Creating a content marketing strategy is a crucial step for any B2B company. SMEs (small and medium enterprises) have a lot to gain from a successful content plan. Using this as a way to connect with your target audience helps kickstart a strong relationship with customers.
Small businesses benefit from repeat clients, and investing in a content marketing strategy can help improve your overall sales. Keep reading, or use the links below to “jump ahead” to learn more about the essentials of content marketing:
Social media marketing has skyrocketed in recent years, causing trending ideas to emerge. However, maintaining a consistent tone and voice across your digital marketing channels should remain a top priority. While hopping on trends can temporarily boost engagement, your company’s values should always be at the core of each post.
Your team should create and share content based on the interests of your target audience. Thanks to the convenience of online buying and virtual sales interactions, buyers today have increased control over their overall customer experience (CX). Your SME must take charge of branding by adhering to consistent messaging and tone.
To get started, you should begin by defining your target audience. Begin by evaluating your product, creating an ideal client profile, and using data to segment marketing lists.
Rather than just looking at demographics like gender and age, dive deeper by assessing lifestyles and other factors. This information will help your team understand what influences customers to complete a purchase. Using this data, your marketing department can focus on attracting and engaging similar prospects to fill the sales pipeline.
With the right target audience, your team can start creating and sharing content. Develop an active presence on the online platforms your target prospects already use to search for content. Meet your target audience where they are most likely to be!
Determine whether your company gets more engagement from social media, website traffic, or email marketing. From there, ensure your marketing has a consistent schedule when posting to the platforms with the highest traffic.
Establishing a brand, voice, and tone for your company is crucial for cultivating brand loyalty. Consumers can easily follow and engage with multiple companies simultaneously, especially on social media. Consistent messaging and tone let customers know what to expect from your company.
This approach helps establish your brand as a leader in the industry, and prospects can use your content as a knowledgeable resource. Rather than constantly posting ‘fluff’ content, your team can share relevant industry information and help guide customers to the solution offered by your product.
How to Connect and Create a Lasting Relationship With Customers
Long-standing customer relationships are the key to success for B2B companies. Developing a strong, easily identifiable brand voice helps build awareness while encouraging engagement with your content. Measuring audience interaction rates allows your team to tailor future content to the interests of your target prospects.
Your marketing content should help funnel customers toward the sales pipeline. By understanding your ideal client profile and your quality customer journey, you can target audience segments where they are in their sales experiences.
Audience segmentation based on interests helps your customers enjoy a more personalized experience. Providing value to prospects, regardless of where they are in the sales funnel, can earn your company a reputation as a key player in your industry.
Consistency in your brand helps content work across the different stages experienced by each prospect. For someone just beginning the research process, engagement through social media or your company’s website can provide valuable insight into the solutions you have to offer.
Prospects more advanced in the customer journey may benefit from email marketing campaigns that direct to downloadable content. Both of these, however, should work to explain the benefits of your product.
Brand awareness is an additional piece that must be part of developing a comprehensive content marketing strategy. Educational resources that help establish your company as a knowledgeable player within the industry and introduction pieces targeted to new prospects are vital for success.
Customers who recognize your brand as a leader in the industry will likely make repeat purchases and view your company as an expert source for business knowledge and guidance.
What is a SWOT analysis?
A SWOT strategy that focuses on your company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT). The goal is to gain a deeper understanding of the factors that should contribute to your overall business strategy. It helps companies see the big-picture of their mission and correctly identify new pathways for success.
Strengths. These are the services or products your company excels in providing and what makes your business stand out among its competitors. For example, if your company is in a niche industry, having an extensive network of industry contacts sets you apart from other businesses.
Weaknesses. These are factors that need improvement to ensure your business is performing to the best of its ability.
Opportunities. These are external factors that help boost your company within the industry. If something gives your team a competitive advantage, it can create opportunities for advancement in the marketplace.
Threats. Anything that may cause harm to your company is considered a threat. Your team’s ability to recognize factors outside your company’s control such as an increase in the cost of materials or the introduction of new competitors, can minimize the harm to your business.
Using SWOT Analysis to Improve Your Business
Successful use of a SWOT strategy, which creates a matrix analysis with the proper framework, relies on team collaboration. By freely sharing feedback and ideas, as well as using data to back up observations, this information will help your team see the most benefits.
This strategy can help the marketing department identify gaps in its yearly plan. With this data, your team will be able to pivot and change objectives to ensure the highest level of success. By using data analytics, the marketing team can set realistic KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and track the performance of their content marketing campaigns.
Getting started with a SWOT analysis requires asking questions to understand each aspect of the strategy. Going further into this plan, a TOWS analysis, or matrix, helps map strategic choices.
This strategy combines the factors of a SWOT analysis to help form plans for the future. Integrating the 4 elements of SWOT can help audit your organization, as well as move forward with successful marketing campaigns.
Utilizing Data Analytics to Measure Success
When creating your yearly content marketing strategy, it’s important to set up KPIs that will help determine the success of your outreach. Rather than basing these indicators on hypothetical goals, your team can use data analytics to measure a campaign’s success.
Content marketing should be focused on attracting new prospects, engaging with warm leads, and funneling customers into the sales pipeline. By actively tracking these objectives, your team can gain an accurate understanding of its strengths and weaknesses. Data analytics also play a role in brainstorming and initiating change within the marketing plan.
By tracking engagement like link interactions and form submittals, your team can see what content resonates with potential clients. These benchmarks help your team create a winning strategy to stay competitive within the B2B market.
Since customers can choose which brands they want to interact with most, having updated data on audience interactions allows your team to compare itself to competitors. Tracking success is important to remain a key player within your industry.
Engagement with content and sales conversions are both factors that help your team understand what type of marketing works for your target audience. A quality customer journey begins with marketing outreach, and this communication should continue until a sale is finalized.
Kickstarting your B2B SME may seem like a challenge, but taking it one step at a time and implementing a content marketing strategy can help you get ahead of the competition. Measuring how your team successfully connects with your target audience will play a huge role in increasing your company’s overall ROI.
Learn how LeadBoxer’s cutting-edge Lead Generation platform can facilitate the growth of your SME through online Lead Identification, Qualification, Lead Management, and the native integrations compatible with your existing tech stack that you need to build a solid content marketing strategy.
Chances are you’ve heard of ChatGPT. This artificial technology is widely used by students to write term papers. It is also a powerful AI (artificial intelligence) tool for sales lead generation.
To learn more about how ChatGPT can be a game changer for your business, keep reading or “jump ahead” to the following topics:
ChatGPT has become a buzzword, but what is it? It is a computer program that understands text data through a learning algorithm called the Transformer architecture.
The artificial intelligence program is based on the GPT-3.5 Transformer and is developed by Open AI. ChatGPT has learned word usage and sentence construction, resulting in text that reads naturally. It performs various tasks including answering questions, making recommendations, and composing engaging conversations.
You can have a free ChatGPT account. However, the free version only grants access to users based on usage. With a $20 per month subscription, users have access during peak usage times and can use the program’s newest features.
ChatGPT generates a response to your prompt immediately. You can also ask more questions that will build upon previous questions. You can also create a new prompt.
What ChatGPT Can Do
ChatGPT gathers information from books, newspapers, social media, and the Internet. Its vast knowledge allows it to produce text that reads as if someone wrote it. It is concise, clear, and engaging.
The most popular use of ChatGPT is for research. Users ask ChatGPT for information on a specific topic and it provides its findings in a polished way.
Users also use ChatGPT to refine or improve what they have already written. ChatGPT can provide recommendations or creative ideas. ChatGPT can also help you practice a new language. ChatGPT has also become a popular tool used by entrepreneurs.
ChatGPT should not be the final, authoritative source for facts and statistics. When asking such questions, research the information using highly reputable sources.
The quality of the text output of ChatGPT is dependent on the quality of the research prompts given. You can’t ask vague questions and expect to get specific answers. Speaking of prompts, we’ll discuss how to compose prompts that will produce optimum results.
Use Successful Prompts to Get the Responses You Need
To get the most out of ChatGPT AI for sales lead generation, it is important to have the correct prompts. If you provide bad prompts, the results will sound like information from search results. Your generated text will be a rehash of information already out there.
As a rule of thumb, compose prompts that save you time on research and include a call to action (CTA). Here are some ways to write good ChatGPT prompts:
Be clear and specific –When you ask clear and specific questions or prompts, you will get more accurate responses.
Use the correct language and terminology – ChatGTP is a computer program, not a human. It will not know industry jargon or the terminology of your target audience.
Be concise – Short and concise prompts and questions will exclude unnecessary information and improve the accuracy of the results.
Include necessary parameters – Asking broad questions will not give you the results you’re looking for. Some parameters to consider include length, tone, and target audience.
Have examples – With ChatGPT, you can provide examples of the types of text you want.
Test and adjust – Practice makes perfect. The more you test and experiment with your prompts, the better they will get over time.
Some specific ChatGPT prompts that produce good responses use the following formats:
“I want you to act as ___ for ___.”
“Your task is to ___.”
“___ should ___.”
“___ should not ___.”
“To get started, please ___.”
“Assuming I am ___, what would be the best way to ___.”
ChatGPT is a text-producing technology offering many possibilities to better your automated marketing and sales outreach efforts. You can use this AI technology for business in the following ways:
Lead generation– You can generate personalized outbound and inbound sales lead generation templates with ChatGPT.
Lead qualification– ChatGPT can improve the likelihood of your leads becoming customers by asking specific, targeted questions.
Customer service or emails – With ChatGPT, you can free up time by efficiently composing phone and email answers to customer questions and concerns.
Product information – ChatGPT can produce information like product descriptions, user guides, and support text.
Content creation –ChatGPT can produce engaging, polished blogs, sales and marketing material, product descriptions, and cold email templates.
3 Stages of Outbound Lead Generation
ChatGPT can be a powerful AI tool for sales lead generation. Besides the aforementioned uses, the technology can boost outbound and inbound lead generation. ChatGPT improves both lead-generation strategies by enhancing the tactics used in each of the stages of both funnels.
1. Awareness
ChatGPT offers many options to draw attention to your product or services. Here are some ways the AI tool for sales generation can enhance your current awareness stage strategies:
2. Social Selling and Personal Branding
You leverage your network to build relationships to find the right prospects through social selling. Here, you’re building trust with prospects. Figuring out the right way to promote your content is key to social media engagement and selling.
ChatGPT creates unique personalized branded content and offers suggestions on the type of content to create and branding types. The technology produces content that makes your brand stand out and appear credible.
3. Database Management and Cleaning
It is crucial to have a current list of prospects in your database for effective outbound sales outreach. ChatGPT works with Google Sheets to help you prepare, update, and manage your database lists. It can also generate content based on various spreadsheet templates.
LinkedIn Outreach
1. Awareness
As a sales professional, you know how valuable LinkedIn is for generating connections with prospects. ChatGPT makes your LinkedIn outreach efficient and effective by doing the following:
Producing engaging and personalized messages to leads and prospects.
Increasing the chance for your leads to read your messages with personalized call-to-actions, hashtags, and mentions.
Pulling market research data on your target audience.
2. Interest
In the interest phase, you’ve gotten the attention of leads and prospects. Chatbots and virtual assistants are useful at this stage because of all the questions people ask. You can use ChatGPT to create automated chat conversations and content that addresses prospects’ needs and pain points.
3. Decision-making
Once the prospects have gathered enough information, they are ready to make a purchasing decision. ChatGPT can create persuasive content for leads with the following:
Sales proposals that address the specific needs and pain points of prospects
Engaging content based on case studies, webinars, or blog posts
Education for leads about your services and products
4. Action
Finally, the lead makes a purchase and converts into a paying customer. ChatGPT can help reassure them they made the right purchasing decision. The AI for sales lead generation can also help with the following:
Produce persuasive scripts
Compose negotiation emails and messaging to close sales
Create custom templates for contracts and proposals
5. Retention
Once a customer makes a purchase, it’s important to nurture them to become a repeat customer. ChatGPT helps with retention by the following:
Writing personalized follow-up emails
Composing questionnaires, surveys, and newsletter emails
Asking for feedback and producing feedback forms
5 Stages of Inbound Sales Lead Generation
As with outbound sales, ChatGPT can be a game-changer for your inbound sales funnel. Here is how ChatGPT is used in each stage of your inbound sales funnel:
1. Awareness
ChatGPT raises awareness of your company’s offerings to prospects. The AI for sales lead generation does this by:
Creating ad copy
Generating content for LinkedIn
Composing engaging landing pages, headings, and call-to-action copy
Creating other web content like quizzes, assessments, and eBooks
2. Interest
When you get the attention of inbound leads, they will be interested in learning more about what you offer. ChatGPT can ease the barrage of questions people may have. It does this by gathering information on your target audience, creating conversation topics, and setting up Chabot scripts.
3. Desire
ChatGPT can move prospects toward a purchase by creating various online texts. These include surveys, chatbot scripts, blog content, case studies, and service pages. This content will give enough thorough information for leads to choose to work with your company over the competition.
4. Action
ChatGPT can produce relevant, engaging product descriptions, blog posts, and landing pages. This helps convert prospects into customers when they are ready to buy.
5. Retention
Once leads become paying customers, you must keep them. ChatGPT can take your email campaigns to the next level, keeping customers engaged.
The technology also produces unlimited email text, subject lines, and call-to-actions. Speaking of cold email outreach, we’ll discuss how ChatGPT can help.
ChatGPT is an AI text tool that can be a game changer for outbound and inbound sales outreach. The technology can produce various high-quality content, making your sales and marketing team more efficient and effective at closing deals.
Technology innovations are changing the way we work, including the sales and marketing landscape for many industries. The skyrocketing popularity of artificial intelligence (AI) applications like ChatGPT give companies yet another tool to surpass their competitors and use data-driven marketing to boost sales. The use of chatbots can help improve customer service and provide a better overall customer experience(CX).
In the B2B sector, it’s important to understand the impact ChatGPT can have on sales. Experts predict organizations striving to remain competitive will soon find the integration of AI into daily workflow crucial to success.
Continue reading, or use the following links to “jump ahead” and learn more about ChatGPT and its expected impact on Data Driven Marketing.
By using data from customer engagement and third parties, companies are able to base their marketing practices on these insights. This information sheds valuable light on the motivations and behaviors of your customers, enabling you to have a better understanding of their preferences. Using data to backup your marketing plans can help your company save money.
According to Forbes, two trillion dollars in revenue is wasted when marketing and sales don’t gather and use insights before making vital decisions that should be strategically determined based on available lead data analytics. In this time of economic uncertainty and downturn, maximizing the marketing budget is crucial to seeing the highest return on investment (ROI) for your company.
Using AI like ChatGPT can keep humans from missing vital information that can serve to drive sales. This cutting-edge technology can do more than simply create quick content. It can put data at your fingertips that pushes your company to the top of its industry.
For those who may be intimidated and hesitant to jump headfirst into a data-driven model, AI can play a role in relieving some of that burden. It may seem daunting to base your marketing strategy on current data and customer trends due to the workload needed to find this information. Using AI is a way of assisting employees as they seek to balance their workload and avoid human error while collecting and putting this insightful data to work.
What is ChatGPT?
Artificial Intelligence has been a driving force for innovation across industries. For those in tech, AI has been the subject of many conversations as well as a factor in new product releases and even the basis for some companies. Other industries are beginning to see the potential in adopting AI into their workflows.
ChatGPT is a language processing tool that uses AI to allow for conversations with its users. This chat bot reads and understands text to allow users to experience the technological innovation of this new information delivery method. For those who are new to AI, it’s important to understand why ChatGPT is such a game changer.
Rather than sorting through a multitude of links from a Google search or compiling data from different sources, ChatGPT makes it easy to locate information for quick use. The chatbot feature allows for a conversational approach, which makes it easily accessible and non intimidating for new users to try. You don’t need to be a tech expert to recognize the immediate benefits of using ChatGPT.
Designed by OpenAI, this platform launched at the end of November 2022. It has been the subject of many conversations across various industries. According to an analysis by UBS, ChatGPT managed to gain 100 million users after its first two months.
With this type of traction, it’s become an incredibly fast-growing app, and taking advantage of its features is important for many B2B companies. By using it with your current techstack, including Leadboxer, ChatGPT can seamlessly integrate into your team’s workflow to assist with marketing and sales efforts.
Getting started is as easy as typing your first question into the chatbox. Your team is able to access its features through the free version, or an upgrade is available for $20/month with the addition of a few extra perks. This type of technology can integrate with your current techstack to help streamline your sales process.
Lead generation and qualification is important for creating a strong sales pipeline. Making sure your sales team is working off quality leads helps save time and boosts overall sales. Using AI to automate your process can lessen the time between a lead’s interaction with content and when a salesperson reaches out.
Using a chatbot can help qualify a lead without expending valuable manpower, as AI can engage with leads to gather information and score leads based on defined criteria. Adding high-quality leads to your pipeline empowers your sales team to quickly identify and reach out to customers who will benefit most from your B2B solution.
Reaching your target audience is vital to ensuring your marketing team is earning the highest ROI possible. Creating relevant content helps showcase your company as a viable solution to your prospects’ problems.
It’s also a great way to establish your business as an industry expert. ChatGPT can help your team create content that shares important information in a timely manner.
ChatGPT is an incredible language generation tool. Its capabilities can help your marketing team develop blog posts, whitepapers, and social media content to distribute to target audiences. This tool doesn’t replace a marketing department, but it does help allocate resources to other tasks.
This type of tool can also help your team easily segment audiences to make sure content gets to prospective clients at the right time. By using ChatGPT, your marketing team can create pieces for all stages of the sales cycle. Automating workflows can ensure this personalized information lands in the inboxes of each segment to help walk them through the sales pipeline.
AI can play a major role in forecasting market trends and analyzing patterns within your industry. This data is gathered by ChatGPT through historical sales data, previous customer behavior, and market trends. This allows your team to take a data-driven marketing approach to optimize sales strategies, plan future product roll outs, and push marketing campaigns.
By adding ChatGPT into your team’s tech stack, your company can stay ahead of competitors by using data-driven marketing tactics. Allowing accurate customer information to guide strategic decisions helps increase ROI and boost sales.
Using ChatGPT to Improve the Customer Journey
Leading customers successfully to closing a deal is the goal of any salesperson. The customer journey starts as soon as a lead is identified, and the experience throughout the sales pipeline plays a large role in landing a sale.
While you can’t personalize your outreach for each individual customer, content should be segmented based on audience groups in similar stages of the customer journey. This helps funnelcustomers through the sales pipeline by providing relevant product information on a timeline that meets their needs.
Understanding how to measure customer satisfaction is the first step toward improving your sales cycle and the overall CX. Setting metrics and using a scale like a Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a great way to keep your team on track. This type of data is important for understanding how your clients feel about their experience with your company and its services/products.
ChatGPT can also help your team streamline efforts and boost the overall experience for your customers. Time is one of the most crucial parts of a successful client interaction. Automation is a powerful way to make sure communication is quick and efficient.
By allowing a ChatGPT chatbot to be used on your website, prospects can immediately meet and engage with your brand. This technology can initiate conversations, gather initial information your team will need, and provide quick assistance for their questions. Personalizedinteractions like these can help leads learn more about your solutions and provide a positive first impression.
ChatGPT uses the information discovered to assess the needs of potential customers. Engaging in immediate conversation allows the chatbot to ask targeted questions that dig into your prospect’s pain points and explore the challenges they’re looking to resolve. With this information, AI has the ability to help qualify leads to ensure your company can provide the right solution(s).
Throughout the journey, proper communication can assure customers that their needs are being suitably addressed and met. While having an actual salesperson to contact throughout the process is important, ChatGPT can help cover any real-time assistance around the clock. Using a chatbot can provide instant responses to customer questions, troubleshoot common issues, and guide prospects through the decision making process.
For companies where price is determined by the customer’s needs, ChatGPT can be used to help put together proposals, including product details, pricing, and terms of business. This streamlines the sales process, and can help your salespeople get this information over to the customer as soon as they’re ready to buy.
ChatGPT can also play a major role in fostering strong relationships and encouraging customer loyalty. By using AI for post-sales engagement, your clients can have access to onboarding and training materials. It is also great for gathering feedback from customers, which can inform company decisions about product roll outs and future implementations.
You wake up, check your phone, and immediately delete three spam emails without even opening them. Make your coffee, hop in the car, and encounter a handful of billboards on the way to work.
Drive home, tuning out the loud, angry men arguing on a talk show, and the ads that too frequently interrupt them. Get home, realize your sister’s birthday is next week, look up great gifts for cat-lovers, and send her one. Make dinner, using a recipe that was emailed to you by a food blog you follow and go to sleep.
We all encounter an endless barrage of marketing every day. Some of that marketing is effective and made with the help of sales AI, and some of it’s, well, annoying. This division between effective and ineffective marketing strategies can be acutely seen when comparing inbound vs outbound marketing.
This guide will cover the differences between the two and much more. Here are the sections to follow:-
Inbound marketing is a customer-focused approach technique that focuses on acquiring and engaging a target audience through relevant content and experiences. Rather than pushing your products or services to your customers, it is all about making genuine connections with them.
As a result, it is known as the ‘Pull’ tactic.
Here are some of the most popular inbound marketing channels used by businesses
Outbound marketing is a traditional marketing method of reaching out to potential customers via multiple channels. The traditional advertising tactics comprised television ads, radio, print media, and billboards.
The same push approach is now being used in digital media, with ads on social media and cold outreach via DMs, phone calls, and emails.
Here are some of the most popular outbound marketing channels used by businesses:-
Traditional advertising:- Ads on television, radio, and print advertisements.
Direct mail: Sending promotional mails to potential buyers directly.
Trade shows: Participating in offline events to display products or services
Digital Outreach:- Cold emails, Cold DM’s and Cold Calls
Difference Between Inbound vs Outbound Marketing
This section is written to help you grasp the differences between inbound and outbound marketing efforts at a surface level. Here you will get a simple understanding of pros and cons of both.
Inbound Marketing
Outbound Marketing
1) Inbound marketing is all about the pull. It entices the audience with value and then pushes products to your customers.
1) Whereas Outbound marketing is all about pushing our products and services in front of people.
2) Inbound marketing focuses on customers first.
2) Outbound marketing relies on the product/offer first.
3) Inbound marketing is largely done online through blogs and social media. As a result, it’s ‘Trackable’.
3) Outbound marketing is done both offline and online. Such as billboards, TV commercials, and Meta advertising too. But some of these campaigns are ‘un-trackable.’
4) The emphasis is on audience who are either interested in their product (or) aware of their problem. Hence covering the whole sales funnel. Audience are nurtured.
4) The emphasis is on a wide spectrum of audiences. As a result, you may find yourself targeting an unqualified set of audience. Hence audience are not in a nurture sequence.
5) Inbound marketing is about creating brand awareness, hence it’s a long-term strategy.
5) Outbound marketing is about generating leads/sales to the business. Hence it’s a short-term strategy.
6) The success of this strategy is determined by the quality of your content and activities.
6) Here, quantity determines success. What matters most is the volume of outreach and the number of ad impressions.
We feel a short table will not justify the actual depth of this article. Hence we’ll go over both marketing methods in detail in the following sections.
Inbound vs Outbound Marketing: Based on Audience Behaviour
Inbound vs Outbound Marketing Based on Audience Behaviour
Audience behaviour and preferences are a critical factor in distinguishing between inbound and outbound marketing. For effective marketing, it’s damn important to understand your audience and where they stand in your funnel.
Without proper analyses of your target audience behaviour, will leave your marketing tactics worthless.
Outbound Marketing (Audience Behaviour):–
1. Reactive Response: In outbound marketing, the audience often reacts to the information offered to them, whether it’s a television commercial, a billboard, or a cold call. Their participation is frequently spontaneous and depending on the advertisement’s immediate impact.
2. Short Attention Span: Because outbound techniques are obtrusive, the audience may have a shorter attention span. If the message does not resonate with them within the first few seconds, they will most likely move on or disregard it.
3. Broad Audience: Outbound marketing frequently targets a broad audience. As a result, not every viewer or listener may find the topic relevant, resulting in a wide range of varied responses
4. Seeking Quick Value: When a prospect responds to an outbound advertisement, they frequently seek quick value or benefits, such as discounts, promotions, or limited-time deals.
Inbound Marketing (Audience Behaviour):–
1. Proactive Engagement: In inbound marketing, the audience are actively seeking for information or solution to their problem. They might look for a blog post, view a tutorial video, or sign up for a newsletter because it is useful or relevant to their requirements.
2. Increased Engagement Time: Because the audience chooses to connect with the content, they spend more time learning, reading, or watching. Thus resulting in greater engagement.
3. Specific Interests: Inbound marketing is designed to address unique audience concerns or interests. As a result, the content is precisely targeted and relevant to those interests, resulting in higher conversion rates.
4. Relationship Building: Inbound marketing audiences are frequently looking for reliable sources of information or answers. Thus offering consistent and valuable content can lead to the audience forming a relationship with or loyalty to the brand over time.
Inbound vs Outbound Marketing: Based on Technology
Inbound vs Outbound Marketing Based on Technology
Technology is at the forefront of redefining marketing techniques in today’s digital world, that includes both inbound and outbound approaches. With the help of tech, there are plenty of new ways through which marketers have been leveraging these strategies for their businesses.
What Technologies impact Inbound Marketing?
1. Content Management Systems (CMS): Platforms such as WordPress or HubSpot help businesses to efficiently develop, manage, and optimize website content, ensuring it effectively reaches the target audience.
2. SEO Tools: Tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs provide insights into keyword rankings, backlink profiles, and competitor analysis, allowing businesses to structure their content for improved search visibility.
3. Social Media Platforms: Sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn have potential prospects on their platforms, allowing businesses to reach out to certain demographics and interact with their audience in real time.
4. Analytics:Google Analytics and other comparable tools provide insights into user behaviour, traffic sources, and conversion rates, helping businesses with understanding the efficacy of their inbound efforts and making any improvements.
What Technologies impact Outbound Marketing?
1. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Systems: Platforms such as HubSpot, Salesforce, or Zoho CRM help businesses in managing leads and customer interactions, thus ensuring timely and appropriate communication.
2. Email Marketing Platforms: Tools like Instantly AI that are used for cold emails to reach out to a large number of people at once. Alongside tools like LeadBoxer can help you in collecting leads for your outreach by providing leads.
3. Programmatic Advertising: Advanced algorithms automate media inventory purchase, placement, and optimisation on ads. Thus ensuring ads to reach the correct audience at the right time.
4. Retargeting Tools: Cookies and other technologies track user’s online actions, allowing businesses to provide tailored ads to their consumers who have previously interacted with their website or products. However, because to privacy concerns, Apple and other platforms are clamping down on this.
As technology advances, it will undoubtedly play an increasingly greater role in determining the future of marketing including both inbound and outbound.
Inbound Marketing Challenges and How to Overcome Them
While being effective, inbound marketing has its own set of obstacles. Understanding these challenges and developing solutions to overcome them is critical for success.
1. Saturation of Content:–
Challenge: With so much content available online, standing out and capturing the audience’s attention is becoming increasingly tough.
Solution: Concentrate on producing high-quality, distinctive, and value-added content. Do extensive keyword research and research in general in order to meet specific audience inquiries.
2. Longer Time to See Results:-
Challenge: Unlike outbound marketing, which can produce quick results, inbound techniques can take time to gain traction.
Solution: Be persistent and patient. Monitor and adapt your plans on a regular basis based on analytics and feedback. Celebrate minor victories while keeping in mind that inbound marketing is a long-term commitment.
3. Changing Search Engine Algorithms:-
– Challenge: Search engines, particularly Google, regularly updates their algorithms, which can have an influence on website rankings.
– Solution: Stay updated on SEO changes and best practises. Consider creating content for both people and search engines as a priority.
4. Engaging the Right Audience:-
Challenge: Getting traffic is one thing, but getting the right traffic that converts is another.
Solution: Develop detailed buyer personas to better understand your target customer.
5. Creating Consistent Creation:-
Challenge: Creating fresh and relevant content on a regular basis can be time-consuming.
Solution: Have a content calendar in place to plan and schedule content ahead of time. To keep them coming, consider collaborating with guest authors or outsourcing your content generation.
Outbound Marketing Challenges and How to Overcome Them
Just like Inbound marketing, outbound marketing has it’s own set of challenges.
Higher Costs:-
Challenge: Outbound marketing strategies, such as TV commercials or billboards, can be costly.
Solution: Spend your money wisely by focusing on platforms and channels that provide the best ROI. If you’re a small online business, shift to Meta ads or cold outreach.
Intrusive perception:-
Challenge: Consumers frequently perceive outbound ads as interruptions, especially when they are irrelevant.
Solution: Make sure your messaging is focused. Understand your audience’s preferences by using data analytics. Tracking website visitors and email click-throughs can help you develop an understanding of your audience’s behaviour and preferences.
Tracking ROI:-
Challenge: Traditional outbound campaigns, unlike digital methods, are difficult to measure. Hence their direct impact on the businesses can be attributed.
Solution: If possible, you can incorporate tracking measures, such as unique promo codes for offline marketing. If you use cold emails, however, our Outlook email monitoring can assist you in tracking your efforts.
Rapidly Changing Consumer Habits:-
Challenge: With the rise of ad-blockers and streaming services, traditional advertisements may no longer reach as broad an audience as they once did.
Solution: Expand your marketing mix. While TV and radio advertisements are still effective, consider incorporating digital outbound strategies like running cold email campaigns or pay-per-click ads.
Compliance and Regulations:-
Challenge: Outbound marketing, particularly telemarketing and cold email operations, might face stringent laws.
Solution: To prevent legal ramifications, keep up with the latest updates on local and international marketing regulations.
Saturation and Competition:-
Challenge: As more and more businesses use outbound strategies, it leads to market saturation and makes it difficult to stand out.
Solution: Concentrate on generating captivating and memorable campaigns. Understand your unique selling proposition (USP) and make sure it’s featured in all of your marketing content.
Short-term Effect:-
Challenge: The influence of outbound marketing, such as a television commercial, can be brief.
Solution: Strengthen your campaigns across multiple media. If you have a TV ad, supplement it with radio spots, print advertisements, and internet banners to ensure consistent visibility.
Inbound or Outbound Marketing for Your Business? Which One To Choose?
If you run a business of this era, then your primary objective should be to test out all possible channels over time and establish your own brand. Because people love brands and once they start seeing your brand name everywhere they start trusting you more.
This is where, integrated marketing, the big brother, steps in.
Integrated marketing is a comprehensive approach that incorporates both inbound and outbound marketing methods to provide consumers with a united and seamless experience. Thus making your business have that omnichannel presence.
Rather than considering each marketing channel separately, integrated marketing considers all channels to be interrelated components of a wider ecosystem. The primary purpose is to ensuring that all marketing initiatives, online and offline, present a consistent and cohesive brand message.
Examples Highlighting the Effective Integration of Both Strategies
Overview: Nike’s classic “Just Do It” campaign effortlessly combined TV advertisements (outbound) with social media participation (inbound).
Results: Not only did the campaign boost sales, but it also created a community of dedicated customers who connected with the company online, sharing their own “Just Do It” moments.
Overview: Coca-Cola customised their bottles with common names and encouraged people to share their “Share a Coke” experiences online.
Outcomes: The campaign resulted in a huge boost in sales as well as a massive influx of user-generated material on social media, demonstrating the successful blending of traditional advertising and digital interaction.
Overview: Dove began a series of television commercials that questioned beauty norms. They supplemented it with online content, such as films and essays about actual beauty.
Results: The campaign resonated emotionally with consumers, leading to widespread media coverage and a surge in online discussions regarding beauty standards.
Overview: Airbnb promoted the idea of experiencing cities like a local through television advertisements. This was coupled with their internet platform, which allowed customers to find local experiences and accommodations.
Outcomes: The campaign successfully positioned Airbnb as more than a housing provider, emphasising the unique experiences it provides, resulting in increased bookings and user engagement.
These case studies demonstrate the value of combining inbound and outbound initiatives. When done well, integrated marketing can magnify brand messages, create deeper engagement among consumers, and generate measurable business results.
Conclusion
While each marketing technique has its advantages, it is the harmonious combination of both that accelerates a brand’s success.
