. Here are some questions to help you become more defined in this channel.
•What is our social strategy?
•How does the social channel integrate with our other channels?
•What content is appropriate and inappropriate for this channel?
•What social channels does our audience use?
The social channel can help your brand stand out and generate awareness and leads. Just remember to start small and then build.
How can you improve what you’re doing to generate more engagement and leads in your business? We can all do better, but only if we put the necessary steps into action.