However, we recommend small businesses in the B2B space to begin with outbound channels such as cold emails and cold emails. Because you can easily contact your target audience and make money in the short-run.
Using services like Lead Boxer an excellent place to start searching for leads for your outbound email campaigns.
However, once your company is up and going, the emphasis should be more on creating a brand. Like that businesses can develop strong, long-lasting relationships with consumers by producing consistent, high-quality content and engaging with audiences across many channels, resulting in increased growth and brand loyalty.
When it comes to traditional marketing businesses usually go for TV ads, flyers, and billboards to attract leads. Instead of those offline channels when businesses prefer digital channels like social media marketing and ads for their marketing to generate leads. We call it as ‘Digital Lead Investing’.
Leads generated from the digital channels can be termed as ‘digital leads’. In today’s digital age, every business that sells products or services online needs to invest in digital advertising.
In this blog post, we will discuss digital lead investing and digital lead generation strategies in more detail.
What is Digital Lead Investing?
Digital Lead Investing is nothing but doing digital marketing to attract leads for your business. Unlike traditional marketing channels, digital marketing attracts leads based on their online behavior and interests and offers a more targeted and faster way to convert potential customers efficiently.
1) Inbound marketing:- It’s where businesses bring audience organically through their assets, like content on their website or posts on social media to convert followers into customers
2) Outbound marketing:- It’s where businesses often push their products to their audience through cold emails or paid ads to convert them into customers.
Every digital marketing strategy, whether organic or not, includes a sales funnel for leads.
Digital lead investing is a strategy that small to medium-sized businesses find effective. The strategies can be automated and are very data-driven. However they are more cost-effective and scalable than other traditional lead generation channels.
5 Steps To Know Before Building a Successful Digital Lead Investing System
5 Steps To Know Before Building a Successful Digital Lead Investing System
No matter what you call it a digital lead investing system or strategy. Having one system in place is important (To keep generating leads for your business)
Defining your specific goals for the business is the first step: A business without any goals is a drive without any destination. Each business has unique goals but fundamentals remain the same when defining your goals. Is it more direct sales, qualified leads, or brand awareness?
Not just defining them but being specific helps you. Something like generating 100 sales in this quarter or increasing your newsletter reach by adding 10k+ subscribers. According to your goals, your lead generation efforts should will be planned.
The more specific the goals, the more detailed your strategy will guide you toward success and help you measure success.
Before you invest in digital lead generation, you need to set clear, measurable objectives. It helps you answer this question, ‘What do you want to achieve with your digital lead investing?’
To build a successful digital lead investing system follow these five steps:
1) Know your audience
Remember, marketing to everyone means marketing to no one.
Understanding who your potential customers are is vital. Research their demographics, interests, and online behaviors. Niche down your target audience as narrow as you can.
This knowledge will direct your content creation process, helps you personalize your marketing campaigns, and ensure you’re targeting the right people.
2) Determine your budget to invest
Budget in the marketing is that one piece of the puzzle that dictates the whole puzzle. As a business, your goals should be to invest as little amount as possible in digital marketing and generate the maximum possible outcome for your business.
A well-sorted-out budget ensures businesses to think and strategize where to allocate their funds wisely across different channels. Remember, more budget doesn’t always mean better results. Efficiency, return on investment (ROI), and other essential KPIs should be your guiding metrics.
3) Find the proper channels for digital lead generation
To build a successful digital lead investing strategy choosing proper channels is the key here.
Not all channels are equal for every business. This is where those initial first two steps on defining goals and knowing your audience helps you decide which digital channels to target.
Anyhow, first you need to identify where your audience spends their time online and if it helps check out your competitors and understand how they generating leads for their business.
Is it on social media, search engine, or industry-specific forums? Choose channels that align with your goals and audience preferences.
Once you have selected your channels, create a strategy to produce consistent content and leverage those channels to meet your business goals.
4) Scale your strategies to build a brand
In 2024, all businesses, even the smallest of the small startups, seem to have access to same kind of tools and marketing channels that a big brand has. Also, due to the abundance of similar companies and products in the market, it will be harder for you to be different from the rest.
Hence, creating a brand helps you stand out, build trust, and stamp your authority in front of your audience.
Although, the best way to build a brand is to scale your digital lead investing channels that have worked for you in the business and take those marketing campaigns to the next level by investing more money, or honing in with more exciting content, or experimenting with creative strategies.
5 Best Digital Lead Investing Strategies for 2024
Best Digital Lead Investing Strategies
We assume you would know most of these strategies if you’re not living under a rock. However, learning about them in detail won’t hurt.
These 5 Best Digital Lead Investing Strategies are designed to maximize your online presence and convert your audience into loyal customers. Here’s how they work:-
1) Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO is about helping websites get traffic by ranking their pages on Google. If you’re good at SEO, you can generate traffic from organic search results on Google, which can generate more leads for your business.
However, that being said, SEO isn’t a short-term strategy where you expect to see leads coming in for your business with just a couple of weeks of work. There are many moving parts to SEO, and the approach is gonna be different for each business, depending on their goals.
But you should know that the fundamentals of SEO will remain the same. If you have a website and are looking to leverage SEO in your digital lead investing strategy, then you need to focus on these things:-
1. Find Keywords:- Keywords are the searches your customer types on Google. As a business, you need to understand what your potential customers type in the search engine, you can take the help of tools like Ahrefs to develop keyword ideas for your content to rank on Google.
2. Content:- Once you have the keywords and topics to write. Writing and publishing articles on your blog is necessary to get your pages to rank for those particular search terms and reach your audience.
3. Building Backlinks:- Whenever a website links back to your website or an article, consider it has a backlink. These backlinks can be earned through email outreach (or) organically. As you publish more content, you need to invest more efforts into building backlinks, because backlinks can send a signal to search engines that others vouch for your content.
2) Sending Cold Email To Your Prospects
Sending cold emails for your business is a more in-organic approach and falls under an outbound marketing strategy.
There’s a good chance that when you send cold emails to your audience, they might have not heard about you or your business. Hence, that’s the reason why we refer to it as ‘Cold Emails’
The major challenge for businesses with cold emails is convincing people (or) other businesses to buy their products.
Unlike SEO, cold emails can help you calculate it’s ROI within weeks of launching the campaigns. Hence, it’s a short-term strategy to book calls with leads and convert them into clients.
How to run cold email campaigns for your business:-
Figure your ICP first:- The ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is a persona that businesses use to describe a set of target audiences who are more likely to be your clients
Gather emails:- Scrape email data from relevant sources. Use some paid tools to gather email addresses of your prospects
Write cold emails and launch campaigns:- Once you have your target emails, input those emails into a cold email sender tool, then write a well-crafted personalized message to your potential leads
Monitor your inbox and book calls:- Once you send a personalized message with a compelling offer related to your products, you will receive positive replies, and its you’re job to book them into calls and close the deals.
Using cold emails is probably the best channel for B2B or software businesses looking to land high-ticket clients (or) recurring clients for their business. If your business isn’t a B2B service, then prefer other strategies from this blog post
3) Content Marketing
Creating valuable content to attract and engage with your audience through digital channels is a widely used digital lead-generating strategy. The content can include blog posts, videos, infographics, and more. The goal is to establish authority and trust through content, which can lead to increased brand loyalty and customer conversions.
There are numerous ways where you can leverage content marketing for business. Here are some of those:-
Collaborating with YouTube influencers for videos
Appearing as a guest on someone else podcast
Co-hosting a webinar related to your business and products
Writing and publishing blogs on authoritative websites
Using social media influencers for your giveaways
Almost everything you do online with content intended to grow your audience and build more trust for your business can be considered as content marketing. Hence, this is one such strategy you can’t avoid when generating leads for your business.
4) Social Media Marketing
Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter are a digital home to billions of individuals online. Not leveraging social media is definitely a missed opportunity if you’re in 2024.
When it comes to social media marketing, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach. You must select your platforms accordingly to your business type and understand where your customers hang out.
For example, if you’re an eCommerce store who sells premium sneakers online. Then, we don’t think that being on LinkedIn and posting content on LinkedIn can generate more digital leads when compared to being on other platforms like Instagram and Facebook.
1) Organic: Publishing content to attract leads on the platform and engaging with your followers to build your brand
2) In-organic:- Running social media ads on Meta, where your ads are tailored to capture the attention of potential leads and drive them to take action, such as following your profile or making a purchase
As of today, there are multiple social media platforms available for businesses to take advantage of, it would surely be a missed opportunity if your business isn’t doing social media marketing for digital lead generation.
4) PPC ads (Pay Per Click)
Ads you see on your search results on Google are referred as PPC (pay-per-click) ads. These ads can be highly targeted to your ideal customers as they appear when people are searching for something very relevant to a product or business on Google.
Hence, compared to ads on Facebook and Instagram, PPC campaigns tend to cost more money for leads and purchases.
To start leveraging PPC ads as your digital lead investing strategy. You can follow these steps:-
Build a website and design a well-designed landing page
Optimize the landing page with good offers, good copy, and proper CTA (Call To Action) buttons
Create an ad account on Google Ads
Choose your keywords to target and set your budget
Design your Ad creatives (Images and Videos)
Write a compelling ad copy
Run those ads and test your campaigns
PPC (pay-per-click) ads are a great lead generation tool for businesses. This is best for those can’t wait for organic strategies to chip in and are more interested in tracking their ROI.
Digital Lead Investing: The Myths vs Reality
Digital Lead Investing The Myths vs Reality
Till now, we feel you have understood a lot of things about digital lead investing through and through. However, we think there are still some questions in your mind that might be unanswered.
Hence, this is the section where we try to bust down some myths related to digital lead investing and share which one is a myth and which one is a reality
Considering the various aspects of digital lead investing, here’s a breakdown of the reality versus myths:-
Digital leads can be cheaper: Reality
Digital leads can indeed be more cost-effective compared to traditional methods. When compared to traditional marketing and advertising methods like billboard ads, print ads, and TV ads. The cost to invest in those channels might eat up a good chunk of the budget for a small business.
Through digital channels, you can capture leads for pennies (depending on the industry), potentially leading to lower costs per acquisition
Omnichannel presence: Reality
Even though in this article, we emphasized focusing on only a few channels for growth but once you build an audience on a couple of platforms. It is recommended to share your content across multiple platforms consistently.
An omnichannel presence across multiple digital channels is beneficial and often necessary for a robust digital lead strategy. It allows you to reach more potential customers wherever they may be online.
Targeting Control: Reality
Digital platforms offer specific and narrow targeting options that allow you to reach specific audiences based on demographics, interests, behaviors, and more, giving you control over who sees your ads.
Compared to print media and TV ads, where targeting is not in your control. However your business is reaching a broader audience rather than those specific set of audiences.
Automation with AI: Reality
Many aspects of digital lead generation can be automated with AI and machine learning, from bidding on ads to personalizing content for social media and responding to customer queries on emails.
From planning to executing, everything can be automated, and with the help of AI tools in the market, businesses can save dozens of hours of work. Which means they can work more efficiently in less time.
Immediate ROI: Myth
While digital lead investing can be efficient, expecting immediate ROI is unrealistic.
If you can wait for a couple of weeks to see results, then ads and cold emails are great. But other marketing channels like SEO, Content Marketing, and Social Media take time.
Like any investment, it takes time to see significant returns as marketing strategies will be tested, optimized, and scaled consistently.
Tracking your campaigns: Reality
As there are tools to automate the processes, there are tools to analyze those processes as well.
Digital marketing realm offers unparalleled tracking capabilities, allowing you to measure everything from lead generation to real-time conversion rates. Hence, you can make quick changes in your campaigns and strategies to maximize your business gains.
Need More Traffic: Myth and Reality
More traffic can be beneficial, but it’s about the quality of traffic rather than quantity. Targeted traffic that is more likely to convert is far more valuable than large number of unqualified traffic.
However, more traffic is the answer if your goal is to build brand awareness and later generate leads. If not, then less targeted traffic is excellent for generating digital leads. Also sometimes, the problem with targeted traffic is that you can’t scale it big.
Wrap Up
In conclusion, digital lead investing represents a modern approach to marketing, one that harnesses the power of digital channels to attract, engage, and convert leads. It offers many advantages over traditional marketing channels.
Generating leads is just one step of the process to grow your business. Qualifying those leads is another step in that process, and if you’re running marketing campaigns without qualifying your leads, you might be throwing money in the water.
This is where tools like LeadBoxer can help you identify your leads by tracking their behaviour with your content and their engagement with your marketing campaigns. Thus assisting businesses to understand which leads to nurture and which leads to not nurture.
Nurturing the right leads means more sales opportunities and more customer purchases.
The secret to jet-powered business growth is account expansion. By retaining existing customers and increasing the revenue growth they provide, companies can boost their profits for less cost and effort than finding new customers.
This guide explains exactly what account expansion is and why it’s vital for your business. It also digs into the best practices and exact strategies for making it happen. By the end, you’ll have a time-tested process for helping your customers succeed and achieve their next goal with additional products or services. Hence increasing your customer lifetime value.
Account expansion refers to growing the revenue generated by existing accounts. Account managers do this by upselling or cross-selling additional products to a current customer. This allows the company to increase its earnings without necessarily needing to acquire new business.
Time and time again, research proves retaining and selling to current accounts provides a higher return on investment (ROI) than acquiring new customers. According to ProfitWell, customer acquisition costs (CAC) have increased by 50% over the past five years. Therefore, it’s essential that account managers work to provide excellent customer satisfaction and ensure customer needs are met to avoid churn or the loss of customers over time.
Then there’s the fact that the probability of selling to a current customer is 60% to 70%, while the likelihood of selling to a new prospect is only 5% to 20%. Not only does it cost less to retain existing accounts, but current clients also generate more revenue. In fact, research from Bain & Company indicates that increasing customer retention rates by 5% can grow earnings by 25% to 95%.
Account Expansion Best Practices
Selling to current customers offers massive ROI and business growth potential, but expansion probably isn’t the right fit for every client. You better need to understand customer before you invest into your account expansion efforts. However to increase your account expansion opportunities, include these three best practices:
Find the Right Clients
Not every new customer is a win especially for the SaaS companies. If your sales team is hustling to get anybody and everybody to sign up for your SaaS, chances are they’re signing new clients who are destined to churn. This is an expensive mistake.
The reality is your solution isn’t right for everyone. A discerning sales strategy recognizes this and prioritizes prospects who are a proven fit. This ensures you’re spending money acquiring customers with great lifetime value (LTV).
Prioritize Client Success
Client success, also known as customer success, is when an account achieves the desired outcome by using your product or service. For them, this is the most important result of your partnership. It also guarantees a healthy customer retention rate, thus increasing your revenue.
Customer loyalty is closely tied to business growth. According to a survey of 752 companies by HubSpot, businesses experiencing revenue increases are 21% percent more likely than their stagnant counterparts to view client success as “very important.”
This might be because successful customers not only stick with the company but are more likely to make additional, recurring purchases, and also are open to refer your business to other customers as well. Hence power of customer engagement is undeniable and you could only expect that if you prioritize your customers success as yours.
Have a Team Dedicated to Customer Success
Resist the temptation to have salespeople offer upsells and cross-sells to your existing customers. They often don’t have the full picture of how these clients are engaging with the company or understand what will best contribute to their success.
Instead, create a team of customer success managers (CSMs) who are responsible for helping clients get to their next benchmark. Unlike customer support reps—people who respond to roadblocks or challenges the client is facing with your product—CSMs anticipate problems using customer data and offer solutions that can help the customer wins.
Customer Success Teams pots you in a good position to manage account expansion by identifying problems in your existing customer base. However, forcing your Customer Success Teams to upsell or cross-sell to existing clients creates a conflict of interest. The pressure to fulfill a quota can lead Customer Success Managers to push customers into new products or services that don’t increase their success.
Only Sell if It’s Logical
While it’s tempting to think of fulfilling quotas as the ultimate goal, CSMs must remember the customer doesn’t care about a company’s revenue. Upselling or cross-selling for the sake of meeting a benchmark at the expense of the customer’s success will only harm the business in the long-term.
Clients who feel they’ve been sold something that doesn’t actually help them reach their next milestone will likely forgo a contract renewal. Therefore a dent in the account expansion rate. Thus, a CSMs should only offer an additional product or service if they genuinely believe it will help the client reach their goals.
On the upside, CSMs who are sure an expansion will increase a customer’s success will have an easier time making the sale. Their conviction that it’s the right move avoids the awkwardness they’d otherwise feel when pushing a poor solution for the purpose of hitting a quota.
Pay Commissions Based on Customer Success
Consider doing away with quotas for CSMs altogether. This way, they can prioritize customer success without feeling pressured by a competing influence. Thus, adding a commission structure for your CSMs can be one of the account expansion strategies.
Commissions based on customer success are a powerful alternative. CSMs who are rewarded for sales that lead to the client’s next milestone are more likely to invest time into carefully identifying the best upsell and cross-sell candidates. They also won’t waste any effort selling to customers who wouldn’t benefit from an additional product.
3 Steps for Account Expansion
1. Create a Post-onboarding Customer Journey
A client’s experience with your company doesn’t end when they make their first purchase. After they start using your product, they should hit multiple milestones that demonstrate the value of doing business with you, as described in this chart from Sixteen Ventures:
A CSM helps facilitate this journey. Here’s how the process might play out:
During the first quarterly business review (QBR), the CSM assesses whether the client hit their first post-onboarding milestone. Depending on the customer feedback, they may also work with the customer to set their next benchmark. This doubles as a good opportunity to ask for a review or referral.
At the second QBR, the CSM checks for the continued success of the client. They might provide support or advice about how to get more out of the customer’s current product. Another milestone is set for the future.
During the third QBR, the CSM assesses how satisfied the customer is and what ROI they get from using the product. If the CSM believes an additional product or service will help the client reach the next level of success, they can proceed with pitching an upsell or cross-sell.
In an ideal world, a QBR would be a high touch meeting with each account. However, finite time and resources likely make this impossible. Instead, consider sending each customer a survey, email, or making a phone call to review their milestone and make a plan for the next step. This not only takes less effort and resources for your company but it also helps you keep the customer relationship in check.
2. Review Milestones After Expansion
After a successful expansion, the client and CSM should assess whether or not the added product helped the customer reach their desired milestone. This process can happen during the QBR, following the new purchase.
Reviewing the effectiveness of expansion shows the client their happiness comes before your profit, which helps build trust and loyalty to the company. It also reduces the likelihood they’ll feel exploited, and as a result, choose not to renew their contract.
Finally, the review session dissuades CSMs from making a sale for the wrong reasons, since this step determines whether they receive their commission.
3. Optimize the Account Expansion Process
CSMs and their supervisors should constantly be looking for opportunities to improve the customer’s journey. With each QBR, search for trends and adjust the client’s success process as needed.
For example, analyze accounts that have already undergone expansion. What do they have in common? Are there any traits that might indicate a customer is a good candidate for upselling or cross-selling? Isolate these characteristics and train CSMs to notice and act on them.
Next, take a look at instances where accounts expanded, then retracted, or weren’t retained. Was a solution offered when it shouldn’t have been? How can CSMs recognize and avoid making similar mistakes in the future?
By reflecting on what’s working and what’s not, you can better ensure client success and increased revenue.
Final Takeaway: Great Customers Drive Account Expansion
Client success is a powerful factor in account expansion. When customers experience firsthand the value your solution provides, they’re more likely to invest in additional products that will help them reach the next milestone.
To do that, however, you need to find prospects who are likely to get great results from your product. Lead intelligence software makes your search for those ideal clients more effective and automated.
That’s where LeadBoxer comes in. LeadBoxer gathers data about prospects, even site visitors who would otherwise remain anonymous. It then assigns a lead score, or a number describing how likely they are to convert, based on the criteria you set.
All B2B businesses rely heavily on strong client management for success. In order to keep a steady flow of sales, your company must focus on key accounts and the management strategy that goes into providing quality customer service. While key accounts may vary based on your company’s size and the products offered, it is important to understand the basics before implementing these tactics. High-value clients are crucial to a business’s success. Your team needs to be ready for the commitment that comes along with key account management.
Identifying your key accounts is merely the first step in key account management strategies. Your sales department should be aware of these clients and have a plan to ensure lasting relationships. From there, multiple departments collaborate and implement strategic account management practices.
If you are looking for operations and workflow tools, please be aware that we offer key account management solutions. At LeadBoxer we know how important key accounts are. We’ll help you identify and keep your company’s most valuable clients. Click here to read about lead and key account management and for a visual overview of our solutions.
Keep reading, or use the links below to jump ahead in this guide:
Understanding how to plan management strategies for important accounts means you need to identify who these customers are. A key account is simply one of your company’s most valuable clients.
A few factors can help you determine which accounts should be considered your most valuable. To start, any client that generates a large percentage of your revenue will be a huge player in your business’s overall success. Key accounts are also those who continuously refer new prospects or help give credibility to your organization through strong reviews and feedback.
Start by analyzing a list of your current customers. Value is subjective to your organization, so make sure to tailor this to your company’s mission. Examining the number of recurring sales, lifetime value, level of influence, and shared goals can help differentiate between your key customers
Hence, key Account Management (KAM) is the process of creating long-lasting relationships with high-value clients. This means prioritizing the future rather than merely looking at short-term gains. Broader goals like collaboration and strong support efforts are required to successfully nurture these accounts.
To implement this management process, your key accounts managers, customer services, and current sales process needs to be evaluated. While long-term relationships with customers are the goal of most B2B companies, key account management in b2b is not always the best use of resources.
Your product needs to have the potential for upsells or bundling of services. Resources will need to be put toward these efforts, and your team will need to be able to take on these additional expenses.
If short transactional sales that involve little interaction between salespeople and prospects are common, then b2b key account management won’t make a difference for your team.
Formulating a Successful Key Account Management Strategy
Once you have determined that key account management is a good fit for your company, you will need a plan for implementation we can call it as ‘Account Plan’. Starting off, sales staff need to be aware of the different tactics they will use in a sales cycle. Instead of focusing on specific opportunities, like landing a one-time deal, employees will work to strengthen ties and align with the goals of long-term customers.
61% of companies believe “training in strategic account management” can enable them to enjoy greater revenue, profit, and customer satisfaction. By taking the time to understand and teach best practices for account management, your business will be able to enjoy the rewards of these strategies.
Make Personal Connections with High Value Clients
Strategic account management requires in-depth knowledge of your customers and their business operations. Familiarize yourself with their industry, business structure, and financial plans. These insights make it possible for your sales team to customize product pitches and add-ons, providing added value to your priority customers.
Becoming acquainted with each account performance will help your team stay proactive. Instead of waiting to hear from these clients, work hard to anticipate their needs. You will need to stay up-to-date on industry trends and changes within the customer’s company.
As your services and products evolve, make sure to relay this information to your clients. Chances are, your customers are not spending time doing research on your services once they have made a purchase. By announcing any changes that may benefit their business, you can boost trust in the relationship.
Within a few years of implementing a key account management strategy, customer satisfaction can increase by more than 20%, while simultaneously resulting in revenue generation and profit growth of more than 15%. Making personal connections as early as possible with these clients is the core job of strategic account managers which will help companies ensure a successful implementation for maximum return on investment (ROI).
Create Customer-Specific Product Plans and Benefits
Long-term clients want to feel like your services are actively making a difference within their organization and this should be clear in your account plan. Make sure your offers continue to encourage upsells or repeat sales based on the needs of each account. By tailoring your services to meet specific needs, the relationship can be elevated from buyer and seller to business partners.
Acknowledge the “whole” rather than parts of your customer’s vision. Key account team looks at the big picture to help support customers. Having a strong understanding of how your services can fit into the daily workflow of a client’s organization helps promote confidence in both parties business relationships.
Do not be afraid to collaborate directly with these accounts even though you’re dealing with the top management of an organization. You want to be seen as a valuable partner rather than a third-party vendor. Discuss specific actions with clients as you develop strategies for their account growth, and listen closely to any feedback that is offered.
Strengthen the Leadership Skills of Account Managers
Managing high-value accounts in the account management process requires time and resources, as well as strong leaders to drive the operation. Multiple departments will be involved in this process. Managers will need proper organization and communication skills for smooth account experience.
There are continuous moving parts during the implementation of key account management. Coordination and lots of planning will be necessary to execute long-term and short-term goals of your target account.
In addition, constant analysis of outcomes is important. The takeaways from each action in the relationship will help when developing future strategies. The ability to quickly analyze and present business cases will prove invaluable during conversations with key stakeholders of your account.
Developing clear action plans will help keep your team members on track. Take a step-by-step approach with any goals that are created to grow the account.
Follow through on anything offered to your key accounts. That may seem like a no-brainer, but trust is gained each time your organization delivers on a promise.
Not every customer is going to be a key account. Even when using strategic account management practices, there will still be one-off clients or relationships that never develop past a transactional stage.
Since key account management requires the allotment of additional resources to help b2b business grow. It is important to be mindful when assigning this label. Clients always have the potential to grow into a key account, but it is hard to demote an account once it has reached this level.
Make sure you don’t overwork your team by promoting key accounts for nonqualified customers. Practice restraint before assigning account managers to every business that has ever purchased your product.
Other than evaluating the list of current customers and their status, it is important to identify key business leads that may turn into high-value clients. Nurturing lasting relationships from the beginning stages can help gain customer trust and boost your reputation.
This means being able to understand the difference between singular transactions and potential partnerships
While identifying key accounts, revenue can be an important factor, and clients that generate significant sales numbers can easily be short-listed. However, there are other characteristics to take into consideration.
First, analyze the ratio of revenue to cost of each current customer.
Determine if there is any potential to expand.
Evaluate product fit within each existing relationship.
Recognize opportunities to upsell or create unique offers that can push clients toward high value status.
Properly identify which accounts will be able to act as strategic partners to your business. Your company is heavily investing in the relationship, so there needs to be more than just monetary gain at stake.
You will want to be aware of the connections and industry reputation of each key account. These should be clients who will refer you to their networks and offer positive reviews.
Since each account acts as a partnership, their reputation can affect yours. It is important to align with customers who share similar missions and goals in your account program.
Key Account Management and the Demand for Digital Analytics
Digital and artificial intelligence analytics have become a major game-changer within B2B account management practices. As technology continues to advance, businesses have become savvier in their decision-making processes. There is a waning desire for constant human outreach along with a shift toward more digital support.
By integrating your tech stack with these key accounts, your team should be able to provide the best experience to high-stakes accounts. Instead of having sales reps reach out for problem-solving, accounts want to see easy ways to access information through automated systems.
Develop account-based marketing plans and keep track of their implementation through automated software. Target your key account relationships through personalized messaging across social media, web pages, and email campaigns.
Since your team will be familiar with the personality and specific needs of each key account, targeted marketing is even easier to achieve. Using Leadboxer, your team can integrate email platforms for campaigns alongside web tracking and data analytics to successfully reach out to high-value clients.
Personalized emails have five to six times higher open rates. By combining account-based marketing with key account management, your company will start to see higher ROI on outreach.
Using technology to handle marketing outreach and data analysis allows your team to reallocate resources to other efforts within the account
Without having to dedicate manpower to these processes, managers are able to focus on the long-term plan by letting technology drive data collection efforts.
While digital analysis is crucial to successful key account management, your team needs to be trained to use it properly. Technology should be seen as a priority rather than an add-on to departments. If employees voice concerns about the implementation of this software, make sure to remind them of best practices and provide training as necessary.
Large customer accounts can be difficult to manage. There are often several decision-makers involved, with your services being used across multiple departments.
Digital analytics help your account managers uncover opportunities for growth within these large organizations. Up-to-date data sets help keep your teams informed on the latest changes with clients. This allows managers to explore up-selling and cross-selling options and encourages timely outreach.
Key Account Management Vs. Global Account Management
At some point, large clients with international ties surpass key account status and require additional resources to expand the relationship. Global account management is the next step for these customers. Evolving to this stage will involve the negotiation of prices at the country level, offering worldwide support, and understanding the global procurement strategy of these clients.
The duties of a global account manager include developing customer relationships with worldwide branches and tracking revenue potential. Successful implementation of global account management should strengthen the customer relationship and provide a significant competitive advantage to your business.
In contrast to standard key account management, global account management is layered over national sales efforts. This requires strong ties with global customers and their internal stakeholders to ensure quality service.
Global account management is a hefty investment and needs to make sense for your business before it is implemented. Accounts with global potential have a few key characteristics to meet before reaching this level.
Earnings potential is crucial. The cost of management needs to be worth the ROI for global customers. These clients should have high international activity, rather than those with only a few businesses outside of their base country.
There should be a strategic importance to take on this level of management. These should be significant revenue producing clients, and they should be able to create new connections for your business at the worldwide level.
An established close relationship is necessary to take on global account management. These clients should stem from key accounts who are ready for this amount of commitment.
Best Practices for Strategic Key Account Management
To ensure your strategic account management program is functioning at full capacity, there are certain best practices that should be implemented. Your company should be focusing on increasing customer loyalty, uncovering new growth opportunities, and driving innovation within your sales and marketing teams.
Assign Dedicated Managers to Key Accounts
For successful management, leaders need to be separate from the sales department. This individual will serve as the liaison between the client and the company. They will be the ones to delegate tasks among departments and handle all client interactions.
Managers should be well-versed in each key account’s company mission and able to communicate how your organization’s current services and products will directly assist in fulfilling the client’s needs.
The reason for separating account management and sales is to increase overall productivity and strengthen key relationships. Sales focus on short-term deals that push leads through the pipeline, as well as increase immediate revenue.
Your account manager takes on a broader role to ensure customer satisfaction. A dedicated leader will be analytical and personable with the ability to communicate with high-level stakeholders.
By allocating team leads to oversee these accounts, your company encourages lasting relationships to generate higher revenue across several years.
Encourage Smooth Transition Between Departments
Since building trust is the main component in key account management, hand-off from sales is crucial. There should be a formal process between your departments to keep directions clear. These accounts should be strategically organized within your system to avoid any slip-ups.
Transitioning from sales to a key account is a big deal. Clients should be excited about the opportunity, and your team should be ready to set aside extra resources to handle the switch. Your duties as a company will expand as customers are moved to this higher level, and it is crucial to stay on top of the process.
Communication of these contact changes is extremely important for your client. Update them throughout the process to make sure they have accurate information.
Set expectations and create touchpoints. This will help avoid any tension within the relationship as they undergo this transition with your team.
Create Customer Profiles and Conduct Needs Assessments
It is the duty of the account manager to become an expert on each of their clients. This requires an in-depth analysis of the customer’s goals and initiatives. Keep track of important stakeholders and get to know the decision-makers.
Understand industry trends and keep tabs on what is happening with your customers’ competition. As their needs change, your account manager should adjust and anticipate ways your company can help.
Within each customer’s profile, your account managers should conduct a needs assessment. Use date to discover any pain points. Find the areas where your goals align for simultaneous progress.
The ultimate focus should be on long-term goals for this client. As needs are assessed, managers should look toward a one to the three-year timeline for strategy development.
Draft Strategy Proposals
After building out your client profiles, a strategy should be developed for each account. This will act as a roadmap for the next few years, and the finalized version should be shared with the customer.
The proposal should include creative solutions to any problems your account currently faces, potential partnerships with other companies, and resource requirements. Long-term goals should be shown with specific short-term benchmarks to accurately track progress.
Not only does this proposal serve as a guideline for account management, but it demonstrates the team’s dedication to the key account. These relationships will continue to develop as your account managers share continued updates with the customer.
Set Communication Standards
Establishing a routine for regular communication will help keep the account fresh. Outlining a schedule encourages expectations for the customer and helps monitor how the account is progressing.
Plan touchpoints, send out recurring meeting invites, and consistently follow up. This provides ample opportunity for client feedback and helps address any necessary changes in a timely manner. Successful key account management happens when your company and the customer remain on the same page.
Staying on schedule will help keep your team up to date on each account’s needs. Clear communication allows customers to reach out with questions and mention any future needs as they arise.
Regularly Evaluate Performance
Setting key performance indicators (KPIs) will help measure progress on each account. Since there will be multiple departments working on these projects, including sales and marketing, KPIs establish benchmarks for success.
Monitoring performance keeps accounts on track. This also allows managers to evaluate how high-value clients are fulfilling any obligations to your company. Key account management provides mutual long-term benefits to the supplier and buyer.
It is important to evaluate these relationships on their internal and external initiatives. This will help your team act on any opportunities for growth as they arise while continually optimizing strategies for high ROI.
Don’t be afraid to reassess if current actions start to lose value for one side or the other. The goal should be to pivot as needed to keep the relationship beneficial for all involved.
Key Takeaways on Key Account Management
Starting key account management practices is a huge undertaking, but it comes with big rewards when handled correctly. Allocating resources, keeping departments informed on changes, and communicating clearly with these accounts is crucial to properly establish these accounts.
Customer satisfaction and improved services remain a top priority for your business. Key accounts require specialized products and collaboration to make sure the services offered provide the most benefits. As the needs of accounts change, your products should be adapted to best serve the client.
Utilizing automation and data analysis can help free up resources. Digital and artificial intelligence (AI) software is starting to play a huge role in the success of account management. Make sure your team is prepared with an up-to-date tech stack and the proper training for correct usage.
Use Leadboxer to start integrating your tech stack with key account management today, by clicking here for a free trial.
We know that you get a lot of emails every day. Some of them might be from email addresses you don’t recognize. When you see an unfamiliar email in your inbox, you naturally want to know who sent it.
Therefore, this is where you can use an email reverse lookup tool to find information about unknown senders.
What is Reverse Email Lookup?
Reverse Email Lookup is a process that lets individuals and businesses track the origins of an email address—information like location, phone number, company name, social media handles, and much more.
Much like the reverse phone lookup back in the day, where we used phone directories to get information about a random phone number.
Reverse email lookup tools do the same thing. Once you enter an email address, these tools will search online directories to find the information related to that email.
We’re sure, you might be wondering. In a world, where people are paying for email lookup tools. Why would someone use reverse email lookup tools?
The answer is simple, but the reasons are many:-
1) To verify the authenticity of an unknown email sender in the inbox and to avoid yourself from any online scams and phishing attacks.
2) To reconnect with an old friend whose only source of contact is the email ID that you have
3) Business inquiries (or) pitches that land in your inbox. Reverse email search helps to know about the details before you start doing business chat with a random email
4) To enrich the email of your customers who subscribed to your newsletter
5) Trying to find any criminal records and bankruptcy details of a person for background verification
And more
Hence, for all those exact reasons, there are plenty of reverse email lookup tools are available in the market.
9 (Free and Paid) Best Reverse Email Lookup Tools in 2024
You should know that reverse email search is not just a process, it’s a gateway to a more informed and secure online experience for email users.
Currently, several methods and tools exist to do a reverse email lookup. Some of them are free, and some of them are paid. With free tools, you can get limited information about your email entities, whereas with paid tools, you get access to additional information about an email address.
This section lists all the free and paid tools possible to do a reverse email lookup search.
1) BeenVerified (Paid Service)
BeenVerified Reverse Email Lookup Tool
BeenVerified is a comprehensive platform offering a range of search tools, including the “Reverse Email Lookup” feature.
The platform also offers Reverse Phone Lookup, Address Lookup, Vehicle Search, People Search, and more. Indeed, there’s no denying that this one tool stands at the top of our list of ‘Best Reverse Email Lookup Tools.’
However, that being said, you need to keep in mind laws such as Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) when it comes to how you can use the information you obtain from a reverse email lookup tool like BeenVerified.
For example, you cannot use it to check someone’s employment history, check educational qualifications, steal an Identity, do tenant screening, and check for any existing credit obligations.
Apart from that, if you want to use BeenVerified, here are the pros and cons:
Pros:-
1. Comprehensive Analysis: BeenVerified provides detailed information (reports) by sifting through vast public records. Usually, these reports will include data like property records, criminal records, vehicle records, and other personal details
2. Versatile Use: Useful for online dating, looking up your caller, reconnecting with old buddies, and understanding online sellers.
3. User-Friendly: Simple and intuitive platform design.
4. Broad Database: Access to extensive databases for high success rates.
5. Confidential Searches: Ensures the person being searched isn’t notified.
6. Positive Reviews: Many users have shared favourable feedback. Check their reviews here.
7. Customer Support: Provides live assistance for users.
Cons:-
1. Accuracy: Information might not always be up-to-date. However, it’s the best in the market compared to most tools on this list. Also, data is exclusive to the United States
2. Not free: BeenVerified doesn’t offer a free reverse email lookup. Also, it doesn’t offer a one-time payment option, you have to choose its monthly subscription.
3. Report Cap: Limited to 100 reports per month.
4. Not FCRA Compliant: Can’t be used for employment or tenant decisions.
2) Reverse Contact (Free & Paid)
Reverse Contact Reverse Email Lookup Tool
Reverse Contact is probably the most advanced tool on this list. What separates this tool from the rest is that it is specifically designed for businesses to enrich their data from emails, which is nothing but gathering information from email addresses.
But unlike the tools in this list where people manually use reverse email lookup to gather/check information of an email. Using Reverse Contact, you can perform multiple searches simultaneously, which is excellent for businesses who want to enrich their data in bulk.
Also, you can integrate it with your own CRM tool to perform a seamless data enrichment process of 10,000+ email IDs. This results in in-depth customer profiles, leading to a tidier pipeline and a significant boost in your marketing campaigns.
Masteos, a rental investment agency shared in their case study how Reverse Contact helped them enrich their 74k+ Contacts. This enabled them to elevate their profiling process, advertise more precisely, and save significant time for the business.
However, if you’re not a business and want to do reverse email lookup manually, you can use their free 20 credits to find the information you need for your anonymous emails.
Reverse Contact
Note:- Similar to data enrichment if you’re looking to enrich your leads for your business and want to qualify your leads based on your customer personas. Then using LeadBoxer, can help your business sort out those leads who have interests to buy from you and it can integrate with your CRM too. Check our case studies here.
Pros:-
1. Comprehensive data enrichment: Reverse Contact provides the same information, such as phone numbers, social media profiles, and possibly physical addresses too. You can leverage this data in your marketing and sales campaigns.
2. Versatility: The primary use case of this tool is for businesses. Businesses of any size and sector can use this tool.
3. High Enrichment Rate:Forest Admin one of their users, got access to 72% enriched emails within their database as they used Reverser Contact. Which meant a ton of opportunity for them.
4. CRM Integration: It seamlessly integrates with CRM systems like Hubspot, Pipedrive, Salesforce, and others, helps in streamlining the workflow for sales and marketing teams.
5. Customer Profiling: Companies can build detailed customer profiles by enriching the data from the set of emails, which is crucial for personalized marketing and customer service.
Cons:-
1. Potential Privacy Concerns: There might be privacy concerns when dealing with personal information, which businesses need to handle responsibly.
2. Learning Curve: Initially, businesses may face a learning curve in understanding how to best utilize this tool for their needs. Hence the ‘learning curve’.
3. High Subscription Cost: Their monthly subscription starts at $99. For $99, you get 2000 credits per month.
4. Limitations in Data: If the email addresses are not linked to public profiles or if the users have a limited digital footprint, you won’t be able to get their information from an email address.
3) Google (Free)
Google
Definitely not a tool, but ‘Google’ is the best way to find information with reverse email lookup. You can simply paste the email address on Google Search bar to know the person’s details.
If email ID isn’t good enough to give you some search results, you play around with search operators like Firstname last name” + “@gmail.com, Firstname + @gmail.com.
However, the problem with using Google as one of the free reverse email lookup services compared to others is that search engines can only generate results on public platforms like online directories and social media platforms. Not private databases unlike some of the paid tools in this list.
Also, one problem with using Google, which other paid tools take care of, is that the person behind the email might have ways to know if their email is being searched for, especially if they have set up alerts.
In other paid tools on this list, the search is confidential, and you should know that they skim through a load of online and offline directories to give you all the details behind a random email.
Just like Google, you can use social media sites like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram to do a reverse email lookup and find the social media handles of your email sender.
4) Spokeo (Paid)
Spokeo
Spokeo, as a tool, answers 500k searches per day. With over 12 billion records, Spokeo can provide you with phone numbers, location history, photos, social media accounts, family members, court records, work information, and much more.
Apart from the reverse email lookup search, Spokeo offers name search, phone search, and address search. You can use these tools on your desktop and even via an IOS app.
Spokeo’s commitment to transparency and trust is reflected in its community efforts, including supporting individual volunteers, nonprofit organizations, and education through scholarships and technology donations.
Pros:–
Easy to Use: Spokeo is user-friendly; all you need to do is paste your email address in the search bar
Comprehensive Search Data: It scans over 120 social sites for real-time user data, which includes dating sites, blog posts, and product reviews, amassing over 12 billion records to cross-reference.
Manual Lookups: The service is geared towards manual lookups, which can be beneficial for detailed fraud investigations and background check-ups.
Cons:-
No Automation: Spokeo does not provide automation, which means each search has to be done manually. Hence, you won’t be able to do reverse email lookups in bulk unlike in Reverse Contact.
Tiered Pricing (not free): Spokeo offers three-tiered Pricing with custom plans, starting at $19.95 for 100 monthly searches.
Limited Searches Per Month: Depending on the plan, there is a cap on how many searches can be performed each month, which could be restrictive for some users.
Spokeo is a simple tool that prioritizes the depth and comprehensiveness of data over automation and high-volume search capabilities.
No need to mention that it’s best suited for people who require detailed background checks of their email and are not annoyed by the manual nature of the search process.
5) People Looker
People Looker
People Looker is another promising email reverse lookup tool where you can simply enter a name, address, or phone number to get the desired details.
Assume you’re in an email chain where your old friends have gathered to discuss someone’s bachelorette or a possible reunion. In case you cannot recognize your old buddies from their emails. Then, you can identify them all by a reverse email search on People Looker.
Just like Better Verified, the information provided by this tool is not to be used for legal purposes such as tenant screening, employment, or credit checks.
Pros:-
People Looker allows its users to search not just by email but also by name, phone number, and address, increasing the chances of finding the required information.
They offer a data removal service for you to have your information taken down from the site.
They offer a $1 trial for seven days for your email lookups. Hence, it is best for someone who needs to check a few emails
Cons:-
1) No automation like Reverse Contact
2) Their subscription starts at $23.99 per month, a little higher than the rest of the tools
3) This tool is not as powerful and fast as the rest of the paid tools on this list
6) Truth Finder (Paid)
TruthFinder
TruthFinder helps users uncover a wealth of information about an email’s owner, including their name, address, phone number, and potentially even social media profiles.
As the name suggests, the tool helps you find the truth behind those unknown emails you received, uncover the real person you connected with on a dating site, or research your business contacts with depth and detail.
TruthFinder offers a Dark Web Monitoring service designed to help individuals protect their personal information from being exploited on the Dark Web. This service actively monitors your data, such as Social Security numbers, email addresses, medical IDs, and bank accounts.
Also, TruthFinder alerts you if it finds your sensitive information on the Dark Web.
Regarding the pricing information, TruthFinder offers a range of membership options to suit different needs, ranging from $4.99 to $29.73 per month. Their reverse email lookup tool starts at $29.73, which includes unlimited reports.
Pros:-
TruthFinder has access to over 150 million records, thus enhancing the likelihood of accurate and comprehensive results.
Apart from the reverse email lookup, Truth Finders can help you with reverse phone lookup, people search, and Dark Web monitoring.
Cons:-
A full monthly subscription of $29.73 is required to access all features. This means there is no standalone plan to use their reverse email lookup
7) Social Catfish (Paid)
Social Catfish
Do you know, you save yourself from catfishing, if you use a reverse email address lookup option from Social catfish.
As you can guess by the name, Social Catfish is a platform people use to make themselves aware of any possible catfish connections online.
This tool offers multiple lookup options like:-
Name Lookup
Phone Lookup
Reverse Image Lookup
Address Lookup
Email Lookup
Username Lookup
Reverse Email Lookup
Most of its users look for dating profiles, social media accounts, criminal records, and other public data linked to an email address.
The platform is known for its image reverse search capability, allowing users to find profiles using photos.
Apart from helping people avoid romance scams, Social Catfish positions itself as a reliable tool for reconnecting with lost contacts and verifying the authenticity of online acquaintances.
Pros:-
It is an excellent tool for people who want to verify the identities of online dating profiles along with some ip address
Offers a wide range of lookups apart from reverse email lookups. Thus ensuring users to gather information is in multiple different ways.
Cons:–
The Pricing starts at $27.48 / month, but for $ 5.73 you can use these tools for 3 days.
Their service primarily focuses on romance scam prevention, which may not suit for business-related lookups.
8) CocoFinder
CocoFinder
CocoFinder is another platform in this list that offers multiple lookups. Here the information is gathered from various places, including government records, data brokers, phone operators, and many offline sources that aren’t available to the public.
Apart from the reverse email lookup, other search tools include:-
People Search
Reverse Phone Lookup
White Pages
Reverse Address Lookup
Who Called Me
Inmate Search
Mugshots Search
Public Records
Criminal Records
Divorce Records
Court Records
Background Check
Obituaries Search
Unlike the Social catfish, CocoFinder is a tool suits for business entities use for business purposes. Social catfish was primarily designed for individuals to gather information about their love interests.
Whereas CocoFinder tools are more dedicated to giving out valuable information for some severe checks and business identifications.
Pros:-
CocoFinder offers a variety of lookup options
It is better for businesses that are looking for serious and detailed checks
Cons:-
No clear pricing structure
Their reverse email lookup uses information from other tools like BeenVerified, Sopkeo, and People Looker
9) RecordsFinder
RecordsFinder
RecordsFinder is an online tool designed to simplify the process of accessing public records, and their reverse email lookup service gathers information for your given email address by accessing the records available in their database.
If you check the list of records they own in their database should give you an idea that this tool is best for people trying to validate (or) verify someone’s existing criminal and legal records.
This tool indexes billions of records from over 3,000 public and private sources and brings you one comprehensive report on any individual in the United States
You can run some free reverse email lookups. But for extensive reports, you can use their trial plan for $2.95 for 7 days.
Pros:-
The best option to access any email for criminal records
They offer a paid trial plan
Cons:-
It is not best for reverse email lookups where you’re trying to gather old friend’s information, business-related queries, and along those lines
Reverse and email lookup tools are often used interchangeably but serve different purposes. Email lookups are used to find someone’s email address using details like name, company name, domain URL, etc. Email lookup tools are used to create a list for email marketing.
On the other hand, reverse email lookup tools are used to find information about the person on the basis of the email address you already have. Hence, reverse lookup tools are used for verifications and cleaning lists.
2) How does reverse email lookup work?
Reverse email lookup works by taking an email address and searching through various databases and online sources to find associated information. This includes public records, social media profiles, digital footprints, and offline records. The tool cross-references the email address with billions of data points available in its database to provide you with information like owner’s name, sender’s ip address, phone number, and location in some searches.
3) Does reverse email lookup work?
Yes, reverse email lookup works. But it’s just that sometimes the databases might not be up-to-date with it’s data points. Therefore, you won’t need to worry if you’re using a reliable tool.
But anyhow, if you want to cross-check the information provided by an reverse email lookup tool, you’re free to do it manually by visiting their socials or maybe calling them on their phone (which is not recommended)
4) How to reverse lookup an email address?
You enter the email address into the search field, and the tool will scan its databases and the internet to find any related information that is publicly available. It depends upon tools on what information they provide, such as location, criminal records, employment details, photos, social media profiles, and more.
5) How do I find out who owns an email address?
The tools listed in this article will provide you with information publicly associated with the email address. This could include the person’s name, phone number, address, social media profiles, and more, depending on what the person has made publicly available.
6) Are Paid Reverse Email Lookup tools worthy enough to buy?
Whether paid reverse email lookup tools are worth the investment depends on your specific needs and the quality of the tool. If you require detailed information, the tool has a comprehensive database that can provide accurate and up-to-date information. Such tools can aid in lead generation, fraud prevention, and customer verification processes for businesses.
7) How can reverse email lookups help in my business?
Reverse email lookups can be a significant asset for various business operations. They can help your business with enhanced lead generation by analyzing the right kind of emails, improving precise customer targeting by validating the emails, preventing fraud by detecting flags, and helping you clean lists by identifying inactive emails.
Wrap Up
Often, when people search for the ‘Best Reverse Email Lookup Tool’ in 2024, they expect to land on a blog post that gives them one solution to their needs.
As we wrote this article, we sensed there might be two types of people who like to use such tools. One are individuals who are using it for personal and professional reasons. The other ones are businesses that are looking to incorporate such tools into their business.
For individuals who like to do manual checks, go with BetterVerified
For businesses who like to enrich their data in bulk, go with Reverse Contact
Those are our best suggestions, you’re free to play around with the others listed in our article
If you have a physical store or run a software business and want to reach customers in specific areas, local lead generation can help you grow.
Local lead generation involves connecting with people near your business and targeting them to become potential buyers, also known as leads.
In this blog post, we will talk about how you can use local lead generation strategies to generate leads for your business and the best channels to use.
What is Local Lead Generation?
Local lead generation is when a local business tries to get the attention of potential nearby customers. Now, this attention can be done through offline and even online marketing channels.
Most businesses in 2024, whether physical or online, can use any marketing channel.
For example, A brick motor is not stuck with flyers and posters anymore, they can run Google ads and work on Local SEO for leads.
Similarly, a software company can sponsor relevant local events if the audience fits their ideal customer profile (ICP). Thus helping business owners with wide range of options for local lead generation.
Before we dive more into local lead generation, let’s talk about the benefits of doing local lead generation for your business:-
Community Engagement:- Because you want to reach people in a specific area, it’s likely they already know each other. Hence, the engagements and interactions in your community will be more.
Improved Conversion Rates:- When businesses focus on local customers, it helps build trust and relevance. Meeting face-to-face and having convenient access to products and services boosts customer trust. Thus, you can see improved conversion rates with local leads for all those reasons.
Lesser Competition:- When a business competes globally, sometimes you can’t keep track of its competitors, but when you’re local. You have less competition to beat.
Worth of Mouth:- As potential customers share the same locality with your existing customers, there is a possibility that word-of-mouth promotion that can increase your leads and sales directly.
9 Best Channels To Start Local Lead Generation
Best Channels To Start Local Lead Generation
Local lead generation is all about connecting with customers in their own your backyard.
Here are the best channels to kickstart your local campaigns:-
1. Local SEO
This is your bread and butter for getting noticed in local searches. Whenever someone types ‘Best cafe near me’ or ‘Best auto repair shop near me’, you want to show up in the search results if it’s relevant to your business. Since local SEO is cost-effective and works in specific areas, Local SEO should be at the top of your list when choosing a channel for local lead generation.
To start, you need a Google My Business listing with your business details, photos, and reviews from your existing customers.
You can hone in on this channel by optimizing your lead gen website with local search keywords, ensuring your Google My Business listing is up to date, and getting listed in local directories. It’s all about ensuring that when someone searches for your type of business in your area, you’re on the top, if not top 3.
2. PPC Ads
Pay-per-click ads, aka Google ads, can be a game-changer. You can target specific locations, ensuring your ads are seen by people in your specific location.
If people are searching on search engines for something about a product (or) service, it is more likely that they are looking to purchase. Hence, Google ads are a great way to get in front of potential customers who are actively searching for what you offer. Also it helps you by-pass the organic search results.
Unlike Local SEO, Google Ads can help you generate leads faster. If you’re starting new and want to compete with other businesses with strong local SEO. Then start paying for ads is great channel for lead generation. Hence, if you have the budget, investing in Google ads is worth a try for your business.
3. Meta Ads
Just like Google ads, Facebook and Instagram paid ads allow you to target specific demographics within your local area. The only thing here is that, unlike Google, people don’t search for your product (or) there to buy anything on social media.
Hence, it would help to tailor your ads based on interests, behaviors, age, and more, ensuring your message reaches the right local audience.
However using paid channels like ads, you get to focus on ROI and keep track of your new customers through this channel. It only makes sense if you have positive ROI for your ads as a local business owners.
4. Cold Emails
This might seem a bit old school, but targeted cold emails can be effective. The key is personalization and relevance. Make sure you’re reaching out to people who are likely to be interested in what you offer and provide them with real value in your message.
5. Direct Mailing
In the digital age, a well-crafted direct mail piece can still have a big impact. It’s tangible and can stand out in a pile of bills and junk mail. Tailor your message to the local community and offer something that grabs attention.
6. SMS Marketing
Text messages have a high open rate. Use SMS marketing to send out special offers, updates, or reminders to a local audience. It’s direct, personal, and can drive quick responses.
Tip:-Cold calling your SMS prospects as a follow-up to your text messages generates better responses for your campaigns.
7. Social Media Outreach
Engage with your local community on social media platforms. Share local news, participate in community discussions, and know local trends. It’s about building relationships and staying top of mind.
Know where your audience is on social media. Is it Facebook? Is it Instagram? Is it LinkedIn?
Go to those specific platforms, create content, build an audience, and pitch your products and services via outreach.
8. Use Local Forums
Platforms like Nextdoor or local Facebook groups can be goldmines for connecting with your community.
Participate in discussions, offer advice, and gently promote your business when appropriate.
9. Local Events
Participating in or sponsoring local events can put your business in front of a potential local audience. Use your banners and flyers to spread the word about your business by being face-to-face with your community
It’s a great way to build brand awareness and connect with potential customers.
In this local event, offer them free samples of your products (or) offer a free consultation of your service for interested leads.
Each channel has its strengths and can be effective in different ways. The key is understanding your local market and effectively tailoring your approach to connect with your community.
By diversifying your local lead generation efforts across these channels, you can build a robust strategy that captures the attention of your local audience and turns them into loyal customers.
How To Start Local Lead Generation For Your Business?
How To Start Local Lead Generation For Your Business
To start a lead generation campaign for your local business there are a lot of things that you need to factor like how to do the ground work to reach customers, and what channels you’re leveraging to generate leads for your business.
However, that being said, it only seems a viable option to generate leads locally if the business is operating offline (or) if your an online business running location-specific marketing campaigns.
Whichever the case may be, these are the steps that we think would help you get a head start while doing local lead generation:-
1) Laws to consider while doing lead generation
It’s imperative to be aware of laws like the CCPA, CAN-SPAM Act, CASL, and GDPR to ensure compliance and avoid legal issues.
Although some of the laws might not apply while you’re leveraging lead generation business model for some location, however it’s best to ensure you’re not violating any.
Some of the underlying laws and regulations you need to keep in mind:-
1. California’s Privacy Law (CCPA):- Have a customer base in California? If you’re using customer data in your marketing campaigns, you need to be straight about their info. In the case of email outreach, you need to provide clear opt-out options.
2. The CAN-SPAM Act:- All over the U.S., if you’re sending out promotional emails and SMS, you’ve got to be honest about who you are. No sneaky stuff with fake email addresses or misleading subject lines.
3. Canada’s Anti-Spam Law (CASL):- In Canada, you must get a clear yes from people before you send them your outreach messages. In these messages, let them know who you are and make it easy for them to opt-out.
4. Europe’s Data Protection Law (GDPR):- There’s a whole set of rules about protecting personal data in Europe. In recent years, companies like Facebook and Google had to bend their rules for privacy. Make sure you got the individual’s permission to use their data, you’ve got to keep it safe, and you should be ready to delete it if they ask.
5. Singapore’s Personal Data Protection Act (PDPA):- Over in Singapore, they have rules to ensure businesses handle personal data like precious cargo. People should know what you’re doing with their information, you can’t use it without their permission. If someone wants their details to be taken off, you’ve got to have the eraser ready.
Whichever your lead generation strategy maybe, if you’re showing your customers who you are and not manipulating anything with your messages and making it easy for them to opt out of your messages, then you’re good to go. Each region has specific privacy rules, before doing local lead generation, ensure your processes and strategies doesn’t interfere with any of these rules and regulations.
2) Know your Audience
For a small business, even though you might feel targeting the overall population in your location you should know that marketing to everyone is marketing to no one, even if it’s done for a specific region.
Within the region where you operate, you need to know your specific set of audiences, who are your potential buyers, and who will keep coming back to buy products and services from you.
Here are the three steps that you can follow to know your audience:-
Research your business and competitors:- Understand the challenges of selling your products and services in a specific locations. Know what the people in that location are already buying. Know your competitors and reverse engineer to look into their lead generation traffic sources to understand how you can do the same in a better way.
Sort out a target audience base specifically and locally:- Use demographic attributes such as age, gender, location, and occupation to sort out your specific audience sets. Also, using firmographic attributes such as company size, industry, revenue, and job titles of decision-makers within the organization helps.
Build Ideal Customer Profile (ICP):- Now, create profiles based on your specific set of audiences, and each ideal customer profile will be marketed differently to convert more qualified leads into potential buyers for your business.
3) Select a target offer and a lead magnet
Selecting your target offer and lead magnet is like setting the perfect trap for your ideal customer – but in the nicest way possible.
However, it’s not about enticing people with offers that you cannot deliver because when it comes to local buyers, once you lose the trust of two or three buyers, the word spreads around soon, and you will be short of business.
Thus, to reach your audience in the right way and entice them into buying from you is an art, where you craft suitable target offers along with lead magnets:-
Lead Magnets:- For online businesses, generally, lead magnets are nothing but giving away e-books, offering free consultation, and something of that sort. For an offline small business, a lead magnet should be something like giving free samples of your products, giving away gift cards for your store (or) free consultation before buying your service. It’s important that these lead gen lead magnets should scream “local” and “beneficial
Target Offer:- Crafting an offer for your product and having competitive pricing depends on the research you did to know your audience. Your target offers should aim to get as many people as possible to visit your store (or) check out your products.
Selecting your target offer and having a lead magnet is all about understanding and providing value to your local community, If you’re good at both of these, you’ll build a community of loyal customers who feel seen, heard, and valued.
3) Choose your platforms to start
Weather you’re an offline business (or) an online business, for each business, choosing the right platforms to do lead gen will be different.
I guess with the plethora of options that we have today when it comes to selecting platforms for local lead gen makes us dizzy in a sense.
To keep it simple:-
If you’re an online business:- Leverage channels like Local SEO, PPC Ads, Meta Ads, Cold Outreach
If you’re an offline business:- Leverage the above channels that an online business does along with that go for trade shows, local events, and other community gatherings
4) Choose your tools to start
Now, selecting the tools for your lead gen depends on the platforms and the methods you’re trying to generate leads. Hence, for each strategy, there are different tools in the mix.
Anyhow, here’s a list of essential online tools that can significantly enhance your local lead generation efforts:-
1. Google My Business:- This free tool is vital for managing your online presence on Google, including Search engine and Maps. It helps you control how your business appears and performs in when a potential customer searches.
2. SEO Tools (e.g., Moz Local, SEMrush, Ahrefs):- If you want to leverage your website and generate traffic through search engine optimization. SEO tools can help in keyword research, tracking search rankings, analyzing backlinks, and identifying SEO opportunities specific to your local area.
3. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software (e.g., HubSpot, Salesforce):- CRM systems help manage interactions with potential and current customers, track leads, and streamline sales.
4. Social Media Management Tools (e.g., Hootsuite, Buffer):- These tools are excellent for managing and scheduling posts across multiple social media platforms, engaging with your audience, and analyzing social media performance.
5. Email Marketing Software (e.g., Mailchimp, Constant Contact):- Email marketing tools helps businesses with creating, sending, and tracking email campaigns, which is an essential part of nurturing leads.
6. Online Reputation Management Tools (e.g., Reputation. com, Podium):- These tools help monitor and manage what’s being said about your business online (including Google reviews), allowing you to respond appropriately and maintain a positive reputation.
7. Local Listing Management Tools (e.g., BrightLocal, Yext):- These services ensure your business information is consistent and accurate across various online directories and listing sites.
8. Google Analytics:- Essential for tracking website traffic, user behavior, and conversion metrics, helping you understand how visitors interact with your website.
9. Lead Capture Tools (e.g., OptinMonster, Unbounce):- These tools help you create effective landing pages and opt-in forms to capture leads.
10. Lead Management tools (e.g:- LeadBoxer, and GoHighLevel):- When you’re doing cold outreach for your local business, may it be through cold email (or) SMS marketing, having tools to assess and manage those leads is essential. Most importantly, these tools can sync with your existing CRM or be the one for your business.
10. Paid Advertising Tools (e.g., Google Ads, Facebook Ads Manager):- These platforms are indispensable for running targeted local ads. They allow you to reach a specific audience based on location, interests, and more.
11. Chatbots and Live Chat Software (e.g., Intercom, Drift):- These tools can enhance customer engagement on your website, providing instant assistance and capturing lead information.
12. Call Tracking Software (e.g., CallRail, DialogTech):- If phone calls and cold calling are a significant part of your business, these tools can track the source of calls and measure the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.
Each of these tools plays a specific role in the local lead generation process, and when used effectively, they can significantly boost your ability to attract and convert local leads.
However, each tool has its use cases, and as a business, you can’t incorporate every tool for marketing. Depending on your marketing channels, customer personas, budget, and your goals, the tools can be helpful for your marketing campaigns.
Wrap Up
Local lead generation is an essential strategy for location-dependent businesses that run offline stores where people walk through their doors.
The key to growing your business through local lead generation is all about knowing your audience and competitors, then crafting good offers, and using the right marketing channels for leads.
If you’re marketing campaign are generating your local leads at scale, try using a tool like LeadBoxer. We use Lead Scoring as a metric to precisely know which of your existing prospects have the potential to become Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs), leads who are more ready to buy from you.
Imagine you have a lead in your CRM, basically other than their name you don’t know anything about them. What if you’re able to find details like their company, location, job title, and other relevant information.
Now that same lead which was is your CRM was just a random lead. After enriching that with relevant data you’re able to qualify the lead for sales. This is called lead enrichment.
What is lead enrichment and how do you incorporate it into your sales process and CDP software? This guide will cover all of that and more. By the end, you’ll know how to uncover lead details on autopilot so you can close more deals with ease.
To get started, keep reading or ”jump ahead” to these sections:
Lead enrichment is the process of data enrichment that gives your sales team enhanced insight into a prospective customer. With this data, sales reps can better understand how qualified prospects are and what’s the best way to interact with them so they can close the deal.
Lead enrichment is often presented in a profile that gives sales reps an overview of the prospect.
Identifying info about individuals, such as job title, email address, contact information, and social media profiles
Firmographic info, like a company’s industry, location, and size
Lead behavior, like how often a lead visits your company’s website or engages with your email marketing
Lead personality info, which can give you guidance on how to engage with an individual
Basic Steps in Gathering Lead Enrichment Data
Lead enrichment process is closely tied to lead generation and demand generation marketing. When you generate a new lead in the funnel, you should also have systems in place that gather additional data to help you qualify and understand that lead in detail.
There are a few ways to generate and enrich new leads.
1. Capture with a form
With this method, prospective customers learn about your company through email, social media, or blog posts. Prospects then give some of their personal information in exchange for a special offer, such as a white paper, demo, or free trial of your product.
When a lead fills out a form in exchange for an offer, enrichment really begins to happen.
Take a look at this lead generation form from Salesforce. Visitors who want to start a free trial of Salesforce’s product first have to answer a series of questions:
Once submitted, this info is sent to the marketing and sales team’s customer relationship management (CRM) software, where it’s turned into a lead profile that’s already populated with several data points about the individual and the company he or she represents.
The most basic way to find and enrich leads with LinkedIn is to first create a list of companies that fit your ideal customer profile, also search LinkedIn for those companies. Their profiles often include many relevant data points, such as company size and location. You can also zero in on the employees that most likely have the authority to buy your product. Hence improving your conversion rates.
After finding all this info, you’ll need to manually input the data into the lead’s profile within your CRM.
How to Automate Lead Enrichment
There are several tools available that automatically gather lead enrichment data and sync it with your CRM or other software. Determining which one is best for your business depends on the kind of data you want. Here are just a few to get you started.
LeadBoxer
LeadBoxer makes it possible to identify and enrich leads without capturing their data through a form. With LeadBoxer, you can identify visitors to your website who would otherwise remain anonymous, and then populate their profile with contact info.
LeadBoxer also records lead’s online behavior, such as how much time they spent on a certain webpage or what resources they’ve downloaded. This gives your team insight into what topics or pain points are most relevant to individual prospects.
To give your team even more of an edge, LeadBoxer scores leads so sales reps know exactly who is most likely to close. With a tool like LeadBoxer, your team will spend more time pursuing the most promising prospects and none of it chasing dead ends.
VisitorTrack
VisitorTrack is similar to LeadBoxer in that it can identify and track website visitors that would otherwise remain anonymous.
VisitorTrack further enriches leads with intent data. Intent data tells you whether or not a lead is in the market to buy a product like the one you offer. It works by tracking and analyzing certain context clues, like what kind of topics a lead has been searching for around the web.
Crystal
Crystal is an app that tells you how to communicate with and pitch to a prospect. It works by gathering data about a prospect from their LinkedIn profile and around the web and then crafting clear dos and don’ts that are unique to that person.
If you want to walk into any conversation with a lead feeling confident about your communication style, Crystal is worth checking out.
CRMs and Lead Enrichment
It’s usually possible to integrate a separate lead enrichment software with your main CRM so that both tools automatically work together.
However, if you prefer having an all-in-one system, consider using a CRM that comes equipped with needed features. Also most of these CRM helps you with lead routing where you can automatically assign your leads across the sales team.
These are just a few of the most popular choices.
HubSpot Sales
HubSpot Sales is a CRM that lets you track and accelerate everyone in your sales pipeline. There are also several helpful features that uncover new leads and enrich the ones you have.
HubSpot can show you who is visiting your site, how often they visit, and what pages they’re most interested in. It also logs which emails they open and what links they click on. Predictive lead scoring then prioritizes the prospects that are most likely to become customers. Hence marketers and sales teams can focus right kind of leads for lead nurturing and right kind of leads for sales.
Sugar Sell
Sugar Sell is a sales CRM solution from SugarCRM. The platform includes a feature called Sugar Hint, which automates lead enrichment.
Sugar Hint gathers data from social media, news, and business sources, and then automatically offers insight and intelligence within the platform. Sugar Hint can also give you actionable intel so you know to act when prospects are most engaged, open to upsell or cross-sell opportunities, or at risk of churning.
Freshsales
Freshsales is a CRM offered by Freshdesk. The platform comes with AI-based lead scoring and automatic profile enrichment.
With Freshsales, you no longer have to spend hours combing through LinkedIn for info or doing manual data entry. Their lead enrichment helps you dig into leads social media accounts and publicly-listed info, then saves the data for you.
Benefits of Automated Lead Enrichment
Automated lead enrichment increases the efficiency of your sales process in a few ways:
It reduces the time sales reps spend manually mining lead data on social media platforms or around the web
Lead scoring tells reps which leads to focus their time and energy on converting
Insights guide reps on when and how to interact with leads so they’re more likely to make the sale
All of these factors work together to increase your team’s productivity, and ultimately, your revenue.
Automated lead enrichment can also help improve your lead generation efforts. Without automated it, you may find yourself relying on lengthy lead generation forms like the Salesforce example shown earlier in this article. However, the longer the form, the more likely that some prospects will lose interest and leave the page before completing it.
If you’re using the right lead enrichment tool, you can shorten or in some cases forgo the form. LeadBoxer, for example, only requires an email before you can start a free trial.
Prospective customers can start using the product for less effort, and since they only have to submit their email, they’re less likely to become distracted or navigate away before submitting their info.
By attracting more leads and enriching their data later, you can further optimize your lead-to-conversion rate.
Start Using Lead Enrichment Today
There’s no doubt about it: lead enrichment can massively improve the efficiency of your sales process. The goal of lead enrichment is to help with lead conversion, close more deals faster, and increase your revenue with less effort.
However, manual lead enrichment can be a time-consuming and inefficient process. The key to getting the most out of it is to use a tool that automatically mines as much data as possible, then gives you actionable insight into each prospect. The same goes for sales intelligence tools.
LeadBoxer can help. With LeadBoxer, you can identify anonymous website visitors or enrich profiles of existing leads with contact info, company details, and their online behavior. LeadBoxer then creates a score that tells you whether or not a lead is worth pursuing. Take it for a spin and try LeadBoxer for free today.
If you were to focus on only one channel for your company’s lead generation, it should be LinkedIn.
The numbers show that the platform isn’t just a good choice for B2B marketers – it’s the best. The conversion rates are higher and the cost per lead is lower compared to other advertising networks. Plus, there are plenty of ways to do LinkedIn lead gen for free, and a couple of tools that make the process easy.
This guide will dig into the benefits, the paid and free strategies, and the tools that help streamline LinkedIn lead generation. By the end, you’ll have a method for generating leads on LinkedIn.
Use the links below to navigate to each section:
Why bother with LinkedIn? Why not focus on generating leads with search engine advertising, cold email outreach, display networks, email marketing, or more high-traffic social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter?
Simply put, LinkedIn is where professionals go to level up in business. The average user might log on to stay informed about what’s happening in their industry, look for new employees to add to their team, or seek out tools that can optimize their team’s workflows.
If your business offers a solution to their needs, LinkedIn is the best environment for attracting their attention.
There are a few other reasons why LinkedIn is the best place to generate leads for B2B companies:
It’s made up of professionals with purchasing power
Over 20% of LinkedIn users can make buying decisions for their companies. That’s at least 61 million senior-level influencers and 40 million decision makers that your business could be connecting with. It’s also the most-used social media platform amongst Fortune 500 companies, so there’s a good chance your potential customers are already on the site.
Its users are extremely active
LinkedIn has over 500 million total users, and over half of them (260 million, to be exact) actively use the platform every month. Of those 260 million users, 44% log on daily. That means a lot of potential leads to engage with on a regular basis.
LinkedIn lead generation is one of the most effective
Those 100+ million decision making users are proven to take action. The site’s own content marketing blog ran the numbers and found that 80% of B2B leads generated through social media come from LinkedIn.
There are plenty of case studies to back up the claim, too. Simplus, a Salesforce partner, says that 70% of their website form fills have come directly from LinkedIn. NetBrain Technologies Inc. doubled their click-through-rate with LinkedIn ads and saw 94% of leads generated accepted by sales team.
LinkedIn lead generation converts more leads for less
There are ways to do LinkedIn lead generation for free, but even if you go with a paid strategy. For B2B businesses, LinkedIn offers much high-quality leads compared to running a similar ad campaign on a search engine or another social media platform.
HubSpot aggregated all of their customer’s results with LinkedIn Sponsored Content and found that while the ads have a higher cost-per-click than Google Ads, they also have double the conversion rate.
With a $1,000 ad budget, you could generate 11 conversions for only $90 each on LinkedIn, while the same budget with Google Ads would generate 8 conversions for $125 each.
Its targeting audiences are tailor-made for B2B lead generation
LinkedIn Ads allow marketers to get extremely granular about the audiences they want to target. These are just a few of the many targeting options:-
Company industry, size and name
Job title, function and seniority
While competitors like Facebook Ads also allow marketers to target users by employer and job title, workplace networking is not the primary purpose of the platform. It’s possible that some users may not be listing their employment info at all, making this a less than ideal channel for reaching target audiences.
LinkedIn lead generation: the go-to choice for B2B marketers
According to the Sophisticated Marketer’s Guide to LinkedIn, 94% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn to distribute content. This means that either a lot of B2B marketers are wrong, or a lot of people are on to something.
In either case, you’d be remiss to pass up on what 94% of your competitors are already taking advantage of. Also content marketing has always been one of the best practices to generate leads.
Free Strategies for Finding Leads on LinkedIn
Many of the actions you already do on a daily basis in LinkedIn can help you find leads. You might only need to think a little more strategically in order to get the most out of your time on the platform.
Here are a few examples:-
Publish articles
Articles are the best way to generate attraction from your ideal clients and articles can also help your LinkedIn account position itself as an expert in your industry. You can use them to anticipate and answer prospect’s questions, which can instill confidence that you’re the right choice when it comes to solving their problem.
Publishing articles on LinkedIn comes with benefits you can’t get from blogging on your site alone:-
Your content gets shared with your connections and followers in their news feeds and sometimes in their notifications.
Users that aren’t already in your network can follow you from your article, so the next piece you publish will automatically appear in their feed.
If your profile is visible, your article is searchable both on and off the platform.
This is a great, free option for establishing your authority without having to convince users to navigate away from the site.
Post daily updates
Posting daily updates to your LinkedIn Page or Showcase Page is a great way to stay top-of-mind with your connections. Your updates will appear on their home feed, so it works as free, organic advertising.
Note that this doesn’t mean you need to publish a unique piece of content every day. Here are a few suggestions for how to keep this step quick and easy:
Repurpose content shared to your other social media accounts
Link to existing blog posts or resources on your site
Direct users to your most recent newsletter
Share your take on news from your industry
The name of the game is to make use of the content you already have and keep updating your page as often as possible.
Join groups
LinkedIn Groups are where people from the same industry can discuss interests, share insights, and ask questions.
They’re great places for networking with potential leads, and you can establish your expertise by answering questions or offering resources that are relevant to the conversation.
However, it’s important not to join a group and then immediately begin pushing your product or service. This comes off as disingenuous and can repel leads instead of attracting them. Build up a relationship with them first before making any sort of offer or pitch.
Engage with a targeted list of users
Your business should already have a set of criteria for what constitutes your ideal client. Use this criterion to search for users that fit the bill, then create a curated list of leads to begin LinkedIn outreach.
With LinkedIn, it’s far more common for people to accept requests for connections from people they already know or have had some interaction with.
Before you click the “connect” button, see if you can’t interact with leads in another way. The most obvious choice is to like or comment on an article they’ve written or shared.
Once your connection has been accepted, continue to engage with them on a regular basis. This could include endorsing them for skills or congratulating them when they announce news about their business.
This level of engagement will gradually warm you up to your lead. They’ll remember who you are the next time they see your articles or updates in their feed, and they also may be more likely to answer a personalized message about your product or service once you finally send it their way.
Engage with current clients
Referrals from current clients are a strong way to find new leads. If you already have a solid relationship with your client, asking for a referral might be as simple as firing off a quick email.
If you’re not as familiar with them, you can grease the wheels by leaving a recommendation for them on their LinkedIn Page, or endorsing them for skills and expertise. This will keep you top-of-mind and they’ll also be more likely to return the favor.
Paid Strategies for Finding Leads on LinkedIn
If you don’t have the time or capacity to use the free strategies for finding leads on LinkedIn, consider the platform’s paid advertising options for your lead generation efforts.
Sponsored Content
Sponsored Content refers to all of LinkedIn’s native ad formats. These ads run in the LinkedIn feed across desktop and mobile for the target audience that you specify.
There are a few possible formats, including single image ads, video ads, and carousel image ads.
Use Direct Sponsored Content if you want to share content in the LinkedIn feed to specific audiences without having to publish the content on your LinkedIn Page or Showcase Page. This is especially useful if you want to run slight variations of a campaign geared toward different target audiences.
Sponsored InMail
Sponsored InMail reaches your target audience directly by delivering personalized messages through LinkedIn messenger.
With Sponsored InMail, you can send personalized invites to webinars or events, promote a product or service, or encourage downloads of white papers, eBooks, and other resources.
Sponsored InMail messages are only delivered when a user is active, and delivery frequency caps ensure that your message gets noticed when it matters most.
VistaVu Solutions is a business management software company for the oilfield and energy industries. They used Sponsored InMail as part of their strategy and were able to achieve a 23.8% conversion rate.
Lead Gen Forms
LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms can be added to your Sponsored Content or Sponsored InMail to help collect leads from within the platform without asking visitors to go off-site. Use them to offer resources in exchange for their information.
Using LinkedIn lead generation ads will automatically populates the form with the user’s data so they can sign up with the click of a button. This decreases the chance that a user will lose interest and navigate away.
IR, a performance management software company from Australia, used Lead Gen Forms with Sponsored Content to reach their target audience. With this strategy, IR was able to achieve a 2x increase in conversion rates and reduced their cost per lead by 44%.
Dynamic Ads
Dynamic Ads appear in the sidebar on LinkedIn and work in a few different ways.
There are Follower Ads (pictured here) which encourage the targeted audience to follow your LinkedIn Page or Showcase Page.
Spotlight Ads look similar to Follower Ads but drive users to your site or landing page with a clear call-to-action.
Content Ads allow users to download content, such as a white paper, then stores lead info directly in your LinkedIn Campaign Manager.
Display Ads
Display Ads are images that run in the right column and above the fold. According to the company, users are 3x as likely to engage with content when exposed to both Sponsored Content and Display Ads.
Even when used on their own, case studies show that Display Ads are an effective form of advertising for B2B companies. Analytics software SAS used Display Ads to drive downloads for their whitepapers. The result was that their cost per lead was 10% the cost of the most expensive competing publisher.
LinkedIn Lead Generation Tools That Will Help You
From browser extensions to full-on software, there are several automation tools out there that will help you get more leads out of LinkedIn. Each has very different functions.
Some, like Skrapp.io, will only help you find email addresses, while a tool like LeadBoxer can automatically find b2b marketing leads (and their contact information) that are already interested in your business.
LeadBoxer
It’s one thing to generate leads through LinkedIn. It’s another to actually turn them into customers. LeadBoxer helps you identify visitors to your website, calculate their value as a lead, then retarget them with paid advertising, for example through effective LinkedIn lead generation campaigns until they become clients.
Let’s say you’ve published several articles on LinkedIn. Those articles then attracted visitors to your website. With the LeadBoxer Lead Pixel installed, you’ll be able to identify those individuals down to the company they work for, their specialties, and even their work email:
LeadBoxer also calculates a leadscore for visitors who engage with your website. This score gives you an idea of how likely that prospect is to convert, so you know whether or not they’re worth pursuing.
You can then use that information to create a highly targeted ad campaign on LinkedIn. Recall that LinkedIn allows you to target people by company name and job title, so theoretically, you could run one campaign aimed at a single individual with a high LeadScore.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator
LinkedIn Sales Navigator is LinkedIn’s own solution for prospecting and finding leads. It enhances the platform’s existing features to give you a more premium experience. The most obvious example is its Advanced Lead Search function. With Advanced Lead Search, you can enter the characteristics of your ideal client in order to find the most relevant prospects.
Sales Navigator can also make recommendations about who is most likely your best point of contact at a target company. It’ll tell you if something big happens, like a potential lead who has a job change.
While Sales Navigator can give you an extended look at who has visited your LinkedIn profile within the last 90 days, it can’t identify who has visited your site or indicate how interested they are in your company.
Skrapp
Skrapp.io is a Chrome extension that helps you extract email addresses from profiles on LinkedIn. It also integrates with LinkedIn Sales Navigator, so you can use both at once.
Skrapp.io has a few other capabilities that help round it out. There’s a company search feature that allows you to find the email address of anyone working in any organization, regardless of whether or not they’re on LinkedIn. There’s also a cloud dashboard that helps store and segment all your lead emails.
All in all, it’s a nice, lightweight tool for small or single-member businesses on a budget.
Crystal
Say your lead has made it to the next step of the pipeline and it’s time to make a pitch. That’s where Crystal comes in.
With Crystal, you can get a feel for things such as how prospects prefer to communicate and what pitching strategies they respond best to. Crystal extracts data about your lead from LinkedIn and other places around the web in order to offer insights about their personality and suggestions about how to talk to them.
This provides a much-needed edge the next time the two of you talk. No more “winging it” in calls or meetings.
Crystal also helps you write better emails and faster, so it doubles as a productivity booster.
LeadFuze
LeadFuze works like a souped-up version of LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Like Sales Navigator, it can search LinkedIn for leads in specific roles and industries, but LeadFuze takes it a step further by looking at what a lead’s ad budget is, what software they already use, and whether or not they’re hiring.
LeadFuze comes with an AI-powered personal assistant that can automatically generate leads for you. Fuzebot, as it’s known, crawls the web looking for new leads that match your established criteria, then automatically updates your records for you.
Fuzebot even verifies email addresses before adding them to your list of leads, that way you’ll never have an email bounced back to you.
Discoverly
Discoverly is a Chrome browser extension that claims to make social networks work better together. In short, it cross-checks various social networks to show you if you have any more mutual connections in common.
Here’s an example of how it might look on LinkedIn:
Source (Discoverly)
Assuming that the person in this example matched your criteria for an ideal lead, you could then leverage your mutual Facebook connections (made visible thanks to Discoverly) to introduce yourself and strike up a conversation.
In short, Discoverly helps you warm up leads before making contact with them.
Dux-Soup
Many of the free LinkedIn lead generation strategies covered in the previous section are time-consuming. Dux-Soup is a Chrome extension that puts those tasks on autopilot so you can go back to focusing on closing deals.
Basically, Dux-Soup builds relationships on your behalf by sending automated messages, automatically endorsing connections, and even auto-following new profiles.
You can then organize leads by tagging profiles and taking notes on them. This data can also be exported as a CSV file to upload into whatever CRM you’re using.
Start Generating More Leads for Less with LinkedIn
If you’re a B2B company, then statistically you’re more likely to find your next lead on LinkedIn. There are several paid and free strategies that will help you find them, but some of these strategies can be tedious and time-consuming. For the best results, you’ll need a tool or two to help you make sense of things.
The best strategy is to publish some content (whether it’s an article or an ad) on the platform that attracts users to your site. You can then use a tool like LeadBoxer to identify those visitors, rank them by likeliness to convert, then retarget them with a highly focused LinkedIn ad.
This strategy takes all the guesswork out of who is a promising prospect, so you can contact them with confidence that they’re ready to hear from you.
Advertising and marketing campaigns are key to finding new customers for your business, but how do you know if those campaigns are working effectively? If you’re getting new customers but paying more than they’re worth in ad spend, it could mean an unsustainable future for your business.
Luckily, there’s an easy way to measure how cost-effective your campaigns are. Cost per lead (CPL) is a marketing metric that tells you whether or not your efforts and ad spend are paying off.
In this guide, we’ll take a deep dive into CPL, from what it is to how to lower it. Once you start tracking CPL, you can create more effective marketing campaigns and attract more leads for less money. Keep reading, or jump ahead to these sections,
The cost per lead (CPL) is the amount of money it takes to generate a new prospective customer for your sales team from a current marketing campaign. These prospective customers — or leads — have seen an ad, clicked on it, then given some of their contact details in exchange for a white paper or more information about your product, thus keeping your sales pipeline full.
CPL lets marketing teams know if they’re spending an appropriate amount on different avenues of customer acquisition, such as Google Ads or Facebook Ads. The higher the CPL compared to other businesses in your industry, the less effective the marketing campaign is. Naturally, a lower CPL is considered ideal.
CPL is only one of many metrics that digital marketers often look at. Try not to confuse it with these other abbreviations:
Cost per Thousand (CPM) – The cost of 1000 users viewing the ad
The Cost per Click (CPC) – The cost of one person clicking on the ad
Cost per Action (CPA) – The cost of one person buying a product
CPM is a more useful metric for companies who are trying to build awareness around their brand, like McDonald’s or Coca-Cola
Users who view the ad don’t necessarily take any action, but they might remember the brand later on. CPA comes into play for eCommerce companies that sell low-ticket items at high volume. If you’re a B2B company or a brand with a high-ticket item like a luxury car, it’s not as likely that visitors are going to buy a product the first time they click on an ad.
CPC measures how much it costs when a person clicks on an ad in a pay per click (PPC) marketing campaign, which is important for determining how much you should spend. If your average CPC is $1, your conversion rate is 10%, and you want 100 new leads this month, you would need to spend $1000 on that campaign.
How to Calculate Cost per Lead
Calculating CPL is relatively straightforward. The formula is simply divide the amount of money you spent on a campaign during a set period by the number of leads acquired through that campaign in the same period.
For example, if you acquired 100 leads through a Google Ads campaign that cost $1000, the CPL for that campaign would be $10.
There are plenty of cost per lead calculators in the market. However on its own, calculating the CPL for all of your marketing efforts across email, social media, and search engines would have limited usefulness. If the CPL was higher than the standard for your industry, you wouldn’t know which platform’s campaign needed adjustments.
This is why it’s so vital to know where your leads are coming from. You wouldn’t want to attribute John Smith to your Facebook Ad CPL calculation if he actually learned about your product through Google Ads.
How to track leads?
A common way to track where leads came from is through a UTM code. A UTM code attaches to the URL of a landing page so that Google Analytics can see which ad campaign referred visitors to the page. You can then count up the number of generated leads through unique campaigns.
Also you can use UTM code to track leads coming from other marketing channels not just ads. Hence this UTM code can also help you calculate cost per lead by channel.
Lead generation software like LeadBoxer automates this process. The Segments feature can add a tag to each lead acquired specifying their industry, location, and referrer, to name a few.
Finding your total attributed leads is then as easy as selecting the right filters to see who was acquired in a certain period from a certain campaign.
Cost per Lead Industry Benchmarks
Knowing your cost per lead is only the beginning. By comparing the CPL you calculated in the previous step to the industry average, you can know whether you’re paying too much or just the right amount for your leads.
To help out, GoConvert aggregated data from over one hundred sites and reports to come up with cost per lead averages by industry.
Source
As can be expected, higher-ticket items like marketing agencies and financial services have higher CPL which means higher customer acquisition cost and their average cost per lead is at $100. Media and publishing, meanwhile, have the lowest average CPL at $11.
6 Ways to Reduce Cost per Lead
If your CPL is a little higher than it should be, don’t worry. There are several ways you can tweak campaigns and acquire more qualified leads for less.
1. Personalize your campaigns
One possible reason why you’re not getting more leads for your money is that your ads and landing page don’t match. Message matching is when the expectation set by the ad is met by the experience on the landing page.
For an example of an ad that gets this right, take a look at what happens when you search for “best CRM” in Google. Zoho CRM claims the top spot with this ad:
Notice how the phrase “best CRM” is repeated in the title of Zoho’s ad. With a title like that, potential customers know exactly what kind of promise Zoho is throwing out there.
After clicking through, visitors land on this page:
“Best CRM” is repeated in the page’s header. Not only that, but a call to action and place to submit info is displayed clearly above the fold of the page. From start to finish, potential customers know exactly what to expect from Zoho.
Resultiks, on the other hand, misses the mark. Search for “marketing automation software”, and you might run across this ad:
There are some indications within the ad’s title that Resulticks is the right match for marketing automation software, but clicking through to the landing page only confuses matters:
There’s no sign above the fold that Resulticks helps with marketing automation. Customers might be left wondering if they landed on the wrong page and won’t be as inclined to submit their info for a demo.
2. A/B test ads
Between your keywords, copy, and images, there are several variables influencing how well your ads are performing. It can be tempting to go with your creative instincts when crafting an ad, but instincts don’t guarantee results. Only by running two versions of the same ad can you figure out which elements resonate most with your ideal customers.
Here’s how that might play out in an example ad created by AdEspresso for their eBook:
The first ad clearly outperforms the second ad with a higher click-through rate (CTR) and conversion rate. The lower cost per sale shows the marketing team that they’re on the right track with the first ad.
Remember: When you’re A/B testing, it’s best only to change one variable with each test. Tweak the title of an ad during one test, then the image during another. By reducing the number of variables at play, you can be sure about what your audience likes.
3. Rethink your keywords
Every once in a while, go into your ads manager—whether it’s for Google, Bing, or another platform—and analyze how well your chosen keywords are performing for your marketing budget. Clean out the ones that aren’t driving quality leads and spend time optimizing the ones that are. Don’t worry if the keywords you deleted are highly searched. If they aren’t bringing quality leads to your business, they’re a drain on your ad spend.
Another way to improve your keyword performance is to target more long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords are more specific and less searched than broad keywords, but the audience also tends to be more motivated and willing to convert. In this case, the cost per acquisition can be more because long-tail keywords are specific hence it makes lead quality better and also competition will be bidding on them too.
4. Lower keyword bids
Those keywords that are converting but with a high CPL? Consider bringing the bid down. Lower bids might drop your search engine campaign’s average position, but it would also give you longer exposure on results pages and more clicks.
It might also be that the manual bid you set months ago no longer reflects the average cost of landing on the first page, as was the case with this client at White Shark Media:
If you don’t want to manually adjust your bids all the time, Google offers Automated Bidding so you can hit your goals without a ton of extra labor. There are several types of automated bidding strategies, including one to maximize conversions. With Maximize Conversions, Google’s AI tries to get the most conversions for your campaign within your budget.
5. Retarget site visitors based on behavior
It’s one thing to retarget people who have visited your site with another round of ads. It’s another to retarget them based on the specific action they took on your site.
Start by analyzing the behavior of leads who have already converted. Keep your eye out for certain trends, like visiting a particular page or taking a specific action before finally making the sale. It may be that customers exhibit the same behavior before buying from you.
A lead generation tool like LeadBoxer tracks all leads from website and email activity for you, so all you have to do is go into a lead’s profile and check out where they’ve been and what they’ve done. Hence we will track your leads across multiple marketing channels in your funnel.
Once you’ve identified certain behaviors, you can create a retargeting campaign based around those behaviors. For instance, if a high percentage of prospects turned into customers after viewing the pricing page for more than a minute, you may want to retarget future prospects who take the same action.
This strategy can be applied to almost any behavior, whether they only visited your homepage for a few seconds or watched an entire demo video. Thus cost of acquiring a customer becomes lower.
6. Check performance by time, device, or location
There are several variables about your audience that may be influencing your CPLs. Take a look at your ads manager and compare how campaigns are performing by:
Time of day – When are most leads acquired?
Device – Are leads more likely to be on desktop or mobile?
Location – Where are the most leads located?
These aren’t the only factors that might be driving up your CPLs. Analyze trends in digital marketing, understand your audience, and try adjusting campaigns to focus on times, devices, and demographics that are performing well.
Use Cost per Lead to Make Your Marketing Campaigns More Effective
If there’s one metric in total marketing to keep your eye on, it might by CPL. Knowing where your marketing efforts stand next to your competitors’ lets you know if you’re on the right track or if you need to tweak some campaigns.
LeadBoxer simplifies CPL monitoring so you can focus on optimizing your marketing campaigns. The Segments feature quickly filters leads based on which ad campaign first brought them to your site so you can quickly calculate the CPL without having manually use a cost per lead formula for each campaign. When it’s time to optimize, use the website and email tracking feature to identify which lead behaviors warrant retargeting. Get started today and try out LeadBoxer for free.
Buying signals are those signs or activities that indicate how likely a prospective customer is to buy. Using these your sales and marketing teams would know exactly who to focus their efforts on. Taking a note of theses signals is key to giving prospects a better buying experience and increasing the efficiency of your sales process.
This guide will review ten of the most common buying signals to look for and how to look for them. It will also go over how to capture, analyze, and act upon those signals. With this information in hand, your team will be well on its way to gaining and retaining plenty of satisfied customers.
What are buying signals?
Buying signals are the actions prospective buyers take that may indicate they’re close to making a purchasing decision. For B2B sales and marketing teams, buying signals are especially important because they can help you hone in on the most promising leads, saving time and closing more deals.
Buying signals can occur at several different steps of a customer’s buying process. Some signals such as when a prospect visits a company’s website. Lead generation software such as LeadBoxer can capture this data and consolidate it into a lead score. A lead score is a way to easily visualize buying signals.
Other strong buying signals occur during conversations between the prospect and a sales agent. These are usually phrases or behavioral cues that show how interested the prospect is. Recognizing these signals requires training as a salesperson and keen attention to detail.
Here are the 10 buying signals which indicates to a customer with a purchase intent.
1. The prospect signed up for a free trial
Signing up for a free trial or other complementary offerings through a lead capture page is a clear indication that a prospect has some interest in the product.
Even if the prospect doesn’t immediately take advantage of the trial, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re no longer interested. It may show that they’re simply unsure how to use it.
Lead generation software can capture this action and use it as part of the data that generates a lead score. Hence helping businesses and sale teams understand who their potential customer could be.
To mitigate that risk, consider enrolling anyone who signs up for a trial into an automatic email series that provides tutorials or tips.
You can also offer free one-on-one meetings or phone calls with a customer service representative who can walk them through your product or service. A more personalized experience can help move some prospects further along on the buyer’s journey.
2. They filled out a form
If someone filled out any form, whether it was to sign up for an e-newsletter or a request for more information, it’s a sign that they want to know more about the company and it’s also because they are interested in asking question related to their problem.
Hence as a business, you should be excited to receive inquires through contact forms as well.
LeadBoxer also captures that data and uses it to populate a prospect’s profile. The software will help you log your future actions that this particular prospect takes on the site and use it to adjust their lead score.
3. They’re engaging with your brand on social media
Following your company’s social media profile and engaging with the content you publish strongly suggests that the prospect is interested in your product.
To identify who is engaging with the brand most often, encourage marketing team members to monitor mentions of the brand or associated hashtags.
Regular check-ins between the marketing and sales team are important for identifying the prospects who are active on social media and who share a common pain points of your ideal customer. With that information, sales agents can now know who might be most worth reaching out to or nurturing.
Another option is to integrate your lead generation software with social media sites like LinkedIn so you can capture a prospect’s actions on the platform. LinkedIn is an especially fruitful platform for identifying and cultivating B2B leads.
4. They’re interested in one product
Interest in a single product or solution shows that prospective clients are clear about what they want. They’ve done their research and are taking steps toward making a purchasing decision.
This signal might appear during a consultation between a sales agent and a prospect, but it could also occur on your brand’s website. Multiple visits to a product page, especially over a short timespan, indicate growing interest.
Hence tools like lead nurturing software can look for these actions and use the data when calculating a lead score.
5. They’re interested in the price
If a prospect asks about pricing during a sales call, it’s generally a sign that they’re at least thinking about buying.
Some sales agents might misconstrue questions about money as a pricing objection, or that the prospect finds the cost prohibitive. Instead, think of it as they’re trying to understand how this solution fits into their budget. Use their question as an opportunity to talk about why your company is the right fit for them with respect to the price.
Another way to know if a prospect is interested in the price is to check if or how often they’ve visited the pricing page. This information should be available within the lead generation software in the log of actions they’ve taken on the site.
6. They’re interested in case studies
Pay attention to prospects who are looking at case studies on your site or are asking about other customers’ success stories. These potential clients are trying to imagine how they fit into your business and want to know if you have a track record of solving problems that are similar to theirs.
To keep the conversation moving, sales follow-up process should start with rep talking about other case studies that are similar to the prospect’s experience or ask if they have any questions or concerns about the company’s previous work. Hence these interaction should lead towards customer buying not sales team pitching.
7. They ask for advice from their peers
Sometimes you’ll notice that more than one person from a company is visiting the site. This might be an indication that someone with purchasing authority has asked his or her peers for their input about the product.
This might also be true when someone copies their colleagues during email correspondences with a sales agent. If they’re cluing other people into the conversation, it’s a good buying signal that they’re discussing amongst themselves how the product fits with their needs.
In any case, if the main contact (or) decision maker is seeking the opinions of people they work with, it’s a good sign that they’re weighing the pros and cons and are close to making a final decision.
8. They ask about terms and conditions
When a prospect starts asking about warranty details or money-back guarantee policies, they’re likely feeling out whether or not they can trust you to deliver excellent customer service. These are some strong prospect’s buying signals, but to convert their underlying questions into buying intent, you should need to have good marketing materials in place while interacting with them.
Look for this signal during meetings or calls with sales agents. If there is a warranty page on your company’s website, check to see if the prospect has visited it. If they have, it’s a prime opportunity for an agent to reach out to them and see if they have any questions about moving forward.
9. They ask about contract specifics
customer buying signals will likely happen during an in-person meeting or phone call. Prospects who are asking sales agents about what needs to happen to move on to the next step are almost ready to pull the trigger on the purchase.
For example, prospect may want to know when the service or use of the product can begin. Show that your company can adjust to their expectations by asking how soon they need it by.
This is also a great time to ask if they have any other questions or considerations about moving forward. Any opportunity you can take to demonstrate outstanding customer service can be another reason why the prospect should go with your company.
10. They ask about methods of payment
Sales agents should be attuned to questions about when or how payment can be made. Prospects who ask about this topic are close to making a purchasing decision but need to make sure that payment options align with their company’s needs.
In this case, the more convenient options you can provide, the better. Automatic payments, payment plans, and accepting credit cards are just a few of the possibilities to make customers lives a little easier. The more convenience you can provide, the more likely you’re going to finish your sales cycle with this prospect.
Pay attention to buying signals and close more deals
We feel these are the 10 buying signals you should look into if you’re a salesperson trying to reach your quota.
Knowing when a prospect wants to buy doesn’t take a crystal ball or a sixth sense. The clues are all there in the buying signals they give off. Good old fashioned attention to detail as well as a mix of data gathered and interpreted by lead generation software makes it possible to take note of and act upon these buying signals in sales.
LeadBoxer is a lead generation software that makes much of this process easy and automated. It can also deliver alerts that let you know when it’s time to take action and make a pitch to a prospect. Get started with a free trial today.
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Your company, like every business, wants to draw in website traffic and generate sales. With everyone online, your first step is to create a website. You could try and wow potential customers with a fancy website and hope that word gets around about it.
However, a snazzy, optimized website is not a recipe for effective digital marketing and lead generation. You’ll have to do more. You need a comprehensive content distribution strategy.
A content-focused marketing strategy is essential for many reasons. The most important reason to invest in content distribution is that content fosters relationships between your customers and your brand. When it comes to people buying your products or services, relationships mean everything.
People who have a relationship with a brand are more likely to do business with that company. Content distribution and content promotion are key to building vital customer relationships. Lead generation content begins with a solid content distribution strategy. Keep reading, or use the links below to learn how to create a content strategy in your company:
To produce piece of content your customers will love, you must know what content distribution is and how to do it well. Content distribution is when you share, create, and promote content across various media channels to an online audience. Content comes in many forms that include:
There are three types of content you can share with your online customers. These are: owned, earned, and paid. For effective content promotion, you need to distribute your content in a way that uses all three types.
Owned
Owned content is the content you already produced. With this type of content, you can control how and when it is published and distributed. Examples of owned content include website content, blogs, social media pages, and e-newsletters.
Earned
With earned content, third parties share or promote your content. These third parties include bloggers, customers, influencers, and journalists. This sharing and promoting of content is free to your business.
Earned content are product reviews, social shares and mentions, guests posts, forums, and public relations shared by third parties. Though the sharing of the content is free, the third party owns it, not your business.
Paid
With paid content, you pay to have your content distributed. The most common paid content distribution forms include pay-per-click ads, sponsored content, paid influencer content, and paid social ads. Each type of paid content has varying price points, format, and audience.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Ads
With pay-per-click (PPC) ads, you pay a third party when people click or have an impression on your ad. These ads are commonly seen on search engine results pages (SERPs). They can also appear on social media platforms where they have “ad” identifiers next to the page listing.
PPC is a search engine marketing tactic that, when paired with your SEO strategy, can produce quality leads. Google Ads is a popular pay-per-click ad platform used by businesses.
Sponsored Content
Sponsored content is paid for by an advertiser that is shared by a publisher, person, influencer, or brand. The most effective sponsored content includes a company or person that targets your ideal audience. Sponsored content can include videos, images, podcasts, and social media.
Paid Influencer Content
With paid influencer content, you pay a top content creator to write, refine, and promote the content for you. This influencer should be a well-known person in your industry. Influencer content benefits your business by boosting your brand awareness, conversions, and website traffic.
Paid influencer marketing uses word-of-mouth and social proof. Both of these are crucial in establishing brand trust with customers. This type of content has been so successful that companies spend around $15 billion on influencer marketing.
Paid Social Ads
Paid social ads include influencer content, PPC, and sponsored content. These paid ads share your content on social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Your content targets a specific audience most likely to interact with it.
To maximize your content’s impact on social media, you need a strategy. A strong paid social strategy will include native social media tools to create, schedule, and share the ads.
To have an effective content marketing strategy, you need to incorporate owned, earned, and paid content. SEO, PPC, and paid promotion are ways to blend the three content types. The most powerful content is the middle ground where the three types overlap.
Content production and distribution takes time, effort, and resources. It also tends to be overlooked. While content marketing may have taken a back seat in your strategy, there are many reasons to prioritize it.
You can undergo a thorough search engine optimization (SEO) strategy to make your website and your brand more visible. What you’ll find is that you can’t optimize your website without quality existing content. Additionally, posting content because you have it will not do you any good.
High-quality content production and distribution are important in your lead generation strategy. Content marketing is important because it centers around relationship-building. It is a chance for you to both share information and bond with your online customers.
Chances are that, your customers are already being bombarded with different content pieces. With all the websites out there, they will only do business with those whose content is valuable. This is because people want quick, relevant answers to their problems and questions. Hence it becomes essential to refine your content distribution strategy.
If you’re still skeptical of content marketing, here are some key statistics to consider:
6 Steps To Develop an Effective Content Distribution Strategy
Not all content distribution strategies are created equal. Throwing out poorly conceived digital marketing content everywhere you possibly can is not a good strategy. You can develop a successful content distribution strategy once know your audience and understand what they find interesting.
Promoting your new content can be overwhelming and time-consuming. If you want your create an effective content promotion plan, here are some steps to get you started:
1. Clearly Identify Your Target Audience
As great as you think your content is, not everyone will be interested in reading it. Those who could care less about your great content will go to another website for content they deem to be more relevant. When people bounce from your website, your search rankings and reputation can take a hit.
For successful lead-generating content, you need your content to be read by people interested in it. This requires you to research and identify precisely who your target audience is.
People who see value in your content are more likely to continue consuming the information you make available. Ultimately, these are the leads that are most likely to convert into successful sales. This is your target audience.
To create content your target audience will value, in addition to properly identifying who your ideal audience is, you must understand their typical consumer journey. Look at their demographics, pain points, objections to buying, and what they are interested in reading.
Research your customers’, website visitors’, email subscribers’, and social media followers’ income, age, gender, education, location, and other relevant demographics. You can find this information using Google Analytics and social media analytics tools. Try to narrow down the reach of your content, but don’t over-filter your audience so that it is too narrow.
After looking at the demographics, collect customer feedback. Ask readers how they feel about the content and how it’s distributed. Ask them what their pain points are and whether the content you provide adequately addresses these issues.
Use the feedback and demographics to create buyer personas. These buyer personas represent the preferences, motivations, and pain points of your ideal customers. Write different versions of content geared toward each of your personas.
2. Choose Your Content Types
There are different types of content. Each type of content caters to a different audience. To develop a good content distribution strategy you need to understand that every channel requires a specific content type.
The kind of content you choose to create will largely depend on where it is distributed. For instance, content developed for a blog is very different in style and length compared to what would be appropriate to share in a social media post.
A company blog is a highly recommended place to start creating online content. Blog posts are easy to share and repurpose. Additionally, nearly half your customers will read your blog before making a purchasing decision.
Depending on your objective, tailor your blog content to match the type of action you want the reader to take. If you want to generate leads, for example, offer lead generation and traffic generation content.
In contrast, social media content is much more casual and concise. With social media, it is important to research your audience using each platform’s analytics tools. This knowledge will assist you in delivering multiple pieces of content that will not only catch the readers’ attention, it will help you to make personal connections with them.
Similarly, when you send emails, you have to carefully think about what to say and how to say it. Email marketing is one of the most effective forms of lead generation around, making it a form of content marketing you should engage in on a regular basis.
Content can also be shared via videos and images. Infographics work well when promoted via social media. Video content needs to be engaging, interesting, clear, and brief.
3. Choose Your Distribution Channels
Your website is your first-stop distribution channel. On your site, you have greater freedom as to what you say and how you say it. Your website includes information on your pages and your blog posts.
You must conduct audience research and choose your distribution channels before you write your content. These two pieces of data will inform the type of content you write and where and to whom it is distributed.
Popular content distribution channels include blogs, social media, email, directories, guest posting sites, and forums. Sometimes traditional public relations may be an option. The content distribution channel you choose must be aligned with your target audience’s interests, demographics, and behaviors.
It’s important to know your audience and where they regularly visit online. Young people, for instance, spend a lot of time on various social media sites. Even among social media sites, there are different audiences.
Look to see where your target audience tends to go to gather information. Do they read industry blogs, watch YouTube videos, or scroll through Facebook? Knowing which distribution channels your audience frequents most is vital to planning a successful content marketing strategy.
Your blog should be your first distribution channel as it is one of your company’s owned properties. Two others that you need to optimize are your social media pages and e-newsletter. With these three channels, you control the content and its distribution. Also having a content calendar helps you ensure that content distribution is going according to your plan.
Social media is a popular distribution channel. In fact, 87% of marketers use social media to share content. Of those, most use an average of five social media platforms.
Content distribution via social media is a good option for many reasons:
Ease of distribution
The content is short and largely image-dominant
Ease of audience targeting
Provides a great opportunity to have casual, personal interactions with customers
A majority of your customers likely use at least one social media channel
Content is instantaneously shared with customers
It is free to share your content
People are more likely to do business with your company when they trust you. Finding the best combination of distribution channels to share your content will boost your brand authority. When customers see and consume your knowledgeable content, they are more likely to accept you as an authority in your field and will look to your organization as the best solution to their challenges.
Guest posting on reputable, industry-specific websites and forums like Reddit or Quora are excellent ways to distribute content to new customers. Be sure that the information you provide is high-quality and free from self-promotion and spammy links. This content should not be focused on your company, products, or services, but should be geared toward educating readers.
An effective content distribution strategy involves having a plan for how, where, and when to disperse information. Both the creation of lead-generating content and its distribution need careful thought. Once you settle on a writing and distribution process, you need to be consistent.
Writing content and publishing it everywhere on the Internet will lead to unsuccessful content promotion. If search engines don’t rank your content highly and the appropriate marketing strategies aren’t applied, your target audience will never find your content.
A good foundation for your content distribution strategy is having S.M.A.R.T goals. These goals are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely. Having such goals helps you see where your current strategy is at and what future success looks like.
With your content distribution strategy goals in mind, develop a detailed content calendar. There are many tools out there for you to use such as Google Sheets, Excel, Asana, Trello, and Google Calendar.
To start a consistent content distribution plan, assign certain people to develop and create different kinds of content. Then, establish an editorial calendar for publishing the content on a consistent basis.
An editorial calendar focuses and aligns your team to work toward common goals. If you contract out your writing, a calendar can inform your editors and writers about what’s coming up.
Some questions to ask as you start developing your editorial calendar include:
What audiences use which channels?
What opportunities exist on each channel that you can’t achieve on others?
What subjects are most likely to resonate with your target audience?
How often and when does each audience post on each channel?
What content types or formats should you use on each channel?
When should you post on each channel to get the most engagement?
What conversations work best on each channel?
Who will be in charge of managing each channel and posting on them on behalf of the company?
Where do you want to drive traffic to on each channel?
What metrics will you use to assess the success of your content distribution strategy?
No two content distribution strategies are the same. The best one for your company will be unique as there is no silver-bullet solution.
How you produce and publish content will depend on how many resources you have, team size, industry, and brand. The concept of creating a comprehensive content promotion strategy can seem overwhelming at first. Useful content distribution tools include Anchor, AnswerthePublic, Canva, and Vidyard.
You’ve created lead-generating content, but if it doesn’t have a call to action (CTA), it won’t be effective. CTAs tell the reader what to do next after reading your content. With CTAs in your content promotion, be sure to somehow capture the reader’s contact information, especially phone number or email.
To bring more readers to conversion from your content, you need to consistently get new leads to cultivate. Lead magnets are the best ways to capture the names and contact information of prospective leads. Through lead magnets you share the content for free with your audience for the exchange of their contact information.
Lead magnet content needs to be interesting, valuable, and applicable to the reader. If you don’t know where to start, here are three lead magnet strategies to try:
White Papers
White paper content highlights industry news like trends, the current state of the industry, and what the future holds. Industry overview white papers are the most common.
The other type of white paper is a product breakdown. Product breakdowns highlight company products. These white papers may go into detail about what a product does, who benefits, and the problems these items help solve.
White papers let prospective leads know that your brand understands their pain points and questions. These types of content also show leads that your product solves their problems.
Webinars
Webinars are another effective lead magnet. You can use live and recorded webinars to get a lead’s contact information. With webinars, you can ask someone to leave their phone number or email address to access the webinar.
Webinars can be one-off or regular events. Webinars are great ways to show your product or service. When you conduct live webinars, you allow the audience to interact with you.
Risk-Free Trial
Offering a limited-time risk-free trial has been a long-time favorite lead magnet for B2B and SaaS companies. With this type of lead magnet, customers enter their contact and payment information to access a product or service. Besides free access, some free trials give customers temporary access to an upgraded or premium version of products or services.
For most sign-ups, the terms and conditions of the risk-free trial must be clearly stated. You should be up-front about subscription cancellation and when a customer will be charged after the trial period ends. Besides transparency, your risk-free sign-up form must be simple and quick to complete.
Once you’ve created your lead magnet, publish it on your website, in blog posts, and on your social media channels. Lead magnets are also effective when used as part of your email marketing strategy.
6. Publish and Promote Content
Now that you’ve created your content, it’s time to publish it. Use your editorial calendar to push it out to your ideal audience at the best time and on appropriate channels. Regardless of what channel you use, follow the rules to optimize your content promotion on each channel.
Using a combination of platforms for your content distribution is a great way to maximize its effectiveness. For example, you can publish an industry white paper and push it out via email, social media, and paid ads. Use these channels to get your content before readers or have them sign up to see it.
Content creation is and will be key in generating leads. For effective lead-generating content that drives sales, you need carefully-crafted content. A strong content distribution strategy looks at the best content type and what channels you should use.
Thorough familiarity with your target audience is the foundation of any successful content promotion strategy.
Contact LeadBoxer today to learn how we can partner with you to generate more leads and drive more sales.
Creating a marketing strategy that appeals to a diverse range of ages can be a difficult undertaking. Mass appeal to multiple generations requires a deep understanding of how each group tends to interact with marketing materials. Planning ahead and using appropriate resources are essential elements of any successful generational marketing campaign.
Reaching a broad range of target audience members during a marketing campaign is important for maximizing your return-on-investment (ROI). The goal of your generational marketing strategy should be to reach potential customers without alienating any key audience bases.
For tips on creating a successful generational marketing strategy, keep reading, or use the links below to skip ahead:
What Is Generational Marketing and Why Does It Matter?
As you are probably well aware, marketing is not a one-size-fits-all approach when building the right customer base for your business. Even if your team is only selling one product, the pitch needs to be adjusted based on a variety of factors, including age. It’s important to understand ways you can incorporate content that appeals to mass audiences throughout your generational marketing strategy to avoid alienating key target groups.
Generational marketing is a strategy that uses segmentation to split audiences by age to better reach each target demographic. Currently, there are four generations of consumers your marketing team should be targeting: Baby Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z.
It is important to understand that every generation interacts with marketing differently. By understanding which age demographics are in your target audience, your team will be able to produce appropriate content.
For most businesses, it is beneficial to appeal to multiple generations. By analyzing the preferences of each generation you seek to engage and eventually convert, you can gain valuable insights, making it possible for your team to develop and apply a successful generational marketing strategy.
Most importantly, Baby Boomers are a generation that has had to embrace major advancements in technology as it has developed at an accelerated rate in recent decades. In comparison, younger generations have had high levels of technology use incorporated into almost every aspect of their lives from a young age. Because of this disparity in experience in terms of technology, many Baby Boomers are used to traditional marketing tactics and tend to prefer in-person interactions.
This isn’t to imply Baby Boomers are out of touch when it comes to technology. According to Pew Research, 71% of adults aged 50-64 use at least one social media site.
Baby Boomers are more likely to be converted through in-store marketing, event marketing, banner ads, and other offline marketing channels. They are a great example for how a target market can be influenced by traditional marketing methods for maximum outreach.
Generation X
Sometimes referred to as the “Middle Child” generation, Gen X encompasses those born between 1965-1980. This group was the first to grow up with access to personal computers, and tend to be more tech-savvy than their predecessors.
This group makes up less of the population than Boomers and Millennials, coming in at 19.61% of the U.S. population in 2024. They might be the smallest generation in this list of different age groups but most Gen Xers make the purchase decision for themselves, hence they are a silent generation will better spending power than Millennials and Gen Z.
Gen Xers tend to be swayed by customer testimonials, and it’s helpful to provide a mix of effective marketing which includes mix of traditional marketing, SMS marketing, and other digital marketing strategies.
Millennials
Also known as Generation Y, Millennials surpassed the Baby Boomers in size in 2024. Currently, Millennials make up 21.67% of the U.S. population. The largest generation by the percentage.
They born between 1981-1996 are classified as Millennials, which means they grew up during the rise of technology. Marketing to millennials can be tricky because they tend to have a large online presence and a good grasp of digital marketing tactics.
There are more than 80 million millennials, most of whom are very active on social media and tend to consume information on their cell phones. This target customers can be attracted and engaged with common online marketing channels like content marketing, email marketing, and social media marketing.
Gen Zers grew up online, and have embraced social media on mobile devices from a young age. They tend to have a shorter attention span and the ability to consume different forms of media simultaneously. A survey by the National Retail Foundation (NRF) shows 74% of Gen Zers consider ‘spending time online’ to be a hobby.
As a unique group, Gen Z may not be fully entered into the workplace yet, but that hasn’t stopped them from having a substantial impact on the economy. The NRF found that consumer spending on Gen Z equated to $829.6 billion.
Generation Z prefers quick messaging, influencer marketing, and dislikes marketing ads on social media platforms that disrupt their online experience. Basically they are unresponsive to traditional marketing they tend to lean toward tech-savvy sales tactics, but they place a larger emphasis on quality when it comes to products.
Establishing Your Target Audience
With such diversity spread across the generations, it is important for your marketing team to know which groups they need to target. Not all products will appeal to a mass audience, and that’s okay. By knowing your customer base, your company can allocate its resources towards marketing efforts aimed at reaching the right people. Hence generational segmentation in important.
Start by creating your ideal customer profile. The idea is to target clients who will most likely benefit from using your product. Odds are, your customer base will span across several generations, but it is possible it may not appeal to all of them.
Creating an ideal client profile takes time and resources. But the information gleaned is worth doing the necessary research so you understand who is most likely to benefit from and purchase your service or product. This information will prove vital in assisting your marketing team as it begins creating successful campaigns aimed at nurturing potential customer relationships.
Once established, take a look at the generational demographics of your target audience. If your list contains members of Generation X or younger (and it most likely will), your team should start thinking about the best marketing approach is to incorporate social media into its campaigns.
Millennials and Generation Zers are known for their online presence, but they are also in tune with marketing tactics. When it comes to marketing these groups don’t want to be bombarded with ads during their content scrolls, but they do want quality information delivered in an easy-to-digest format.
According to a consumer survey, 81% of consumers prefer receiving personalized communications from brands. This means your company needs to establish which customers are buying your products and then find ways to personalize effective marketing campaigns.
What is Attitudinal Segmentation?
Similar to generational marketing, attitudinal segmentation involves splitting your audience into groups. Rather than focusing on age, attitudinal segmentation groups customers together based on shared beliefs. This strategy dives deeper into the way customers think and feel.
This type of audience segmentation can help your marketing team personalize their outreach based on the feelings of specific customer groups. It is also most successful when combined with other tactics, such as generational marketing.
Using these strategies together can help maximize outreach and avoid alienating key audiences. When beginning the implementation of attitudinal segmentation, starting off with a few simple questions can kick start the process.
Try establishing motivations with questions like “Why do you…”, or focus on opinions with “What do you think of…”. These answers are a way to reach and segment your audience members into groups based on their purchasing behaviors. By understanding the way consumers feel, your marketing team will be able to develop content that speaks to the needs of your customers.
The Importance of Brand Loyalty Across Generations
There is more to creating a successful marketing campaign than simply understanding generational marketing, preferences, and customer attitudes. Audience engagement helps lead a marketing campaign to the finish line by filling the sales pipeline with qualified leads ready to start the purchasing process. 84% of consumers will interact with advertising when they feel loyal to the brand.
The sales cycle begins with marketing touchpoints that happen long before customers get the chance to speak with the sales or customer service departments. That means brands start building their reputation from the moment content is extended to an audience. Establishing and maintaining a credible brand is important for encouraging customer engagement.
According to Havas, over half (60%) of brand-related content fails to deliver and is considered clutter by consumers. Before taking any concrete steps to plan a marketing campaign, the team should understand that consumers value quality over quantity when it comes to brand communications.
Generational and attitudinal marketing align when it comes to understanding what customers want to get from a brand. Not all consumers share the same attitudes, and many are loyal to the same brands for different reasons. Diving into the insights that generational and attitudinal preferences share with brands can help your team create a successful campaign that reaches the correct audience.
For example, Gen Z looks for brands who are able to provide for the greater good and offer value. As a group that has grown up connected to communities through the internet, 68% of Gen Zers say they expect to see brands positively contribute to society. On top of their overall belief in bettering society, Gen Zers look for tech-savvy brands. In fact, the majority of this group won’t engage with websites/apps that are slow to upload. A brand with omnichannel marketing is bound to attract this generation.
Gen X is known for being the most brand-loyal generation. Statistics show four out of 10 Gen Xers will stick with brands with which they have already established relationships. Continued outreach and implementation of customer feedback will be important to maintaining a good loyalty program with many in this age group.
Along with preserving a good standing among consumers, brand loyalty leads to repeat purchases by customers. Studies demonstrate purchases by repeat customers are vital to success, accounting for up to 65% of a company’s business. Brand loyalty helps establish long-term relationships with consumers and encourages multiple purchases from these buyers.
In between buying cycles, marketing plays a large role in nurturing customer relationships through targeted content. This outreach helps your company and the services or products to stay top of mind for consumers.
Creating a Generational Marketing Strategy Without Alienation
After taking a deeper look at the different generational motivations, the best place to start with campaign creation is understanding how incorrect use of this information may cause alienation. Generational marketing can help successfully reach out to consumers across different age groups, but overgeneralizations about the target generation can cause more harm than good.
While understanding generational differences, especially with the preferred communication styles, is important for marketing, it is just as important to avoid stereotyping. A successful generational marketing strategy will combine with attitudinal segmentation to provide a positive personal experience for the target audience.
To start a successful campaign, it is important to identify where age will play a role within your company’s outreach. Knowing how generational differences factor into your brand will help your team segment audiences appropriately.
Diversity Within Generations
One of the main problems with traditional generational marketing is failing to take into account how large these groups are. For example, with 80 million Millennials in the generation, it is safe to assume not all of these consumers share the same beliefs. All of the generations are made up of diverse groups who may act differently from their peers.
Consumer age can provide insights into their preferences, but these trends do not replace a personal connection with the customer. Simply assuming your client will act a certain way due to their generation can cause tension and potentially ruin the business relationship if those assumptions are proven false.
Implementing attitudinal segmentation alongside generational marketing can be a great way to find middle ground when creating campaigns. Using data that provides insight into customer opinions, purchasing history, and lifestyle, these tactics can help companies avoid getting caught in a stereotype trap.
This allows your marketing team to focus on creating content for groups with similar interests, rather than just age. By delivering quality content that speaks to a consumer’s preferences, attitudinal segmentation can boost overall engagement and reach mass audiences.
Continue to communicate with groups via email blasts, but focus on tailoring content to reach the targeted audience. Segment these groups based on preferences like the amount of communication the consumer wants or specific products they may buy.
Quality customer service remains a high priority for consumers. According to Microsoft, 69% of U.S. consumers view customer service as an important factor when maintaining brand loyalty. Customers will continue to repeat purchases from companies they view as excellent in the customer service department. To ensure these efforts are reaching the right audiences, tailor your customer services to the needs of different generations.
Millennials and Gen Z are known for their online presence, and online customer service options make addressing these issues easy. For those who may prefer a more traditional route, implement customer service over the phone and make sure consumers are able to interact with a real person.
Marketing for Tech-Savvy Groups
A huge mistake that can be made during generational marketing is assuming some groups may not be active on social media. While Millennials and Gen Z tend to spend more time online than others, it would be incorrect to assume Gen X and Baby Boomers avoid the internet completely.
68% of Baby Boomers are active on Facebook, which means a majority of this generation sees Facebook advertisements daily. For those companies who want to utilize social media for all generations, sticking with traditional outlets like Facebook can help with effective outreach.
Due to the Millennial’s and Gen Z’s tech-savvy lifestyle, digital marketing tactics are important for reaching consumers in these age groups. It is important to have a strong understanding of the way these groups interact with online communities to maximize outreach efforts.
According to Epsilon, 75% of these generations shop online with their smartphone. That means usability across devices is important for closing sales. Website compatibility and access on smartphones will help connect younger consumers with your products. The study also found that Millennials spend more money online than other generations. Having the ability to purchase items directly on a website is important for tapping into this generation’s spending potential.
While Millennials lead the way in e-commerce buying on sites like Amazon, Gen Z has adopted a different tactic when it comes to online purchasing. According to Forbes, 97% of Gen Z view social media as their main source of shopping inspiration. Being able to purchase items in apps, like Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest, helps Gen Z have a more personalized shopping experience.
Generalizations about age groups are nothing new, but falling into these traps can be detrimental to your generational marketing strategy. Avoid getting stuck in the belief that all boomers hate technology or that millennials are entitled. These stereotypes often find their way into conversations, but they alienate audiences and can negatively impact your brand’s image.
Instead, focus on authentically presenting your brand in a way that can resonate across generations. Consumers are smart, and they will easily identify inauthentic attempts to ‘fit in’. For example, unless it is already part of your company’s persona, using cheesy social media lingo can be a turn-off to younger customers.
Not only does the youngest generation care about authenticity, but overall, brands with consistent presentation saw a 33% increase in revenue. Across generations, consumers are focused on the image a company presents and how its actions back this up. With customers holding the buying power, authentic brands will benefit and continue to rise to the top.
Key Takeaways
Generational marketing is not a one-size-fits-all strategy. Marketing teams should avoid jumping into a campaign that is based on age alone. Instead, creating a diverse plan with attitudinal segmentation and patterns based on generational behavior will avoid the alienation of key target audiences.
Embracing technology works for all generations, but some may require more creativity to be persuaded into a purchase. Stick with traditional outlets to reach Baby Boomers and Gen X, but don’t be afraid to try out new platforms like TikTok in hopes of reaching Gen Z. Maintain authenticity and transparency across all social media and email, though. Consumers will appreciate consistent branding, and this can increase your company’s brand loyalty.
Establish your target audience through a range of factors. Look into their lifestyles, communication preferences, and product interests. Segment your audience based on attitudes and opinions, as well as generation when applicable. Focus on creating brand loyalty and rewarding repeat customers.
Overall, generational marketing can help companies better reach their targeted demographic, but it is crucial to approach this strategy with ample research. To avoid missing out on outreach to key audiences, combine generational and attitudinal marketing strategies for a successful campaign.
For a free trial on using customer insights from web traffic, check out LeadBoxer!
Although account based selling (ABS) has been around for quite some time, this strategy is gaining popularity in recent years. Organizations are starting to see the real impact of this tactic, leading to increased sales and more revenue.
While the typical sales strategy targets a single point of contact within an organization, account based selling works differently. Rather than focusing sales efforts on a single person, this methodology takes a broader approach.
Although this strategy is too extensive for business-to-consumer (B2C) products, it’s more suitable for large-scale, enterprise-level b2b sales. Keep reading to learn more about account based selling, including how to effectively implement this strategy into your sales process. This ABS guide should help you decide if this sales approach is right for your organization.
Continue reading or use the following links to jump ahead to these topics:
Account based selling (ABS) is a hyper-focused, ultra-personalized sales strategy. This approach targets entire accounts rather than concentrating on a specific person within a company. With this strategy, every account is treated as a market of one.
This involves a multi-touch, multi-channel process that targets a variety of touchpoints within an organization. While the typical sales strategy aims to close sales with individuals, account-based selling targets the organization as a whole.
Account based selling and account-based marketing (ABM) go hand-in-hand. The overall goal of the process is to identify target accounts and inch them closer to a sale. Rather than having sales and marketing departments that “hand-off” duties to one another, this strategy blends the two.
As this isn’t the traditional approach, your sales and marketing teams must be more aligned than the average organization. In a company-wide effort, these teams must come together to target the right accounts and form a cohesive, detailed strategy. The process involves first identifying key decision-makers with a pain point, then targeting them with personalized sales outreach.
This strategy can work alongside marketing nurture campaigns to move key contacts closer to a sale.
Who Should Use Account Based Selling?
In a recent survey involving ten corporate leaders, seven of them said they are investing more in account based strategies. However, this approach isn’t suitable for every organization.
As this methodology involves your entire business, you must have enough resources to implement account-based selling framework. Before eliminating your current business model and starting fresh with account-based model, determine if this approach is right for you.
Ask yourself the following five questions before you’re planning to leverage benefits of account-based selling.
1. Who is your average customer?
Understanding your potential customers can help you decide if ABS is the ideal approach. If you usually sell to small businesses, you may want to consider a different strategy. Because ABS involves tons of manpower and resources on your end, dedicating that to these businesses typically isn’t efficient.
Unfortunately, the picture is a little unclear for mid-market customers. Experts claim that any deal size less than $50,000 in lifetime value shouldn’t utilize an account-based selling approach. If you’re a business that offers enterprise solutions, you may already have high-value accounts that are well-suited for account based sales.
2. How long does your sales cycle last?
An effective account-based selling strategy doesn’t happen overnight —the process to come up with a good selling model can take months. That said, this approach is better suited for longer sales cycles. If your average sales journey lasts for at least three months, ABS may be right for you.
3. How much do you know about your ideal customers?
Account based selling involves hyper-focus on your audience. This laser-precision approach requires an in-depth understanding of your ideal customers. If you’re unsure where you fit in the market or don’t have adequate data, you may be advised to consider a different strategy.
4. How many stakeholders are involved in the average deal?
While the average sales approach targets one or two stakeholders, this can cause problems. For instance, this tactic could backfire if that contact quits the job, goes on leave, gets sick, or takes a vacation.
By targeting multiple stakeholders, it’s far less likely for the deal to fall through the cracks. The more eyes on your sales process, the higher the chance of closing the sale. Account-based selling model is a multi-threaded, multi-channel approach, which typically leads to more involvement from a wide variety of stakeholders.
5. What’s the nature of your offerings?
Account-based sales strategy is a detailed, precisely integrated process across multiple facets of your organization. It’s ideal for subscription-based products. As long as your messaging is consistent and clear, these customers probably won’t end their relationship with your product or service.
ABS marketing through subscription-based products also provides the opportunity for upselling and cross-selling. If your business offers multiple services, add-ons, and packages for high-value accounts, account based selling could be the right tactic.
How Content is Used in ABS
Similar to inbound marketing techniques, you can use content in account-based selling gear up a specific audience. Additionally, both inbound marketing and ABM use different content at different stages in the sales cycle.
As previously mentioned, account-based selling requires a company-wide approach. So all teams should collaborate to develop audience-focused content for the various accounts and personas.
Below, you’ll find a variety of content types and tactics that can be used in an ABS strategy. These are categorized by the level of effort needed for execution.
Targeting your customers with engaging content doesn’t stop when you close a sale—ABS-focused content continues long after the deal is made. After all, customer satisfaction is a core element of ABS marketing efforts.
If your customers aren’t satisfied, chances are they won’t renew, upgrade, or buy again in the future. After the sale is complete, you’ll want to continue to provide valuable content to keep loyalty and engagement high.
This can be achieved with:-
Training sessions: These can help your customers understand more about your products.
Executive check-ins: This involves meetings, preferably quarterly, to discuss what’s going on with the account. These discussions should involve both buyer and seller executives.
User events: To boost exposure and excitement for your product and brand, facilitate events to bring your customers together.
Developing Your Target Account List
After narrowing your target accounts, choosing contacts, and deciding the content you’ll implement, it’s time to build an account list. To simplify the process, ABS experts encourage organizations to categorize target lists into different tiers.
Your company should then allocate a certain amount of resources and attentiveness for each level. The smallest tier should receive the highest amount of care, while the largest tier should receive fewer resources.
While it varies from one company to the next, your first tier will typically consist of 20 to 50 accounts. These customers should receive thorough research and one-on-one, personalized communication.
The next tier typically includes about 200 accounts. The amount of personalization and care these groups receive is based on their specific industries and personas. Due to the many facets involved in the process, these campaigns can last for several weeks.
Sales rep and sales development teams must provide assistance in choosing target accounts. This is because these professionals play a key role in converting prospects through their selling approach. Therefore, excluding them from the sales model and decision-making process is an inefficient practice.
How to Implement an ABS Strategy
After reading this guide to account-based selling, you may still be confused about how to implement this selling model into your organization. If that’s true, you’re not alone.
Transitioning to ABS is one of the most common roadblocks for organizations across the country. Although people understand the value of changing processes, they still struggle with execution.
Because organizations have different processes and best practices, implementing ABS looks different for many companies. If you’re currently using a high-volume, high-velocity approach, instantly changing to account based approach can be a slippery slope. Instead make the switch over time in stages to use account-based selling.
Once you’ve developed your ideal customer profile and chosen suitable accounts, allocate 30% of your organization into tiger teams. Members of these specialized teams are skilled professionals tasked with a specific goal within an account.
Before getting started, it’s essential to decide which metrics to track. After starting the process and seeing a positive impact, you can then allocate 50% of your company. If you continue to gain traction, go to 75%, then eventually 100%.
As for how long this transition should take, most companies notice improvements within 12 to 24 months. Those who find early success typically have close-knit marketing and sales departments.
Although account based selling can be a complicated topic to understand, we hope this ABS guide provides some clarity. While the transition may not be an easy one, this change could propel your business to new heights.
If you’re a company operating at the enterprise level, successful account-based selling can increase your revenue and improve customer satisfaction.
In one of our previous articles we discussed why warm leads are better for your business but we realised we got ahead of ourselves. So, we decided to double back and try to understand what are warm leads.
Every company needs to follow up and nurture leads as part of its sales process. Warm leads are nothing more than individuals who have expressed an interest in your company in the past or people with whom you wish to establish a relationship. It could be something as simple as a person filling up an online form and asking for more information on a certain product, or making connections with the staff of a particular organisation. When these people get a visit or a call, it classifies as a warm lead.
Whereas cold leads are taken by surprise and often turn negative, warm leads are formed out of a pre-existing relationship or expression of interest. That’s the difference between cold and warm leads. Hence its lot easier to approach a potential sale, and places warm leads on top of cold leads in the sales cycle. Warm leads result in more effective sales talk.
Why are Warm Leads Beneficial?
Think of it this way: Would you like it if someone tried to sell you something within the first five minutes of knowing you? Of course not! The same applies to your customers as well. They hate it when your company tries to push a product/service on them, and are more likely to walk away. Even worse, they will probably remember your company in a negative light.
This is exactly why warm leads are preferred. Businesses, especially small ones, rely on warm leads to establish a certain level of trust with possible clients until they make a purchase from them. Establishing trust is an integral part of the sales process because the warmer the lead, the higher chance there is of converting it to a sale. Sizeable companies have systems in place for a formal sales process, and these involve introducing the brand to a potential customer, referred to as the lead.
The more the lead becomes exposed to the name and message of the brand, the more it begins to trust the brand over time. Warm leads show interest in your brand in such a way that closing sales becomes easy. In fact, companies boasting of solid, well-thought-out sales processes are adept at monitoring calls, messages, emails, and outreach so that each sales rep understands precisely where every lead is in the process.
The Thing About ‘Warm Leads’
The term “warm leads” is quite flexible. For example, any prospect that has been referred to a business website also qualifies as a warm lead, even though the organisation did not contact that prospect directly. Just the fact that the referrer recommended that particular company to the prospect means that an indirect connection has formed between the company and the lead. It is not necessary that the prospect know the business; simply knowing the person who referred them to the company is enough. In this case, the referrer serves as a sort of middleman, which means that generating warm leads is not a linear process.
There is a flexibility associated with warm leads that is missing in others. This makes them all the more lucrative. When a prospect reaches out to the business looking for information, they usually try to find out the contact number or fill out a form on the website requesting a call back. Such prospects are intrigued to go through all the effort to reach out to the business by themselves, without knowing anything about the company. This shows just how easy it is to work with warm leads rather than cold leads in lead generation.
Warm Leads Mean More Conversion Probability
Though there is still some amount of rapport building to be done on your part, warm leads are simpler to convert into sales than cold leads. The fact that the business had previously established a connection or contact with the prospect is indicative of the fact that they already had some amount of trust between them. This is the reason why the prospect will actually read or listen to whatever you have to say. They are ready to invest their time, and will not be as quick to walk away from the product or service as a result.
Warm leads are actually quite pleasant from the standpoint of the salesperson. They find it easier to distinguish between warm leads and cold leads and interact with the former; all it requires is a little bit of common sense and practice on their part. In the end, what matters the most is the way the prospect views the interaction, instead of how the business classifies it. While interacting with a warm lead, the company should always make it a point to introduce itself and then immediately raise the topic of their pre-existing association with the prospect. The way they respond should be an indication whether the sales team should pursue this lead for conversion or not. The moment you get some sort of acknowledgement about your connection with the prospect, you need to move forward in the sales funnel.
A business is better of investing all their efforts on warm and qualified leads rather than cold leads due to the higher probability of conversion. You might have ten cold leads in your campaign, but compared to them one warm lead in your campaign is always a better use of your time. Firstly, it is difficult to try and monitor ten cold leads. A person who is familiar with your name or the name of your company and who is ready to make an invest in your services or products will be easier to pin down, rather than the phone numbers of people who have never even heard of you.
How to Generate More Warm Leads?
Some companies resort to paying for long email list and phone numbers. But this cold approach is a hit-and-miss, and less effective than building and nurturing existing relationships with customers. Your time and money is better spent elsewhere, namely creating new relationships and conversations with interested parties. Such a process can be time-consuming, but the payoff is always greater. Cold calling isn’t something that their sales people enjoy, but they need to do it as part of their job. The trick is converting the cold leads into warm prospects, thereby increasing the chances of a successful sale by the sales team. Some of the most effective methods are given below.
Forming a Blog
If you have an expert sales team on your payroll, chances are you won’t have to work too hard to reach out to customers who know nothing about your business; instead the sales lead will come to you. It becomes possible through the creation of a website that also hosts a blog offering good content. This, in turn, forms a lead nurturing process that sets your company up with warm and hot sales leads.
All you need to do is research, create a blog with the help of one of platforms for business and share good content on your blog. The blog creates a platform to help attract prospects particular a type of lead interested in your business, products (or) services. This not only improves the SEO but automatically alters the feel of the conversation. The tables are now turned in your direction, it’s warm leads vs you because prospects understand that you have valuable insight to provide them before they even engage you directly.
Using Lead Capture Techniques
Get your prospects to visit your website by setting up a well-aimed blog. However, you should make it a point to know who those site visitors are before they leave. Otherwise, it would all be in vain. Use lead capturing to get the details you require about your visitors. Lead capturing involves creating helpful content that solves the problems of your personas. This could be lead magnet, which can be as simple as e-book, Free webinar, or something of those sorts.
You need to link your blog readers to a specific landing page that requests them to fill up a quick form. As soon as the form is submitted, allow them to access the lead magnet for free. Once you have their email run an effective email campaign for these subscribers to warm them up about business and offerings.
Through email marketing catch their interests frequently to make your way towards building a relationship.
Using a CRM System
It is best if your company uses CRM software. This ensures that none of the information you gleaned from your leads go to waste. You will find lots of different tools on the Internet that not only monitor who visited your website, but what they looked at, when they visited, and what offers they downloaded as well. The purpose of this data is to provide you with a clearer picture of your lead and initiate a sales conversion if needed.
LeadBoxer integrated with your CRM system allows a sales representative from your team to understand the lead readiness to buy from you via assigning a lead score to each individual lead. This score is usually anywhere between 1-100, the higher the score the higher will be the probability to convert warm leads.
Harnessing the Power of Social Media
It is important you know how to use social media for the benefit of your company. Simply opening accounts on social networking sites is not going to help; you must know how to get the most out of them. It helps if you begin by thinking long-term.
You will be able to generate the initial interest via a clever post or a giveaway. New leads are always appreciated, but you should also have a plan on how to plan on building on that foundation. Otherwise, you are going to lose any lead as soon as you get it. Social media metrics are a great way to become familiar with your audience and their needs. Not to mention, a great way to generate warm leads.
However, you should first determine the market you wish to cater to. Also, it is important to link your company’s posts, tweets, and updates with the landing page. This will give visitors the chance to know your company even better.
Cross Promotions and Referrals
Warm leads aren’t always the tricky affair that people make them out to be. For instance, customer referrals are a great way to generate business-to-business leads. Customer referrals are built out of trust.
Another great option is cross promotions with other businesses. This method provides a cost-effective, easy and quick way to get more warm leads; leads who you otherwise would never have been able to gain access to. This is a highly exciting prospect. Planning cross promotions carefully is a great way to tap into an audience base that has high interest in your product.
Webinars and Face-to-Face
Despite the rise of social media techniques, the old-fashioned approach is long from dead. It works wonders, especially in the form of executive events and webinars, where it is possible to interact directly with the lead.
Due to the overwhelming focus on technology in the current digital age, the old ways are easy to overlook. But, these methods were used for a very long time and with good reason – they were effective. Because at the end, leads are people just like you and us, it builds when you listen from someone face-to-face rather than the content online.
So your company should try this out. Even telemarketing could be one of the strategies to generate warm leads who are ready to buy if done right.
Email
Generating a warm lead through email is possible if you email one of the higher-ups in the organisation and ask for a referral down to the correct individual, or email the decision maker directly. Irrespective of your approach, a lot rides on the subject line of your email. It needs to be interesting enough for the lead to actually read it and open the mail.
There is a particular way to develop effective cold email subject lines. Use the names of the leads in the subject line only if it makes sense. Keep the subject as specific as possible. Make the subject line as personal as you can so that it appeals to the lead, and turns it warm. Make sure that the email doesn’t sound too much like a marketing email. Try to keep it casual yet professional. You could try experimenting with a question format for the subject line of the email. Always make sure that you deliver what was promised in the subject line in the actual email.
Customers are no longer the same, and sales and marketing are trying to keep up. The rise of search engines and social media, businesses and individuals do not have to wait for sales people to approach them. They themselves can go looking for the things they want and choose whichever company offers the same. Sales and marketing work together to bring in warm leads. This helps create more business than cold leads ever could.
When it comes to marketing, data is king. With in-depth data, marketers can personalize interactions with customers, market to them at the right times, create a more enjoyable experience, and overall, close more sales. However, capturing all of this data, organizing it in one place, and making use of that data has been a struggle. Because using traditional tools such as web analytics, CRMs, and marketing automation is very time consuming. Here a customer data platform software can help.
You typically have to spend a lot of time combining all of this data to get a complete picture of your customer. Even then, this process is limited and you can’t fully take advantage of this data to completely personalize your marketing campaigns.
In this article, we’ll discuss what CDPs are, the difference between them and traditional marketing tools, their benefits, and compare over a dozen CDP options.
Read on or use the links below to “jump” to the section you’d like to read:
The Customer Data Platform Institute defines a Customer Data Platform (CDP) as “a marketer-managed system that creates a persistent, unified customer database that is accessible to other systems”.
In essence, a CDP is a system that pulls together all the data you have on a customer in one place – customer data platform software. With it, you can create a unified view of that customer and see every action they’ve taken since first interacting with your company.
How many times they’ve visited a specific page on your website
When they opened one of your emails
When they clicked a link inside that email
How many times they opened your emails
Information on mobile app sessions, social media comments, purchase orders, and chat history
In short, CDPs can help you understand customer behavior by accurately assessing the customer journey.
Customer Data Platforms vs. CRM vs Marketing Automation: How Are They Different?
You may be thinking, “Don’t CRM or email marketing platforms such as Hubspot and MailChimp already do this?”. Not exactly.
The data that CRMs and email marketing platforms offer is limited. CRMs typically offer basic information and allow you to store customer information such as addresses, emails, etc. Some may even track interactions like email opens and live chat or email conversations.
The same goes for email marketing platforms such as MailChimp. These platforms will store a customer’s email and track email activity. On the other hand, they miss other key areas such as web activity, mobile app activity, and so on.
However, CDPs aim to combine all of this data into one place and try to capture a customer’s entire interaction with a company. A true CDP would have data on a customer’s chat history, email history, website visits, mobile app sessions, purchases, social media interactions. And anything else that would involve an interaction between them and your company.
Some CDPs also allow you to leverage that data to send emails, run marketing automation, optimize advertising, and more.
What Are the Benefits of Using a Customer Data Platform?
CDPs can expand your marketing capabilities with less manpower, saving you time and money. Specific benefits include:
1. Having a Single View of Your Customers
The most obvious reason to use a CDP is that you can get a “single view” of the customer, aka unified customer profile.
You can see their entire interaction with your company in one place, rather than trying to somehow manage and collect this data from multiple data sources and tools.
2. Being Able to Personalize Customer Interactions
Having access to both first-party data and third-party data in one place can allow you to personalize a customer’s entire experience with your company. Instead of going through each data point, you can use data segmentation target particular customer groups.
You can personalize names in emails, send out a coupon directly after a customer has visited a specific page on your website. Also, you can enter them into a B2B marketing automation process when they’ve had a chat with your company, or send them an email when they logged onto your app.
Hence segmentation like the above can help you personalize your marketing campaigns to each single customer. With CDPs, the possible personalized experiences you can craft for your customers are endless.
3. Being Able to Create Highly-Targeted Campaigns
With all of this information at your disposal, you can now create specific targeted campaigns, and in some cases, one-on-one experiences using your customer’s behavioral data.
Do you want to target customers who have visited your pricing page within the past month, have opened up and clicked in your last three emails, downloaded your mobile app and have been actively using it for the past two weeks, and have also contacted your company via email or your live chat widget?
With Customer Data Management Platforms, you can do that
Customer Data Platform Software Options
To manage customer data, CDPs have become common . Different customer data platform software work best for different industries, and each offers unique data across platforms that set each apart from competitors. However here are the top-rated tools in the field:
LeadBoxer
LeadBoxer is a Lead & Customer data platform that focuses on the sales side of the CDP spectrum, by collecting information about your customers throughout their entire customer or buyer journey
We collect and give you information such as:
When a customer visited your website, what pages they visited, and how long they spent on that page
What emails a customer has opened from you when they opened it, and what links they clicked
Get notifications when leads or customers are ready-to-buy or show buyer intent
All of this information is then organized into an Accounts view and a Leads view. And here each of your customers or leads are given a score to gauge how engaged they are with your company:
The score is called ‘Leadscore’ which gives you an idea of which prospects are most worth your sales team’s time and effort.
Each of these customers or leads can be viewed on a micro level to collect real-time data and to see every bit of that person’s activity.
To learn how LeadBoxer can help you understand your customer experience across marketing camapign.
What sets it apart: Instead of manually integrating all of your tools, Segment has a single API that allows you to share data and integrate your entire marketing stack at once. There are also tools for validating and protecting all of your customer data.
Who it’s for: Segment serves a variety of customers, from enterprise-level companies like IBM and Petco to retail like Peloton and SaaS like Zendesk.
Pricing: Segment is free for tracking 1,000 visitors or less per month. The mid-range option for teams, which tracks 10,000 visitors per month, starts at $120 per month. For the enterprise-level option, contact Segment for a quote.
What sets it apart: With the power of AI, Blueshift predicts how likely customers are to purchase, engage, churn, and more, all this based on the data collected. Customer scores and segments automatically update with each interaction, and the predictive affinities function ensures you’re targeting them with the most relevant content.
Who it’s for: Plenty of personal finance companies like ClearScore, LendingTree, and GOBankingRates use Blueshift, as well as B2C companies like Skillshare, Tuft & Needle, and Artifact Uprising.
Pricing: Blueshift doesn’t list their prices, but their solutions range from simple email automation to cross-channel marketing and AI for enterprises.
What sets it apart: In addition to tracking cross-channel data collection on individual customers, Exponea has experiment capabilities that allow you to tweak and test your website’s appearance so that you can always be improving customer experiences.
Who it’s for: B2C brands will get the most out of Exponea’s tools. Their top customers tend to be clothing and accessory brands like Topshop, Missguided, and FitFlop.
Pricing: Fill out a form to receive a custom pricing plan based on the needs of your company.
What sets it apart: QuanticMind unifies all your customer data to help you enhance your advertising and customer experiences. If you want to get more out of your advertising spend, QuanticMind customer data platform software can do it with automated bid optimization.
Who it’s for: QuanticMind is primarily geared toward large enterprises like WP Engine and Rosetta Stone, but it also serves leading B2B and SaaS brands like MOZ.
Pricing: QuanticMind doesn’t list pricing or product tiers on their website. Schedule a demo to learn which solution and pricing plan best fits your business.
What sets it apart: WithCustomerLabs CDP, you can select specific elements on your website to instantly create trackable events to collect customer data. The friendly interface erases the need to write any code, making it possible to start tracking all the website events you want within minutes.
Who it’s for: CustomerLabs has customer relationship management solutions for e-commerce, B2B, and SaaS companies.
Pricing: Personal plans start at $0 per month but tracks only 2,500 customer events. Business plans start at $49 per month and track 0.5 million events per month.
What sets it apart: The CDP is only one capability of Emarsys, a B2C marketing automation platform. With Emarsys, businesses can create personalized customer experiences at scale and show you where to focus on your next marketing steps.
Who it’s for: Emarsys is primarily a solution for B2C brands like Tupperware and Char-Broil.
Pricing: Emarsys doesn’t openly list its pricing on its website. Get in touch for a demo and pricing plans.
What sets it apart: Optimove’s self-optimizing campaigns use customer data to adjust triggered actions so that customers always receive the campaigns they’re most likely to engage with.
Who it’s for: In addition to retail, financial services, and apps, Optimove customer data platform software has solutions for the gaming industry to analyze player behavior.
Pricing: Optimove doesn’t list pricing or product tiers on the website. Request a demo to learn which features and pricing plan best fits your business.
What sets it apart: Tealium AudienceStream CDP is one aspect of Tealium’s Universal Data Hub platform. It claims the biggest integration marketplace in the industry, offering you to setup a data warehouse to unify your marketing stack.
Who it’s for: Tealium countslarge, diverse organizations like Providence St. Joseph Health and the Utah Jazz basketball team among their customers.
Pricing: Telium’s product tiers and prices aren’t listed on the website. To learn which features and pricing plans fit your business, schedule a demo.
What sets it apart: Pimcore CDP is open-source software that aggregates best customer data and customer insights to create real-time personalized experiences at any scale.
Who it’s for: Pimcore CDP serves a diverse and largely European customer view, from freight and port logistics company Rhenus Logistics to online marketplace Modile.
Pricing: Get in touch with a sales rep for a custom pricing plan.
What sets it apart: Boxever is CDP that collects data on web visits, mobile activity, email activity, calls, ads, and more. It combines all of this type of data into one place and allows you to personalize your marketing and deliver predictive offers.
Who it’s for: Boxever’s largest customers tend to be airlines like Jetstar, Emirates, and Ryanair.
Pricing: Pricing is crafted on a per business basis.
What sets it apart: Evergage allows you to personalize the content on your website, app, and emails on a one-to-one basis in real-time.
Who it’s for: Large companies like Intuit and Walmart use Evergage, as well as software companies like Autodesk and B2B solution providers like Citrix.
Pricing: Pricing is offered on a per business basis, so you’ll need to contact a salesperson for a quote.
What sets it apart: AgilOne is CDP specifically for B2C companies. The platform offers a “360 profile” where you can view customer interaction. The platform automatically cleanses, standardizes, and enriches customer profiles to help you deliver consistent experiences.
Who it’s for: B2C companies Lululemon Athletica and Tumi are among AgilOne’s customers.
Pricing: Pricing is offered on a per business basis and you will need to contact the company for a quote.
Customer Data Platforms are the Next Level of Marketing Automation
Having a customer’s data all in one place rather than hopping in between a suite of separate tools saves marketers and salespeople time and money.
Also with a unified view of customers, you can create personalized marketing campaigns that maximize your spend, increase conversions, and create delighted customers for life.
The best customer data platform from the list is definitely LeadBoxer and Segment. You can choose your CDP depending upon you current tech stack and business goals.
Looking for more qualified leads?
We offerLead Identification and Lead intelligence through website & email tracking
Business-to-business (B2B) demand generation is important for any business. It is especially crucial for start-ups, companies launching new apps, and those offering business services. Awareness of your business products and services involves demand generation marketing strategies.
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Awareness is at the heart of demand generation marketing. To sell your services, your customers need to know they are solutions available and you provide the best solution for their business challenges.
Demand gen marketing reaches out to customers who are unaware of your brand, products, or services. This type of marketing positions your offering as the best option to meet their needs.
Basically demand gen marketing is a lead generation strategy where you target qualified leads to create a demand for your product who didn’t know your solution existed before.
How to Develop and Implement a Demand Generation Marketing Strategies
There is an effective way of creating demand for your products (or) services and it needs a hefty investment of efforts in marketing and sales. Below are the steps to create a demand generation campaign to make sure your customers’ needs are paired with the solutions your business offers:
1. Create a Robust Content Marketing Strategy
When people visit your website and blog, they need to know what your company does and what it offers them. Your content needs to be clear, concise, informative, timely, and relatable.
A content calendar is a great way to regularly get information out about your brand. When people and search engines see you consistently produce original, quality content, your company will become visible. It will also be seen as credible.
Quality content is for both readers and search engines. Search robots will notice the keywords and relevancy of your content. When you provide important, useful keyword-rich information, your content will appear higher in search results. This will increase your brand’s visibility and expose more web users to your brand and its offerings.
2. Offer Free Content
You will be hard-pressed to find anyone who will refuse free stuff. When you’re looking for new customers to introduce to your brand, products, and services, you need to appear trustworthy. When you offer free content, you’ll establish your brand as an authoritative source in your market.
A successful demand generation strategy involves offering lead magnets and free content. Some of the content you can offer for free include:
After you have content on your website and free offerings, make sure you share it on your organization’s social media pages. 53% of consumers are more likely to make purchases from brands that are transparent on social media. Your content must be authentic to your brand and share relevant, engaging content.
4. Partner With Influencers
Some of your marketing efforts needs to be directed towards collaborating with reputable, well-known individuals in your market is another way to improve your brand’s online visibility and credibility. When your brand associates with a well-known influencer in your industry, your brand will get attention.
These associations through influencer research and outreach take many forms. Some of the common ways partnerships develop include podcast interviews, social media mentions, advertising on industry-related websites, and guest posting on their website.
5. Continually Measure and Tweak Your Demand Generation Program
Your work isn’t done when your demand marketing campaign comes to an end. Compare the results to your original goals and key performance indicators (KPIs). Did your B2B demand generation marketing campaign meet, surpass or fall short of those benchmarks? Continue to analyze it after its completion through the use of tools like Google Analytics and Facebook Insights.
Why Demand Generation Marketing Strategies are Essential
Brand awareness is the most important goal for 89% of B2B marketers. What is the importance of a demand generation in b2b marketing and why is it a “must-do” for your organization? Here are some benefits to this type of marketing strategy
Help Make Small Businesses and Startups “Known”
B2B demand generation efforts are crucial for any business. It is more important for start-ups and new brands who have yet to form a substantial customer base.
Demand marketing fast-tracks these new businesses in establishing credibility and trust with their customers in the sales funnel. Once this happens, business and client relationships can form.
Increases the Conversion Rate = More Sales
59% of consumers are more likely to purchase a new product or service from a brand they trust. Bringing awareness to your brand through demand generation marketing is the first step in building this trust.
Builds Trust and Credibility
B2B demand generation marketing is most effective when customers have a strong relationship or connection with the company they do business with. Demand marketing exposes your brand and its products and services to business leaders through well-written, engaging, informative, and optimized content. Your digital marketing efforts needs to instill a sense of expertise in your niche while also relating to the reader.
6 Tips and Tricks for Demand Generation Marketing
Below are some tips for B2B demand generation marketing your marketing team can use to spark interest in your products or services. And don’t forget about sales enablement for your team too.
1. Consider Your Marketing Sales Funnel
According to Salesforce, 79% of a company’s leads never convert to a sale because 65% of companies don’t have a funnel or lead qualifying system in place, and of those who do have a funnel, the majority don’t have a way to measure its effectiveness.
When your company has a marketing funnel that is measured, you’re able to meet customers where they are in the sales and marketing process. You’ll be equipped to give customers the appropriate content and messaging that moves them closer to a sale.
The typical B2B funnel consists of six stages: awareness, interest, consideration, intent, evaluation, and purchase. Demand generation marketing addresses potential customers at the top of the funnel in the awareness stage.
For demand generation, you’re interacting with a large, broad audience that is not familiar with your brand, service, or product. You want to avoid any sales content. Instead, offer them blog posts, downloads, free ebooks, infographics, and engaging social media content. Here some of the best customer data platform software can help.
Remember to insert tracking on registration forms, emails, and webpages. The insertion of tracking on your business’ online properties provides valuable information about those curious about your brand. Some popular tracking programs to try include:
While demand generation marketing targets and engages with customers at the top stage of the funnel, it doesn’t mean you should neglect to implement a lead scoring system or have a strong lead strategy.
As with every business funnel, the number of customers who make it all the way through to create a sale is a small percentage of leads that entered the funnel at the awareness stage.
As leads progress through the funnel, the costs, and resources needed to keep them moving forward to make a sale increase. This is because they are qualified and are the most interested in doing business with you. A lead scoring system evaluates how likely a lead is to make a purchase.
4. Invest in Display Advertising
Most marketers today invest in online advertising. With the high competition for prime advertising real estate on websites, it can be difficult for new, small businesses with limited advertising budgets to compete. Especially when the future of sales post pandemic isn’t so clear.
Google has a suite of marketing platforms geared toward different budgets and marketing goals. Google Display Network consists of partnerships with millions of websites on which business owners can advertise.
The purpose of this type of advertising is not getting people to purchase your product or service but to create brand awareness. According to Clutch and WebFx, 55% of companies use display advertising and receive an average click-through-rate of 35%.
5. Offer Your Best
Rather than bombard customers with information, put your brand’s best foot forward by sharing your finest piece of content. Content should be informational, not promotional.
When you offer your best content, your brand will become recognized as the go-to information source. This is key in the long run as it forges positive relationships between your company and its customers.
Consumers who feel they can trust an organization will most likely become loyal to it. This benefits your business as loyal customers are easier and less expensive to retain than new ones.
6. Build Online Relationships and Credibility
Customer experience plays a bigger role in a company’s bottom line than ever before. Nearly three-quarters of consumers say good customer service plays a role in their loyalty to a brand. Conversely, negative customer service experiences cost businesses billions of dollars each year. Check out more about cost per lead on our blog.
Some customer relationship-building ideas include:
Show-off your expertise through your social selling, blog and website content
Be responsive, authentic, and transparent in your social media comments and direct messaging (DM)
Invest in producing YouTube videos where consumers can see the people behind your brand which will give it a personal touch
Participate in industry podcasts and online industry conferences
Get connected with influencers to review and talk about your products or services
Encourage customer reviews
LeadBoxer can help your start-up or small business with its demand generation marketing through lead qualification. With LeadBoxer’s tools and services, you can better connect with leads that are most interested in and in need of your services.
Pop culture would have you believe that the most important part of any sales journey is the art of closing a deal. Equally important, however, is how you open it. Pursuing only the most viable prospects with the need, authority, and budget to purchase your product is a winning recipe for securing new accounts. Lead qualification is an essential part of this recipe. But what exactly is it, and how do you do it?
In this article, you’ll learn how to qualify a sales lead from the moment they first visit your website all the way through to after an initial discovery call. With the information you gather, you’ll be able to effortlessly determine which prospects are worth pursuing and which aren’t, saving you time and money.
Lead qualification is a process of marketing and sales teams working together to forecast the likelihood that a prospect will ultimately make a purchase. It occurs at every stage of the sales journey and ultimately decides if the prospect will be funneled down the pipeline.
The first step of lead qualification happens during the inbound marketing stage. At this stage, your company’s marketing team captures contact info via site visits, email subscriptions, email tracking pixel or social media, then decides if the lead fits the profile of your company’s ideal customer.
This qualifies the prospect to move on to the next step, which is a discovery call from a sales rep. The sales rep leads a conversation that reveals the prospect’s needs, project timelines, purchasing authority, and any budgetary constraints.
Information gathered during a discovery call further determines if the prospect is viable of the time it takes to craft a proposal, or if you’re better off pursuing someone else’s business.
Why Lead Qualification is Important?
Lead qualification is important because it saves you time, energy, and ultimately your bottom line. It occurs very early in the pipeline, ideally when you’re making initial contact or even beforehand. It helps you determine:
If the prospect is in the right industry and territory to benefit from your product
And if they have a need your product can solve
If the person you’re talking to has the budget and authority to make a purchasing decision
If there is some way you can provide value over your competitors or the prospect’s current vendor
But if the lead doesn’t meet your criteria for what makes a qualified prospect, then you can disqualify them. Disqualification may sound like a bad thing, but in reality it saves you time and allows you to focus on more promising contacts.
Bottom line, lead qualifications allows you to quickly assess whether or not you’re talking to a person that has any real intent in buying what you’re selling. This can also help make sales reps more efficient, productive, and motivated. Without it, you could waste time talking to people who will never close, and no one wants to feel like they’re just spinning their wheels.
Looking for more qualified leads?
We offer Lead Identification and Lead intelligence through website & email tracking
Lead scoring is a process of assigning a point value to a prospect at or near the beginning of the sales pipeline. It often happens before a sales rep ever makes a discovery call. In fact, it may inform whether or not a call is worth having in the first place. This ensures that reps spend their time talking to only the most promising leads.
Before you can calculate a leadscore, you’ll need to gather the following data about a prospect:
Buyer Profile
Does this prospect fall into your target industry and territory? Do they fit the profile of your ideal customer?
To find out, you’ll need to include fields in the forms on your landing pages that gather the relevant information. Anyone tasked with this level of qualification – be it a sales rep or a marketing team in charge of identifying prospects – should always keep the company’s ideal customer profile in mind.
From there, you’ll be able to award points to leads whose answers align with your buyer profile and take away points for those who don’t. You can also award points for those who fill out fields that were otherwise listed as optional on the form, as this demonstrates additional interest on behalf of the prospect.
Company Information
If you’re a B2B organization, then knowing the size of the prospect’s company and its contact information is essential to qualify the lead. You can add or take away points depending on how the size of their company relates to your ideal customer profile.
Online Behavior
The more time a prospect interacts with your site, the more likely that they’re interested in your product. Tracking page views, length of visit, downloads, and frequency of visits over a 30, 60, or 90 day period are all good data points to start with.
Email Engagement
Just because someone signed up for to your email list does not necessarily mean they’re ready or even interested in buying from you. Open rates and click-through rates are a more meaningful indication of interest.
Social Media Engagement
Tracking Facebook or Twitter likes, retweets, shares, and click-through rates from your posts are all ways of tracking social media engagement. The more engaged a prospect is, the higher their leadscore should be.
Spam Detection
Using all lowercase letters when filling out website forms is a red flag that the prospect may be a bot. The use of a Gmail or Yahoo email address instead of a company email address may also indicate that they don’t fit your buyer profile. These indicators can subtract points from the prospect’s leadscore if it doesn’t disqualify them altogether.
Now that you have a set of data, you’ll need to interpret it in a way that immediately communicates how qualified a lead is. To manually calculate an actual point value or leadscore, follow these steps:
Step 1: Set Your Benchmark
To do this, divide the number of new customers acquired by the number of all leads generated. This conversion rate is your control, which you’ll use to compare to other characteristics.
Step 2: Choose the Most Valuable Characteristics
Which characteristics did your highest quality leads exhibit? In addition to going with your gut, consult your sales reps, marketing team, analytics, etc. for their insights.
Step 3: Calculate Close Rates
As with setting your benchmark, divide the number of customers acquired by leads generated that exhibited certain qualities. Do this for each characteristic.
Step 4: Compare Characteristics
Which characteristics showed significantly higher close rates to your benchmark? Assign higher point values to those characteristics. For example, if leads who downloaded a certain whitepaper have a close rate of 25%, you might assign that characteristic 25 points on future leadscores.
Once you decide how you’re going to calculate leadscores, you can save yourself time and energy by investing in a lead generation and sales tool. Many will capture all the data you need, then automatically calculate it. Software dashboards are usually visual, easy to reference, and quickly identify who is the most promising prospect to pursue.
Here’s a look at how you can customize different characteristics or information in LeadBoxer to automatically calculate a lead score for potential prospects:
After a lead has been gathered and qualified with a leadscore by the marketing team, it’s time for a sales rep to step in and make a discovery call.
Lead Qualification Frameworks and Questions
At this level, sales reps determine whether or not the prospect has any real need or desire for the product. This is done by asking the right questions during a discovery call.
Several thought leaders and top sales reps have spent decades developing multiple frameworks for their lead qualification processes. The method you chose to follow will ultimately depend on your industry and the average size of accounts you typically work with. Your personal conversation style and comfort zone might also play a role in what framework you reference.
These questions have the added benefit of encouraging potential leads to open up about their needs, frustrations, and pain points. Should you decide that the lead is qualified to move forward in the process, you can use this information to tailor your pitch and deliver a more effective proposal later on.
BANT stands for budget, authority, need, and timeline. Although the brainchild of IBM, it’s the go-to framework for qualifying leads in a variety of markets and companies. Some relevant questions to ask during a discovery call would include:
Budget: How much of the budget is set aside to address this challenge?
Authority: Are you in the position to make a purchasing decision to address this challenge?
Need: What challenge are you dealing with and why hasn’t it been dealt with before?
Timeline: How soon do you hope to solve this challenge?
Strengths: BANT is simple and straightforward. For anyone with a low-stakes or lower priced product with no existing qualification framework in place, it’s a good option to start with and develop from there.
Weaknesses: BANT’s questions don’t follow a logical order. It would be a bit daring to open a discovery call by jumping straight to a question about money. Plus, according to CEB’s research, 5.4 people are involved in B2B purchasing decisions. When considering authority, the answer is likely that multiple people are involved and should therefore be brought into the conversation.
CHAMP
CHAMP was developed as a solution to the seemingly backward sequencing of BANT so that the more important questions are asked first for both the buyer and the qualifier.
Challenges: What problem needs solving in your business? What challenges are you still faced with that your current solution still does not solve or address as effectively as you would like?
Authority: In addition to yourself, who else is involved in this purchasing decision? Should we bring them into the conversation? What are the organizational relationships that influence the decision?
Money: What are your expectations for the investment necessary to purchase the solution?
Prioritization: When do you plan to implement a solution to your problem? Are you looking at any other possible solutions?
Strengths: The ordering of questions follows a more natural trajectory of conversation. For those just beginning to explore qualification frameworks, this may be the easiest to keep at the back of your mind during a discovery call.
Weaknesses: As far as conversations go, CHAMP is still a little shallow. For one, it doesn’t get into how a prospect would measure the success of the project. This leaves the sales rep ill-prepared to fully demonstrate value further down the pipeline during the proposal stage.
GPCTBA/C&I
Hubspot developed what is certainly the longest acronym in sales, but they swear by it. Although they break down their framework into more detail than this, in a nutshell GPCTBA/C&I stands for:
Goals: What’s your top priority right now?
Plans: How do you plan to achieve that goal?
Challenges: What difficulties do you foresee with your plan?
Timeline: When do you hope to solve this? If you don’t buy at this time, what remedial actions do you plan to take?
Budget: What have you spent on achieving this goal so far? What additional funds can you allocate towards it?
Authority: How does your company purchase products of this type? Who else is concerned with this buying decision and what are some of their concerns? What ego or ownership issues come up that need to be managed and respected that I need to be mindful of?
Negative consequences: What happens if you don’t reach this goal? What will it cost you and your company if you keep things the way they are today?
Positive Implications: What can you achieve next if you do reach this goal?
Strengths: In an era when multiple solutions to a person’s problem are just a Google search away, it’s more important than ever to get clear on how relevant your product is to their needs and how closely they fit into your niche. This framework gets into the nitty-gritty and can quickly indicate if a prospect is truly viable. Plus, it was developed by a SaaS company, so it likely translates well to other SaaS providers.
Weaknesses: Sales reps unfamiliar with this framework will likely need to practice holding a conversation that touches on all these topics in a natural way. Otherwise, you risk hosting a discovery call that comes off as more like an interrogation.
It’s possible that there are questions relevant to your product or industry that aren’t covered by any of the frameworks above. In that case, you’ll want to tweak your approach so that you’re covering all your bases.
Some additional questions worth considering are:
What are the concerns or roadblocks that could come up down the road and get in the way of us working together?
What are the timely and relevant issues that are going on internally?
Which is the overall mood of the company and its leaders towards this problem?
What internal resources can you leverage to try and resolve this issue on your own?
How will your current vendors react to the possibility you’ll buy from us?
Whatever framework and sets of questions you go with, don’t overload the person you’re speaking with by asking them too many. The idea is to engage them in meaningful conversation, not convince them that you’re an interrogator.
When to Move Prospects Forward
After making a discovery call, you’ll need to make a decision about whether or not to continue the sales process. Some good signs that prospects are ideal candidates for moving forward include:
Pain Points
The prospect clearly identified what challenge they have and talked about it at length. It’s clear this is an issue that is a top priority and needs to be solved soon.
Specific Goals
During the conversation, the prospect was certain on measurable goals and outcomes. This shows that they’ve spent a great deal of time thinking about the challenge and will be receptive to solutions that propose to meet those goals.
Knowledge
Overall, the prospect knew the ins and outs of the challenge or project like the back of their own hand. This shows that they likely have sway over the purchasing decision if they’re not in charge of it themselves.
However, if you encounter some of these signs during your discover call, you might want to consider stopping the process:
Short Answers
Whether it’s because they don’t have the time to talk, they haven’t thought about their challenges in detail, or they don’t have a pain point you can address, this is a clear indicator that the prospect isn’t interested.
Inconsistent Answers
Conflicting responses are an indicator that the prospect might not have that much influence over the project, or it’s not enough of a priority that they’re willing to find a solution just yet. In either case, you’ll want to save your time and pursue other business.
Qualify Leads and Close More Sales
An optimized leads qualification process serves two main functions: to forecast whether or not a prospect is worth the time and effort of a proposal, and to help reps tailor that proposal for maximum effectiveness.
The first step to qualifying a sales lead is to generate a leadscore based on their engagement with your website, emails, and social media posts. The second step is to make a discovery call to determine their needs, purchasing authority, and budget.
While this may seem relatively straightforward, there’s a lot of data and elements that need to be taken into consideration in order to calculate a leadscore. Thankfully, there are several different kinds of lead generation software out there that can gather, analyze, and calculate that leadscore for you. In no time at all, you’ll be filling your pipeline with qualified prospects and winning more accounts.
Looking for more qualified leads?
We offer Lead Identification and Lead intelligence through website & email tracking
The difference between demand generation and lead generation can be confusing. Both share similar traits, however, the goals and specific tactics behind each method are different. Thus, having an understanding of both can help you to create a more effective marketing strategy.In this post, we’ll define both demand and lead generation and how they differ from one another. We’ll also discuss specific tactics that each method uses and talk about when to use demand generation vs. lead generation.Let’s get to it:
What is Demand Generation?
Demand generation, or “demand gen” for short, is the process of creating awareness and demand for your company’s product or service. In short, demand gen aims to bring new visitors to your website or business in order to introduce them to your company.The end result is to build your target audience, establish trust, and to spark interest in your company.Types of demand generation content include:
All of this content is provided for “free” in order to attract new potential customers. At this stage, they shouldn’t have to provide their email or other contact information in order to access this content.
Demand Generation Ideas:
To get you started, here are a few demand generation ideas you can use:
Create SEO-Driven Content
One way to create awareness is to create content that your target audience is already searching for. There are many ways to identify keyword opportunities. For one, you can look at Google related searches. Simply search a keyword in Google and then scroll to the bottom of that page:
Here you will see a list of related keywords that people are searching for. You can also look at the types of questions people are asking in Quora or use a tool like Ahrefs for keyword research.
Guest Posts
Guest posting is the process of creating a blog post for another popular blog in your industry. This is a great way to reach your target audience and “piggy-back” off of the traffic that the established blog already receives.
Create Industry Expert Roundups
An expert roundup is a blog post where you gather quotes from experts in your industry on a particular topic that you know your target audience will enjoy. This type of content is often shared well. Not only that, contributors will typically share the blog post with their own social networks once it’s published.One way to find experts in your industry is by Googling your chosen topic and finding people who have already written on the topic or have provided a quote. You can also use a tool like HARO to help to collect responses.For a great example of an expert roundup, check out our blog post, “19+ Lead Generation Tools from the Experts”.
Advertise on Industry Blogs
Running display ads, investing in a sponsored post, or purchasing a sponsored email slot from an industry blog that you know your target audience already visits, can be a good way to take advantage of a site that has a larger viewership than yours.
Run a Viral Contest
You can create a viral contest by creating a contest where you allow participants to earn more entries by referring new people to the contest, sharing it on social, commenting on a post, etc. This increases the likelihood that contest will be shared, making it a good way to increase awareness.Three options for running a viral contest include:
Lead generation, or “lead gen” for short, is the process of converting potential customers into qualified leads (ie. someone who has a genuine interest in what you have to offer). In short, lead gen is a way to funnel-in eventual purchasers of your product or service down the path of buying.The end result is to find qualified leads for your company so that they then be added to a lead nurturing process or so that a salesperson can follow up.Lead gen typically involves creating “gated” content and then asking for someone’s contact information in order for them to receive that piece of content. Types of lead generation content include:
Any type of gated content (such as an eBook, PDF, checklist, cheat sheet, whitepaper, etc.)
Courses
Free-Trials
Product Demos
Viral Contests (where someone needs to enter their email or other contact information to enter)
In order to receive access to this content, the person must enter in their email and/or other contact information that the company wants to collect.To learn more, this guide breaks down the basics of lead generation and why it’s so important.
If you have yet to create any type of lead magnet on your site, an eBook is a good one to start with. Most eBooks tackle a broad topic in your industry, thus you can promote it across multiple blog posts on your site.
Create a Content Upgrade
A content upgrade is another type of lead magnet that is there to entice people to enter their email and/or other contact information in exchange for the content upgrade.Rather than an eBook which is typically more general, a content upgrade is typically specific to a particular blog post. This increases the conversion rate of signups since the content is more closely related to the blog post the person is reading.Examples of a content upgrade might include:
A PDF version of that same blog post
A checklist
Step-by-step instructions
A cheat sheet
Host a Webinar
Hosting a webinar with experts in your industry can be another way to collect contact information from your audience by requiring them to sign up in advance for the webinar. Software such as WebinarJam and Demio can help you get this set up.
Use a Lead Analytics Platform
While collecting contact information from potential leads via lead magnets and webinars are viable lead generation tactics, sometimes you have to take matters into your own hands. Not everyone is willing to fork over their email or phone number.This is when a direct outreach approach can be helpful. For people who don’t submit contact information but still might be qualified leads, a lead analytics platform like LeadBoxer can help you to identify these people and find their contact information so you can reach out directly.For more lead generation ideas, we recommend the following resources:
What’s the Difference Between Lead Generation and Demand Generation?
Lead generation is a subset of demand generation. Demand generation is used to create awareness and attract new people to your business, while lead generation is used to qualify those people into “leads” and get them ready for the next step in your marketing or sales process.
A simple way to understand the differences is to take a look at the different types of content each method uses.Demand generation uses free content (such as blog posts, articles, videos, etc.) in order to create awareness and to attract your target audience.Lead generation content is typically “gated”, meaning a person has to provide their email and/or other contact information in order to receive that piece of content (such as a PDF, whitepaper, checklist, etc.).
This allows sales and marketing to continue the relationship and nudge that person towards a purchase.You don’t need to choose one or the other. Both lead gen and demand gen can be used effectively within your overall marketing strategy.
When creating content, you want to consider the goal behind that piece of content. Is the goal to generate awareness or to increase leads?For example, if you create an eBook and the goal is to generate awareness, this is demand generation. In order to maximize your results, people should be able to download the eBook freely without needing to input any contact information.
This will make it easier for people to share it with their friends and colleagues.However, if the goal is to find qualified leads, this is lead generation and that piece of contact should be gated.As you can hopefully see, it’s nearly impossible to go with one without the other.
An effective marketing strategy will include both lead generation and demand generation. Demand generation is used to attract new customers and lead generation is used to identify qualified leads.
Finding ways to lessen the burden of manual processes for your sales team helps increase productivity. In a fast-paced environment, the more time spent with customers instead of handling data entry, the better chances of landing a deal.
Increasing return on investment (ROI) and improving sales numbers are crucial for companies in the B2B industry. By implementing workflow automation into your business, lead generation will become smoother and your team should see a boost in sales growth.
Use the links below to “jump ahead”, or keep reading to learn all the best ways to use automation to help scale your business:
Simply put, workflow automation handles repetitive manual tasks, automates them, and saves your business precious time and resources. By shifting the work from an employee to software, automation can eliminate mistakes, speed up the flow of things, and help improve overall performance.
The goal of this strategy is to reduce the time employees spend handling tedious tasks. Freeing up this time for your sales staff should provide them with more opportunities to spend bringing in new customers and nurturing existing ones. The automated tasks should be parts of the workflow that require little intellectual input, such as data entry.
Another reason to implement automation is to reduce errors. Increasing efficiency is more than simply doing tasks quickly.
By eliminating human mistakes, automation can help your team run smoother with accurate information. This can be as simple as software capturing contacts rather than a salesperson typing out a profile.
Workflow automation is important for companies who want to remain competitive within their industries. This can help management audit processes due to the visibility created through automation. By seeing the workflow from top to bottom, teams can eliminate redundant tasks that clog up the pipeline.
Performance tracking can also benefit from automation. For those driven by key performance indicators (KPIs), like sales, automating a workflow to track productivity can help employees see where they work best and which areas need improvement. This data can help boost sales and push your sales team to a higher performance level.
This can also help improve the overall customer experience (CX). Eliminating errors and freeing up resources allows your customers to have a smoother experience with your product. Salespeople can also provide more availability for customers to help work through any product issues.
Automation can help increase communication across departments and break down silos. Sales and marketing work closely together, and automated workflows can eliminate overlap in tasks like lead generation. Accurate data entry and fewer mistakes can also improve the quality of leads as they enter your sales funnel.
Using workflow automation for lead generation is a great way to boost sales productivity. This technology can help gather contact details, track website engagement, and introduce sales representatives to new, qualified leads.
Using Workflow Automation for Lead Generation
Moving leads through the pipeline is crucial for ending the cycle with a purchase. It can be tedious tracking leads, generating contact information, and updating their stage in the sales cycle. Workflow automation for lead generation can help improve the process, cut down on redundant tasks, and increase overall lead quality.
This type of strategy does more than input leads into your CRM. Automation helps place leads into different sales stages when certain actions are completed. It can also move unresponsive leads from the sales pipeline, which helps your team focus on prospects most likely to convert.
Using automation can ensure leads are introduced to sales representatives at the right time in the buying process. For example, using trigger points in email campaigns or on the website can create a workflow. This would have sales representatives automatically assigned to leads once a call-to-action has been completed.
By having an automatic outreach plan, your team can be sure to connect with leads in a timely manner. In turn, the sales conversation will begin while the prospect is still in need of your company’s solution.
Workflow automation can help keep your CRM and data as up-to-date as possible. Tracking and updating information in real-time as leads work their way through the sales pipeline helps your team eliminate any duplication. This allows marketing and sales teams to know which leads are ready to convert, and which need to be nurtured through outreach.
Automation for lead generation can also help score and qualify leads to increase the overall quality of prospects. By tracking website and content engagement, as well as other factors, scoring leads can help your sales team determine which prospects are ready for outreach. Your team will better determine which customers can benefit from your product as a solution to their needs and will boost the overall CX.
How Sales Workflow Automation Can Increase Sales Productivity & Growth
Almost everyone has heard the saying “Work smarter, not harder.” In sales, this mantra is important to boosting overall growth.
Rather than getting bogged down in repetitive, daily tasks, sales teams should be focusing most of their time leading prospects through the pipeline. 50% of the time spent on sales is wasted by performing unproductive prospecting.
In an industry where time is invaluable, knowing that much of a sales representative’s day is wasted on mindless tasks is obviously cause for concern among business leaders. In addition, the “Harvard Business Review” reveals that incorrect, outdated, or bad data adds $3 trillion in costs to US businesses every year. Utilizing workflow automation for your sales department can cut down on inefficiency and improve data quality.
Part of the reason bad data costs companies is the manual labor required by employees to fix mistakes. By introducing an automated workflow for collecting information, your team can allow the software to take the burden of cleaning data. This ensures your salespeople are working with the most up-to-date client information and can help leads be reached at a quicker pace.
Rather than spending their time searching for contact data or trying to determine if a lead is a good fit, your sales team can rely on automation to sort this information.
An automated sales workflow can also increase productivity across your team. Salespeople will be able to complete their jobs with fewer resources, including less time spent on mundane tasks, which helps avoid bottlenecks within the process. Automation standardizes much of the sales cycle, which allows your team to funnel leads through the pipeline quickly and efficiently.
Teams experience better communication and increased collaboration. Software allows access to real-time updates in the automated process.
This allows sales and marketing to align their efforts and adjust as needed to provide prospects with the best experience possible. Automation also demands more accountability from your employees, so it’s easier to understand who is responsible for specific tasks.
Sales workflow automation can also help reduce costs within the department. Cutting down on manual tasks lowers the employee turnover rate while providing better customer service. This helps retain clients at a higher rate, which should lead to an increase in ROI.
Top 5 Workflow Automation Software Platforms
Choosing a quality workflow automation software will add an important piece to your tech stack. Using a platform that integrates with your current tools is a great way to reduce extra costs. For companies who want to get the most out of sales automation, check out the following workflow automation software options.
1. Zapier
This platform helps streamline your processes and works with specific apps to make sure information gets to the right place. Zapier stands out due to its number of app integrations, including Leadboxer for lead generation, qualifying, and scoring. This software can help your team create workflows that allow your apps to talk to each other.
Pricing starts at $19.99/month (per user).
2. ClickUp
ClickUp is great for increasing productivity and managing a team. It also works nicely with external apps to help create an efficient workflow for your department. The automation is pretty simple. Your team only has to decide which action needs to occur once a trigger point has been reached.
Pricing varies based on your needs, but for $5/month per member, your team can have access to the unlimited plan.
3. KissFlow
For a simple option that may be a great fit for companies beginning their automation journey, check out KissFlow. This platform is use-friendly, which helps your team easily adapt automation into their daily routine.
Plans start at $200/month.
4. Integrify
Looking for software that’s great for team collaboration? Integrify may be a good fit. This platform streamlines your processes while allowing notes and sequential flows, which encourage teamwork.
Pricing varies, so speak with a sales rep to get a quote.
5. Flokzu
A great platform for project management, Flokzu can help create tasks and send notifications to your team. Their reporting feature is great for tracking metrics and team performance.
Businesses, particularly B2B models, rely on successful navigation of the sales journey to close the deal, like lead generation platforms. One of the most important stages of the journey is the beginning, which means lead generation. All companies have limited amounts of energy and resources to accomplish their goals, so it’s crucial to spend these on the right prospects.
Continue reading for an examination of why automation is a necessity in sales today and a breakdown of are the top five lead generation systems or “jump ahead” to the following topics:
Lead generation is the starting line for all sales. The research and efforts spent on this step will determine the rest of the sales cycle. Rather than burying employees with manual identifying and qualifying, automating the process with a lead generation company can kickstart a smoother customer journey.
What is Lead Identification and Lead Qualification?
The first stage in any sales journey is pinpointing the prospects worth reaching out to, or in short, identifying leads. The next step is determining if these potential clients are worth your time and energy, also known as qualifying leads.
While there are many manual ways to determine the value of prospective clients, finding ways to streamline the process can help your company focus its efforts on closing the deal. The easiest way to simplify lead generation is through automation by investing in a platform that meets your needs.
Lead Generation Software and Data Analysis
Understanding the role data plays in automated lead generation will help your company better utilize any chosen tool. This data provides insight into a prospect’s engagement with your brand, as well as information that helps tailor your marketing strategies for maximum outcomes.
Lead generation companies help you accurately target clients who will benefit from your services. The data analysis from these platforms works to help break down information provided by online engagement, as well as score prospects based on their actions.
Lead generation companies help you see which parts of your brand visitors are engaging with. With this insight, you can tailor your marketing and sales strategies to highlight the ways you will be able to help these customers.
Top lead generation companies are able to collect contact information from anonymous web traffic, which makes it simple to connect with these prospects. Using a lead generation platform allows you to see how qualified these online visitors are in terms of benefiting from your services.
Crucial insights provided by this type of software kickstarts the sales journey. By targeting leads most in need of your services, your business will be able to increase sales conversions.
Understanding Lead Generation Software
Automation is one of the most important features of lead generation software. Instead of using employees and company resources on manual paperwork for data analysis, automated software streamlines the process by doing the crunch work.
Platforms track website and email engagement to identify potential prospects. By having a list of potential clients given to you, with data to illustrate their recent activity, your team can focus on selling instead of research.
So, how do you decide what software is best for your business? “Lead generation platform” has become a loose term covering several different types of technology.
Programs like LeadFeeder and Snitcher are considered IP lookup tools. Their main function is identifying potential leads based on the IP addresses that visit your website. While online visitor identification is an important part of lead generation, other platforms offer more robust operations to dive deeper into the sales cycle.
Taking it a step further, other programs focus on providing contact details from visitors who engage with websites. Lusha and Seamless.ai are tools that create lists of email addresses and other contact information from online engagement. This gives a business the ability to get in touch with potential leads after being identified by the software.
The Top 5 Lead Generation Software
Getting the most bang for your buck is important when it comes to lead generation companies. You’ll want a program that offers both lead generation and IP address verification for website traffic. A strong combination of data analysis and integration capabilities will go a long way to helping simplify and strengthen your generation process.
A strong choice that analyzes data across multiple channels, LeadBoxer is a platform with built-in features designed to enrich company or personal data. LeadBoxer makes your best leads easy to find so you can turn them into customers. It is a complete solution; from marketing campaign through to qualified leads – use leadboards to manage MQLs.
Included are powerful filters and intuitive scoring algorithms to divide your audience into segments. Results can be synchronized or exported using native solutions.
Integrations: Hubspot, ActiveCampaign, Marketo, Google Data Studio, Clearbit, Active Demand, Gmail, Outlook, Copernica, Google Big Query, Zapier, Google Tag Manager, MailChimp, Drupal, LinkedIn, WordPress, and Pipedrive. Open API.
Pricing: Free trial and starting at $195/month billed annually. See pricing for details.
Pros: Ease of use. Intuitive, automated reporting, flexible, syncs with 1st-party data, automatic scoring, multiple integrations, and tracks email and newsletters. Tracks BOTH companies and individuals. Compliant.
LeadForensics is a software that works to uncover the identity of website traffic, so you can turn website visitors into actionable leads. This platform allows you to utilize it as an additional data source to gather names, job titles, and contact information of site visitors.
LeadForensics also analyses the engagement on your site. You will be able to see what was searched for, which pages were visited, and how many times they have visited your site.
Features:
Website & email tracking
Smartphone app for easy access
Lead manager for the organization
Upload your own data to track potential clients
Data insight
API
Lead scoring
Email notifications
Integrations: Salesforce, ZOHO, Microsoft Dynamics
Pricing: Flexible; Free trial + plan created based on your needs
Pros: Identifies leads in real-time, lead scoring based on multi-criteria system, customizable, provides integration options
Cons: Does not give a price plan upfront; fewer integration capabilities than competitors
Albacross brings together revenue teams to accelerate conversion rates. Their lead generation software works on identifying anonymous visitors, analyzing engagement, as well as segmenting and qualifying prospects. This platform allows integration with most major tools and CRMs for easy data access.
Features:
Website engagement tracking
Lead identifying and qualifying
CRM integration
API
Easy organization for captured leads
Automated email reports
Flexible filtering
Integrations: HubSpot, Sugar CRM, Salesforce, Pipedrive, Slack, Microsoft Dynamics, ZOHO, Base
Pricing: Flexible; Free trial; Pricing plans are discussed with Albacross to determine the best fit for your needs
Pros: Easy to use; integrates with most major CRMs and business tools, customizable
Cons: Lacking pipeline management feature, no upfront pricing
This platform focuses on bringing web intelligence to businesses. Leadfeeder wants to help integrate your sales and marketing team to create a smoother process and increase conversion rates. The software identifies anonymous web traffic, qualifies potential leads, provides important contact information, and syncs data with your CRM.
Integrations: Pipedrive, Mailchimp, Salesforce, Hubspot, ZOHO, Zapier, Microsoft Dynamics, Slack, Active Campaign, Google Hangouts Chat, Google Data Studio, Google Analytics
Pricing: Free trial; Free lite version; Plans start at $63/month
Pros: Strong integration system, lower cost than many competitors, allows as many users from your company as you would like
Cons: No in-depth data analysis, functions mostly as a “look-up” tool
KickFire’s IP address intelligence translates IP addresses to companies and provides vital data for B2B organizations. KickFire enables access to this data across multiple channels including their LIVE Leads platform, API, and software integrations that best fit your company’s needs.
Features:
Website & email tracking
Real-time lead alerts
Lead management
Lead scoring
Live dashboard feature
API
Integrations: Adobe, Act On, Drift, Eloqua, Ensighten, Google Marketing Platform, Integrate, Intercom, LiveRamp, Marketo, Openprise, Segment, Sitecore, Slack, Tealium, Connectwise, HubSpot, Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce, Sugar, ZOHO, Constant Contact, Mailchimp, Active Campaign
Pricing: Free trial; Plans created based on your company’s needs
Pros: Large list of integration abilities, customizable software, ROI tracking, free lite version
Cons: Short 7-day trial window before purchasing
Getting Started with Lead Generation Software
Overall, lead generation software can be a complete game-changer for most companies.
For small and large companies alike, automation will speed up the sales process and result in higher conversions to sales. Important data insights are provided in real-time, so your team will never miss a hot lead again.
Having the right lead generation platform is crucial for encouraging productivity and can play a huge role in targeting sales efforts that lead to successful conversions. Take the leap for a more productive sales team, and get started with your free trial of LeadBoxer today!
Discovering and engaging with new leads is crucial for any B2B company. This is the first step in your marketing and sales process, yet some businesses struggle to keep leads from falling through the cracks. Creating an automated marketing lead lifecycle can help your team excel in lead management.
This cycle will help your marketing and sales department define the process for lead hand-offs and facilitate the creation of a symbiotic relationship between the two teams. The lead flow process will also help ensure qualified leads are getting to the right employees, and other leads are being nurtured until they’re ready to convert.
Taking advantage of an automated lifecycle can help lift the load that lead management puts on your team. Qualifying, nurturing and pushing leads through the pipeline takes time and resources, but utilizing your tech stack can lessen the burden.
Keep reading or use the links below to “jump ahead”:
Simply put, the lead lifecycle is the journey your prospects take through the marketing and sales stages. This process helps manage the customer experience by defining what stages your leads need to pass through before the deal is closed. The lead lifecycle sets rules for your teams to follow so prospects are nurtured and passed through the stages at the correct time.
This seems like a simple concept, but it requires buy-in from all departments as well as proper execution. Done correctly, your lead lifecycle can ensure no prospects slip through the cracks, generating more sales.
The lead lifecycle creates a process to manage prospects from the start to finish of their customer journey. This plays a major role in improving the overall quality of leads that are being transitioned to the sales funnel. By implementing a standard lead scoring system, your marketing department can gain valuable insight into each lead’s level of interest.
This process helps determine the difference between a new prospect, a marketing-qualified lead and a sales-qualified lead. This allows your sales team to spend their efforts on customers who are ready to buy, while marketing is able to allocate resources to leads who may need more time. Sales activities can be used to produce revenue rather than spending time on cold outreach.
Once a prospect has been identified, marketing begins nurturing the relationship, which helps qualify the lead. After gauging the level of interest and readiness to buy, the lead is either handed off to sales or recycled back into the marketing funnel.
For leads that are not quite sales ready, your marketing department can begin fostering a stronger relationship through advertisements, email campaigns and in-depth product knowledge. The lead lifecycle also leaves room for valuable feedback to reach your departments. Marketing is able to see which campaigns work well and make adjustments when content isn’t producing the desired results.
Proper lead qualification also helps segment your prospects, which allows your team to engage with targeted audiences. This means your resources can be used on leads where they will gain the most value.
By having a defined lead lifecycle, your company makes sure no lead gets left behind while improving overall lead quality. It will help your company create a loop from sales to marketing, which helps your marketing department tighten up their efforts.
By qualifying leads, your sales team can provide insight and let your marketing department know which channels are producing the best customers. This allows your company to better allocate resources as well as strengthen any areas that are falling behind.
When implementing a lead management strategy into your company, the first step should be defining and understanding what a lead is for your team. While this seems like a basic concept, it is crucial to avoid vague descriptions or loose definitions.
This helps determine at which stage a prospect can be considered sales-qualified, as well as helps place all customers into the right stage of their lifecycle. There are five stages that can help your team create a standard process for the sales funnel.
Marketing Inquiry (MI)
Not quite a lead yet, a marketing inquiry is the first introduction for many prospects. This is when a contact may enter the lifecycle but needs to be nurtured before moving any further in the process.
For example, this type of prospect may come from a website form, webinar attendee, content download or email campaign. They will have most likely engaged with your company but not yet requested further follow-up from a sales representative.
As nurturing begins to take place, a lead score can be determined for the prospect. MIs are not ready to be passed off to sales, and should be handled directly by the marketing department.
Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)
Further along in the process, an MQL has shown interest in buying and a need for your product. This is someone who is engaged with your content and shows the ability to convert to a sale. Most likely, an MQL will have asked for a follow up from the sales team, or reached out to discuss the problem their business is facing.
Most importantly, an MQL will have provided contact details including their full name, phone number, email, company name, location and specific product needs. This helps determine the transition from marketing to sales.
Sales Accepted Lead (SAL)
This is the stage where the sales team should do their own vetting to determine if the lead is truly ready for their efforts. This means reaching out, verifying that the contact information is correct, and asking what type of solutions the client is seeking.
This stage helps create a smooth relationship between your sales and marketing departments. For the leads that pass their qualifications, sales will be able to start their leg of the customer journey. However, for the ones disqualified or sent back to marketing for additional nurturing, this provides the sales team with an opportunity to give feedback.
By having a defined process that allows these conversations to take place, marketing will be able to streamline their efforts for MQLs and improve the overall quality of leads that are being handed off.
Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)
When it’s determined that a lead has the need for your product, a willingness to purchase and a timeline in mind, the sales team can label them an SQL. This moves the lead toward the finish line and helps your sales team get closer to completing the sale.
Closed
The last stage in the lifecycle is a completed sale. When the process works correctly, your sales team will have guided the client across the finish line, resulting in a successful conversion.
When a sale fails to go through, there are multiple ways to define a disqualified lead. If the prospect is a bad fit or indicates they will not buy your product, the lead should be disqualified and removed from the lifecycle. However, if the lead determines they just need more time before making a purchase, they can be recycled back to marketing to further strengthen the customer relationship.
Understanding the Difference Between Marketing Qualified Leads & Sales Qualified Leads
Because the lead lifecycle process is designed to help improve the overall quality of your leads, it’s crucial to understand the difference between marketing and sales qualifications. This will help align your departments and ensure all employees are working toward the same end goal—increasing sales conversion rates.
The marketing department is usually the first point of contact for all prospects. Whether the lead is generated through website traffic, downloaded content or social media engagement, their first impression is affected by the content they’re consuming.
Immediately after the initial contact is made, marketing funnels these prospects into the lifecycle to begin nurturing and qualifying the lead.
A Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) is defined by their need and the contact information gathered. Most likely, these prospects have engaged with campaigns, expressed interest in your product to solve a specific business issue and provided valid contact information.
In comparison, a Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) has already been determined as a potential customer with buying capacity. This means your product is seen as a potential solution for their business, and they have begun their journey through the sales funnel. SQLs are further along in the buying process compared to MQLs.
SQLs will have a determined budget and some understanding of how your product fits into their business model. They will also have a timeline for their purchase, which helps your sales team determine the validity of the lead.
Having both teams understand the difference between MQLs and SQLs creates a smooth pipeline between departments. Your marketing resources will be allocated to those who need more time in their journey, while sales efforts can go directly to closing deals.
What Is a Marketing Service-Level Agreement?
To help close the gap and avoid silos between sales and marketing teams, a service level agreement (SLA) can be used to align goals and measure progress. Traditionally, an SLA establishes deliverables between a business and its clients, but it can be used for internal operations as well.
There are three common types of SLAs:
Customer Service SLA
Internal Service SLA
Multi-Level SLA
A customer service SLA helps create an agreement of services between vendors and specific clients. For example, this could include the type of product, date of delivery, and point of contact for confirmation.
Internal service SLAs operate only within one company, typically between two departments. This is a great way to create processes, share goals and report on each team’s efforts.
Lastly, a multi-level SLA can work for multiple departments to ensure all teams are working toward the same end goal. Rather than working solely between sales and marketing, this SLA may loop in customer retention or quality control teams.
Utilizing an SLA can ensure your lead lifecycle process is working across the board. This specific SLA will help create guidelines that qualify the hand-off of leads from marketing to sales. It can determine the process for notifying and assigning new leads to the sales team.
The SLA can help lay out appropriate procedures for sales to follow up on MQLs. The agreement can be used to create a rejection process if sales determines leads are unqualified.
To get started, determine numerical values for marketing and sales goals. Sales will be set by their quotas, while marketing can base its numbers around metrics that measure how resources are being used to create revenue.
Assigning numbers and key performance indicators (KPIs) that both teams are expected to meet establishes a standard of accountability across both departments. Numerical values can also help marketing understand the mindset of quote-driven salespeople.
Next, create a system for tracking and reporting these initiatives. This will help both teams measure their successes and evaluate which areas could use improvement.
Lastly, create a system that holds teams accountable to their goals. This means determining a process for what will happen if a department fails to meet its expectations including a plan for making up lost revenue.
To ensure both departments are holding up their end of the deal, encourage open communication and list the best ways to contact each team.
Automated Sales Lead Management
Automating your lead lifecycle can help your company remain competitive in the B2B industry. Lifting the load of repetitive daily tasks and allowing automation to take over data cleansing frees up time and resources for your teams to flex their creativity. In our increasingly digital world, utilizing tech stacks and plugging into the B2B ecosystem gives your company an edge.
The B2B ecosystem refers to a digital network that connects vendors, customers and developers across areas. Going one step further, the business-to-business partner ecosystem brings together similar businesses, typically ones that share ideal client profiles and territories. These partnerships help drive innovation and produce higher Return on Investment (ROI).
Building these partnerships and taking advantage of collaboration helps your company get ahead in the industry. Integration strategy is one way to utilize the ecosystem. Creating Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) allows companies to form partnerships and seamlessly integrate tech stacks.
For example, automated lead management software can integrate with your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) so sales can see updated information on the status of lead engagement. This also allows marketing teams to see the sales process, enabling them to encourage follow up with MQLs as needed.
By utilizing this integration strategy, business processes can be improved and user ability can be extended. Throughout your company’s personal ecosystem, digital transformation can play a huge role in your company’s overall success. Embracing automation can help connect your departments and create lasting partnerships with other B2B companies.
Automated lead management platforms like Leadboxer do more than simply identify prospects and store contact information. Leadboxer helps capture data from website or content engagement, score leads and segment target audiences to maximize your marketing outreach.
Why Automation Is Key to Success
Manually tracking sales leads through the lifecycle is a big undertaking for most marketing teams. Human error can account for promising leads slipping through the cracks.
Automation is a game-changer!
Sales conversions are the ultimate goal of lead generation. Allowing software to take over repetitive tasks so more time can be spent moving leads through the sales funnel is the most efficient way to increase your ROI and productivity.
An automated workflow helps align team goals and ensures processes are followed. With lead management software, prospects can be segmented for marketing to easily nurture. Leads can be automatically assigned for outreach, and engagement data can be pushed through to your CRM.
Most importantly, automated lead management can fine-tune the qualifying process. Leadboxer uses data gathered based on behavior and client profiles. The platform also includes a scoring algorithm to help your marketing and sales teams determine the validity of each prospect.
Rather than wasting effort with old contact information, automated workflows ensure your team is using the most up-to-date data available. Automatically gathering information and contact details shortens the time between lead introduction and sales follow-up. It also helps your marketing team nurture relationships and determine which leads need to receive additional promotional content.
This innovative software can also streamline the notification system between departments, which helps lessen the time that leads go without being responded to and nurtured. Delays can easily cost your business sales.
With notifications, sales can be ready to reach out to new leads as soon as they arrive in the CRM, and marketing can segment prospects into targeted audience outreach almost immediately.
Leadboxer’s B2B Sales Ecosystem
Innovation and collaboration are driving the B2B industry. Through the business-to-business ecosystem, companies are able to expand their abilities and become competitive leaders while working more efficiently.
An integration platform enables customers to combine their tech stacks and data to optimize workflows. Global key players for this strategy include Microsoft, Informatica, Dell Boomi and others.
Leadboxer also integrates with many applications to form an important B2B sales ecosystem that helps companies boost the performance of their current tech stack.
As a lead management software, Leadboxer works to make marketing and sales easier for B2B companies. Through lead generation, qualifying, scoring and automated workflows, the software is a staple for companies who need help with their lead lifecycle.
Through partnership and integration, your company is able to transfer data between software platforms and streamline communication with internal teams. The use of lead management software like Leadboxer automates the lead lifecycle and eliminates any bottlenecks between marketing and sales teams.
Key Takeaways
Establishing a lead lifecycle and defining qualified leads is an important first step to excelling in your lead management strategy. By aligning the goals of sales and marketing and including an automated process for lead management, your company can begin working with the most qualified leads available.
Understanding the difference between marketing-qualified leads and sales-qualified leads can help your teams make sure prospects are interacting with the right resources. By defining what your team considers an SQL, marketing can make sure these contacts are being delivered to salespeople for immediate follow-up. This will also lessen the amount of rejection of MQLs by the sales team since your marketing department will have clear guidelines on proper lead qualification.
Utilizing a marketing service-level agreement can help organize your internal goals and get multiple departments on the same page. It is crucial for marketing and sales to be aligned in their efforts, and a SLA helps hold both teams accountable. This strategy lays out what each department needs for success and will help increase accountability and boost overall ROI.
Automated marketing lead lifecycle management helps free up resources from your departments and allows software to do the heavy lifting in your lead generation plan. This also helps your company become part of the B2B ecosystem through enterprise platform integration.
Taking advantage of the B2B partner ecosystem encourages innovation and collaboration. It also allows your company to maximize the usage of its tech stack.
Understanding and implementing a successful lead lifecycle management process can lead to higher ROI for your B2B company. Automation helps align goals, eliminate silos and clean data for a better overall lead lifecycle.
To get started with lead management automation with multiple application integrations, check out this free LeadBoxer trial!
Regardless of your industry, you need customers to buy your product or service. However, satisfied customers who make repeat purchases, upgrade and become brand ambassadors for your company are even better. A positive customer experience generates loyal customers. You can accomplish this with B2B marketing funnels.
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Think about it. Would you do business with a company you don’t have a relationship with? Probably not. This is why a positive customer experience through the B2B customer journey is so important.
When customers have a pleasant interaction with your business, they are apt to spend more and recommend your company to others. Conversely, B2B customers who have a bad experience will ditch your company for another and broadcast their disappointment in word of mouth and online reviews. In fact, customer experience will be the main differentiator between brands.
Customer experience is catching the attention of marketers. One study found that almost half of the companies responding seek to invest more in ensuring a positive customer experience.
In a competitive B2B market where customers can access everything at their virtual fingertips, a positive customer experience is everything. The most successful companies deliver superior customer experience throughout the B2B marketing funnel stages.
A positive customer interaction begins with successful navigation through your B2B marketing funnel. This powerful relationship-builder starts with the first interaction with your brand and extends beyond conversion or purchase. Your B2B marketing funnel is designed to not only result in initial sales, but to create a loyal, repeat customer base.
A positive customer experience begins with a map of your customer’s journey through all the touchpoints with your business. This map will help you identify trouble areas and barriers that keep people from making a purchase.
Mapping the B2B Customer Journey
To deliver a positive customer experience, you need to get into the customer’s shoes. This involves being familiar with all the touchpoints a prospect will encounter in becoming a paying customer.
The customer journey begins with making them aware of your brand and ends when their relationship with your company ceases. Touchpoints commonly include advertising, PR, marketing, content production, sales support and interactions with sales representatives.
A B2B customer journey map moves a company to be more customer-centric. Your company will be more mindful of your customer’s experience with your brand throughout the purchasing process. This tool helps you improve your funnel to ensure a pleasant customer service interaction so people will return.
Each company will have a different customer journey. For B2B customers, this journey is complex and time-consuming because of the following:
It takes more time to get buy-in from senior management
It requires getting cooperation from various staff involved in the different stages of the customer journey
There is the unknown availability of resources needed for a company to implement a new product or service
Possible uncertainty about how to get started using your product or service, especially for multi-site locations
Technical or service requirements a product or service needs to pass before being implemented
The added complexities of B2B customer journey mapping can either make maps overly complex or simplified. As a result, there is the risk of being process-driven instead of experience-driven. This can make your brand seem out of touch with customers.
The B2B Marketing Funnel
Marketing funnels are the processes of taking website prospects and converting them into customers and advocates for your brand. Each stage of the B2B marketing funnel has relevant content that boosts your company’s trustworthiness. The more authority your company has, the stronger your relationship with customers, resulting in a better customer experience.
In B2B marketing funnels, prospects are broken into customer journey stages where they are delivered tailored messaging. Each of your customers will travel through these stages on the way to becoming loyal, repeat customers. Your prospects must be moving onto the next stage through the funnel.
B2B Marketing Funnel Stages
As previously mentioned, the B2B marketing funnel is divided into stages. These stages are top of funnel (ToF), middle of funnel (MoF) and bottom of the funnel (BoF). The top of funnel stage will have the largest audience while the bottom of the funnel will have the smallest.
Top of Funnel
At the top of the B2B marketing funnel, you have prospects who aren’t aware of your brand, product or service. This stage is all about spreading awareness of your product or service and how it can solve a prospect’s problem. This is usually done by educating prospects and answering their high-level questions in blogs, articles and videos.
At the top of the funnel, you want to attract prospects to your website in order to spread awareness. As people don’t know much about your brand, product or service, this is not the stage in which to try a hard sell. Once your prospects show interest or desire, they are ready to move forward toward the middle of the funnel.
While the bottom of the funnel focuses on awareness, the middle of the funnel is about sharing product details. Prospects that make it to this stage are interested in learning more about what exactly you have to offer. The extra sharing of information about your offerings helps you gauge your user’s experience.
Some of the content you might use at this B2B marketing funnel stage include:
eBooks
Whitepapers
Case studies
Webinars
Tutorials
Landing pages
Surveys
Email sequences
Customers who respond well to the middle of the funnel stage, then move on to the bottom of the funnel stage. This is where you push for the final sale.
Bottom of the Funnel
At the bottom of the funnel, your goal is to sell your product or service. A secondary goal at this stage is to build customer loyalty. Purchases are good, but generating loyal, repeat customers is even better.
At this stage, customers are familiar with your brand and offerings. They also have had many relationship-building interactions with your company. Your chief aim is to build customer loyalty by informing them of the value of your product or service.
Email marketing, especially onboarding email sequencing is effective at this final stage of the funnel. In these emails, teach customers to fully utilize your product or service and let them know all the ways your offering can benefit them.
You can also send surveys to new customers asking about their experience and inviting them to join a loyalty program. You not only want customers to make a purchase, you also want to persuade them to become brand ambassadors for your company.
The Role of SEO Content in the B2B Customer Journey
Strong content is a game-changer in digital marketing. The more informative, relevant and personal your brand’s content, the better your lead generation and sales will be. This is because well-written content delivered to the right people builds your brand’s authority and trustworthiness.
People who see that a company is knowledgeable and transparent will be more willing to do business with that company. As in generic digital marketing, great content is crucial in your customer journey mapping and funnel effectiveness. In fact, 87% of marketers create content for each stage of the customer journey.
The B2B marketing funnel and all the B2B customer journey steps can’t build customer/business relationships without content. Each touchpoint along the customer journey needs to have well-written, strategic content. What you communicate with the customer should meet them where they are and encourage them to move forward.
With content marketing for B2B marketing funnel stages, produce quality content that answers your audience’s questions. Cover topics of interests in your niche or industry to make your company the authoritative source of information.
Content marketing also includes search engine optimization (SEO). This type of B2B marketing funnel content will utilize researched keywords and link building techniques.
In today’s digital age, you can’t create effective content without using keywords. Content without keywords will not be picked up by search engines. When this happens, your great content will never be seen by your ideal audience.
After you identify your keywords, use them throughout all your digital assets. This includes website content, product descriptions, blogs, whitepapers and video transcripts.
Another tactic used in SEO content is link building. This involves strategically inserting links throughout your content. These links can be either internal, linking to a page on your website, or external, linking to outside sites.
It is best to use a combination of internal and external links. The external links need to go to reputable sites to further your brand’s credibility. When link building, don’t use too many links, as your content will be penalized.
All the B2B marketing funnel stages and each touchpoint along the B2B customer journey need SEO content. This type of content will target a specific audience, catching their attention and compelling them toward the next stage. Your content will inform prospects and turn them into loyal, repeat customers.
To generate B2B leads and sales, you build relationships with your prospects and customers. Excellent customer service and experiences with your company are the foundations for this relationship building.
Great customer experience comes through meeting your customers where they are in the buying process. It also comes through understanding the journey your customers go through from brand awareness to making purchases.
LeadBoxer’s unique lead generation platform with its full complement of integrations, make it easy for you to target and communicate with your ideal customer base consistently and effectively, ensuring a great customer experience.
The B2B industry continues to benefit from innovation sparked by the evolution and implementation of new technologies. As they advance the process of emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic, companies are adopting practices that were discovered during the shift to virtual work spaces.
Automation remains a key player for competitive B2B companies. By embracing B2B marketing automation tools, your team will have clean data and continuous communication with leads. Duplication is avoided; the process is streamlined, and you have the flexibility to reallocate resources to other departments as needed!
This means your marketing team will be able to accurately track the success or the need to fine tune campaigns in real time!
By allowing automation to take over parts of your marketing department’s daily, repetitive tasks, engagement and lead nurturing can be prioritized resulting in a higher conversion rate.
Keep reading, or use the links below to “jump ahead”, to learn the best ways to optimize and automate your marketing process.
Marketing is a key component in the success of any B2B company. This outreach allows your company to communicate with leads and generate interest in your product and services.
LeadBoxer’s Workflow Automation allows your marketing team to Assign, Route and Qualify leads using automated rules you can set and configure to meet your customized needs. Learn more about how LeadBoxer can help your organization streamline its marketing workflow by scheduling a free demo and signing up for a free trial today!
B2B marketing automation is a must have for enabling your marketing and sales teams to become more efficient and effective. This is essential for making a good first impression on potential customers. Replacing repetitive tasks with automated workflows allows your marketing team to focus on creating meaningful campaigns that showcase the value of your product or service.
By gathering this data from your automated marketing practices, the department will be able to share these insights with salespeople. This will help refine their sales process and clean up the sales funnel. With the marketing and sales departments properly aligned, less leads will fall through the cracks and customer relationships will be strengthened.
Through automated practices, lead generation is apt to increase. When using a platform like Leadboxer, information can be gathered from website and email campaign engagement. This allows your marketing team to identify more prospects based on their activity with your content.
Follow up time for new leads can be shortened by utilizing trigger points. When prospects engage with your content, follow up communication can be sent automatically.
This practice helps keep the lead warm, as well as collect data to score and qualify the customer. Once this lead is ready to be passed to sales, there will already be a line of communication in place, upon which the salesperson can build.
Automation optimizes the lead nurturing process. For customers who aren’t quite ready to hit the sales funnel, automated communication through relevant content can keep your product top of mind. This helps create strong brand awareness and nurtures the potential relationship.
Your marketing and sales team will have access to cleaner data through automation. Featuring easy to install Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Integration, Leadboxer helps fill in the details while constantly tracking leads. This allows your team to feel confident in their contact information and provides valuable insights into a prospect’s recent engagement.
With accurate data, aligned departments and increased lead generation, B2B marketing automation offers huge benefits for your company. Once your team is ready to move forward with this strategy, creating a workflow will help keep things on track.
Getting Started With an Automated Marketing Workflow
Simply put, an automated marketing workflow is a series of triggers and steps that help streamline efforts. Almost any step in the process can be automated, and your team will need to decide which areas can benefit most from this.
First, identify the steps your team will want to take before, during and after the automation is implemented. The goal is not to replace your entire marketing team but to streamline the process, so your team can focus on improving their outreach and content.
Most likely, your first step will be to generate a list of leads for outreach. Then, the automated marketing will take care of the communication. After the campaign has been launched, your team should carefully evaluate the reactions from leads.
Allow leads to be segmented by their responses. Qualified leads will be handed off to sales to begin their journey within the sales funnel. From there, your team can begin another campaign and restart the process.
Platforms like Leadboxer help automate some of your marketing tasks while also qualifying and segmenting leads. This technology should integrate with your CRM to make sure data is accessible across departments.
Website and social media engagement is crucial for identifying new leads. Most customers begin their search for solutions online. This means their first interaction with your company will most likely occur when your site pops up in an online search, or when a customer comes across your social media.
Having an automated process to collect data can help speed up the lead nurturing process. By allowing software to gather information based on a prospect’s interaction with your site, leads can be accurately qualified.
The gathered data will also help build out customer profiles in your CRM. This helps your marketing and sales team have the most up to date information on leads. Communication efforts will benefit from this data.
Trigger Points
Gathering data is nice, but having action behind website engagement can help boost the number of leads in your sales funnel. Trigger points are a key aspect in automated B2B marketing practices.
To create the best trigger points for your company, study the behavior of website visitors. Identify which interactions lead to customers who are ready to enter the sales funnel. Once this has been decided on, create an automated follow up to streamline outreach.
Keeping leads warm is crucial to successfully moving them all the way through the sales pipeline. An automated touchpoint created by a trigger point takes the stress away from having a real human follow up. This allows your salespeople to begin prepping for their pitch before they’ve even had a conversation.
Trigger points can also help convert leads who may not be in the purchasing mindset. Automated follow ups through website engagement can help your marketing team segment leads who need nurturing. This helps your team get these prospects on email lists for future campaigns.
Email Marketing
Creating touch points through email campaigns is a great way to keep leads engaged with your brand. Automation can help free up your team to focus on other goals by handling the distribution of this content.
Once content has been created, your marketing team can allow automation to handle the rollout of the campaign. This includes monthly newsletters, educational resources, and product updates.
Your team will also be able to track the engagement of these campaigns, which helps plan future marketing efforts. Combine this tracking with your lead scoring efforts to make sure leads are being properly segmented and handed off to sales in a timely manner.
Key Takeaways
Marketing efforts are crucial for companies to remain competitive within the B2B industry. They help your salespeople identify prospects and allow your company to build brand awareness. Your marketing department plays a major role in connecting customers with the right solution for their needs.
By embracing an automated process, your marketing and sales teams can benefit from an increase in leads, better lead quality and cleaner data. Automation also helps free up resources and employees to help your company focus on bigger picture items.
B2B marketing automation helps streamline costs within your organization. By reducing the amount of people who are needed to take on repetitive tasks, your marketing budget can be evaluated for bigger projects.
Automation helps reduce duplicated efforts and the introduction of human error. By utilizing software that integrates with your CRM, automated marketing efforts can avoid duplication across departments.
The customer experience may see improvements from implementing this strategy. With trigger points that handle immediate follow ups, clients will feel important and valued. Having fresh data can also help your salespeople deliver a better customer journey through the pipeline.
Automated marketing practices can also help fine tune your outreach strategies. By gaining feedback from customers and tracking valuable insights, your team will have the knowledge needed to adjust campaigns. It also allows you to see your strengths and weaknesses through lead engagement.
Overall, B2B marketing automation can prove to be a key factor in helping to take your company to the next level.
Take Leadboxer up on its offer of a Free Trial today to see how its innovative lead generation platform featuring key integrations can help automate your marketing efforts and accelerate the growth of your B2B business!
Understanding your target demographic is crucial to successful marketing in the B2B industry. Campaigns rely on strong data surrounding consumer behavior. Rather than reaching out to a broad audience, segmentation can make sure messaging gets to the right leads at the ideal time.
Creating a marketing segmentation plan can help jumpstart these efforts. There are several ways to segment your audience including firmographics, demographics, geographics, behavioral and psychographics.
Psychographics for B2B marketing may be a huge key to helping your company remain competitive within your industry. By separating your clients and creating outreach based on lifestyles, relevant information about your products reaches qualified leads to push them into your sales funnel.
Read on or use the links below to jump ahead to learn more:
Audiences can be segmented into several different categories. By focusing on psychological traits like lifestyle, personal interests and opinions, outreach will target consumers based on their psychographics.
This information looks deeper into the behavior of the target consumer. The goal of psychographic segmentation is to gain valuable insight into the lifestyle and preferences of your ideal audience. While it seems like a great way to categorize leads, this information is not always as obvious as demographics and may require data discovery.
Having this type of understanding allows your marketing team to create content that resonates with buyers. This will encourage engagement and allow for the development of a strong customer relationship.
Psychographics can also help uncover new leads. When identifying the audience and targeting your outreach, marketing can focus on sourcing new leads who follow similar behavioral patterns. Understanding what motivates your customers is important, but psychographics can also be paired strategically with demographics.
Simply put, demographics explain who is buying your products while psychographics break down the factors behind the purchase. Utilizing this data together for segmentation can help narrow your targeted audience even further
For example, demographics might include gender or religion, while psychographics look at the buyer’s habits. Not all individuals in the same demographic group are motivated by the same factors, which is why combining behavioral traits is helpful. This data allows your marketing team to round out the ideal buyer persona as well as segment audiences based on personal preferences.
Along with segmentation, psychographics can provide valuable insights to inform your ideal customer profile. This big-picture strategy helps your company make overarching decisions around marketing, sales and product development.
The customer profile is created by assessing your product and the value it adds to the market, as well as defining ideal customer characteristics. By understanding the psychographics of your clients, this profile can be tailored to reflect real consumer behavior.
This data allows your organization to see the ‘why’ behind each purchase. Lifestyle data helps determine how customers are choosing to buy products and what motivates the purchase. This type of information can play a large role in any product updates or future rollouts.
It’s important to realize there is a difference between behavioral data and psychographics within the B2B industry. Behavioral segmentation relies heavily on product and content engagement. Essentially, this category looks at the way customers are interacting directly with your brand.
Psychographics are still informed by consumer behavior, but it’s more about lifestyle choices. Rather than tracking product usages, this type of analysis looks at how consumer values and habits affect buying decisions. The daily actions of customers are studied to better understand what type of person may benefit from the solution your company provides.
The goal of this segmentation is to target leads who will be most receptive to your outreach. It can help foster strong customer relationships based on emotions and shared values. This can lead to stronger brand loyalty and potentially increase return on investment (ROI) by encouraging repeat purchases.
When gathering this data, it’s important to have a grasp on which factors fall under psychographics. Below are a few examples to help your team get started.
Lifestyle
This includes how a consumer fits into society and where their values lie. Characteristics for this category may include relationship status, type of occupation, or homeowners vs. renters. This data helps segment people based on what stage of life they are in.
Habits and Opinions
People tend to stick to their habits rather than breaking them. This is important for marketing to understand since many customers may have specific habits when it comes to content engagement and the sales cycle.
Understanding the makeup of a customer’s daily life can have a significant impact on advertising choices. For example, if your ideal customers prefer to do product research via social media rather than company websites, outreach can be tailored to better accommodate this type of engagement.
Behaviors
While segmentation can be categorized on behavior alone, it can also work in conjunction with psychographics. These characteristics can be studied through product usage, content engagement and purchase history. This data can help segment outreach by anticipating a timeline for when your leads may be most interested in making a purchase based on their prior actions.
Social Class
Economic status influences purchasing behavior. While social class may also be a self-identification for some people, this information does provide valuable insight for purchase capacity.
Personality Traits
Understanding the types of personality your products attract helps your marketing team develop content that will resonate with your leads. Not all of your customers will have the same personality traits, so this type of segmentation can make sure content reaches the right person. This can help increase engagement across campaigns.
Interests
Similar to personalities, a person’s interests can help steer the direction of your marketing. Segmenting leads and sending outreach based around clients’ interests helps form a strong connection with your brand. This can also help your marketing team avoid sending out fluff to leads.
Using the data found around client interests can make sure your outreach is relevant to the receiver.
The Importance of Audience Segmentation
Your marketing department’s ROI benefits from data-driven campaigns that encourage customer engagement. Before a lead can enter into the sales pipeline, it must be qualified and segmented into the proper group for continuous outreach. These efforts help nurture leads and eventually guide them through the buyer journey.
The goal of marketing efforts is more than just landing a sale. The department should be focused on creating lasting relationships to encourage repeat sales and promote brand loyalty. It can cost up to five times more to acquire a new customer compared to the cost of retaining an existing one.
By using psychographics to tailor content and segment target audiences, marketing can help strengthen client relationships. Using this segmentation helps break audiences down into more specific groups. Broad outreach may feel impersonal and doesn’t provide a unique call-to-action based on the customer’s current needs.
Instead, using psychographic segmentation ensures content is personalized and helps set attainable next steps based on a lead’s preferences. Overall, audience segmentation should help improve the relationship between leads and your company.
Psychographics help by providing a deeper understanding of customer needs and driving communication. By shifting the conversation to focus on customer interests, your teams will be better equipped to sell the product.
Sales pitches and marketing contact can feature ways your product is able to improve your customer’s life. Psychographic data allows for accurate examples of these improvements to be used based on lifestyle and habits.
This data can also help improve overall product features. By understanding why customers are using your product, features and updates can be created to meet their needs. Psychographics also allow your product to be customized based on different buyer personas, allowing for more options to choose from.
Gathering Psychographic Data
Once you have a grasp on the benefits of psychographics, it’s time to start gathering data to implement this strategy. While it may seem like a daunting task to try and understand the motivations of potential new leads, there are several approaches that can jumpstart the process.
Speak To Current Clients
You already have existing customers who use your product, so understanding their lifestyle is a great place to start gathering psychographic data. This approach allows your team to decide how many customers you’d like to speak with to gather this information.
First, make a list of your top clients. If you have a strong relationship with them already, getting to know more about them is a good way to figure out what your ideal client profile looks like. Schedule a time to speak with them, or create questions you’d like to ask next time they reach out.
These questions should focus on their lifestyle, hobbies and interests. They can be as simple as “What did you do this weekend?” or “What does a typical evening after work look like for you?” This can help create conversations around their lifestyles and provide insight into what motivates them.
Going further than a handful of top-tier clients, your marketing team can create a customer survey and send it out for feedback. If you choose to take this approach, try to be as transparent as possible with the recipients. Explain that your company is trying to better understand their clients to help provide the best experience possible.
Try Focus Groups
This is a way to gather unbiased feedback from participants that are not immediately familiar with your product and services. While this group does not include current customers, it is important to keep the sample size as close to your target audience as possible. Use demographic information from clients to model your focus group.
Create a questionnaire that helps provide the type of feedback you want to gather. For example, make sure that the questions you are asking focus on the participants’ lifestyle rather than just your product.
Utilize Third Party Research Companies
While handling the research on your own can help gather insight from current clients, consider sourcing this part out to a third-party company. Market research companies can focus on similar demographics to your target audience. This allows your sample pool to widen while still gathering relevant information.
Use Website Analytics
Content engagement can tell you a lot about a person. Information can be gathered from the type of content that gets the most clicks, the time of day purchases typically occur, and what website forms gain the most traction.
Data can be collected regarding the usage of discount codes to help segment those who prefer a bargain deal. Seeing which blog posts have the most visitors can determine what type of people are using your products and which areas they are searching for more information about.
If you’re not already utilizing the data provided by website analytics, now is a great time to get started. Software like Leadboxer can help track this type of engagement across platforms, while simultaneously uncovering new leads from website traffic.
Approaching Psychographics in B2B Marketing
This strategy should focus on motivating customers based on their current needs. Segmentation allows you to run multiple campaigns simultaneously while making sure content is tailored to the intended audience. Your team should work to provide any resources needed to complete a purchase.
Find ways to incorporate the customer’s priorities into all of the content they receive from your company. For example, if exercise is one of the main hobbies of your target audience, publish a blog talking about how daily exercise can lead to productivity at work. If possible, you could include pictures on social media that display these hobbies in a way that relates to your product.
Make sure the call-to-action is customized to encourage engagement from each audience. This can be as simple as including language that reflects their interests.
When planning outreach and applying psychographics, your team needs to determine which factors are going to segment the recipients. There are a multitude of options to choose from, so it’s important to narrow the scope before planning a campaign.
Leveraging Psychographics to Optimize Marketing Efforts
This strategy goes further than simply segmenting your email campaign lists. It can be used across your website and all social media channels. This content will help reach new leads, nurture relationships and encourage brand loyalty from existing customers.
Social Media
Chances are, your marketing team is posting content on social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok, as well as running targeted ad campaigns. Psychographics can help determine how to develop content that resonates with your intended viewers.
On social media posts, work to make content that goes further than a sales pitch. Not every post needs to invite a sale. Some of these posts can be educational, or may provide a behind the scenes look at your organization. This type of content can be used to address the lifestyle of your audience without overdoing the promotional material.
Utilize social media as a way to organically grow relationships with your target audience. Becoming a thoughtful leader within your industry that provides content based on psychographics can help promote brand loyalty and boost engagement. Your customers will be able to come to your social media channels for advice and share this content across their own channels when it aligns with their values.
Blogs
Using the blog space on your page should be a priority for your marketing team. This content is crucial for multiple reasons including SEO, website engagement and providing valuable information to customers.
This is a great way to create content that is tailored to specific groups of customers. Using psychographic data can help your team determine blog topics that will resonate with your leads. This helps your brand showcase your product and provide information that is relevant to your industry.
When creating these posts, find ways to incorporate psychographics into the title to immediately draw readers into the piece. Rather than simply writing about the ways your product is useful, tie it into your audience’s interests. For example, if your target customer works in marketing, including a piece about the “Top 10 Ways Lead Generation Can Improve Your B2B Marketing” is a great way to encourage engagement.
Testimonials
Encouraging buyers to purchase your product through other user’s experience helps build trust. If you have clients who are similar to your targeted lead audience, use their positive feedback to showcase the solutions your company has to offer.
This content can be created for different stages in the customer journey, which helps buyers who may be on the fence about making a final decision. Not only should this information discuss how satisfied current customers are, it should also tie into the lifestyle of your segmented audience.
Continuing with the marketing example from above, show your leads how the product has helped customers streamline their marketing efforts and increase ROI. This will entice prospects to either make a purchase or reach out to your sales team for more information on next steps.
Customer Appreciation
While psychographics can be used to uncover new leads, it can also help strengthen current relationships and encourage a continued partnership with your customers. Buyers who have already purchased your product will be more interested in remaining with your company when they feel appreciated.
Using psychographics can provide insight into the lifestyles of customers and shine a light on their current needs. This gives an opportunity for your brand to showcase how well they understand their clients.
Consider sending out appreciation gifts that are relevant to your customer’s interests instead of something with generic branding. The extra effort will illustrate the values your company has in common with these clients.
Key Takeaways
Audience segmentation can play a vital role in successful B2B marketing. Rather than simply grouping customers by demographics, using psychographics can provide valuable insight into the lives of your target audience.
This strategy is a great way to uncover new leads, strengthen existing relationships, and build trust as a key player in your industry. It can also work well with other types of segmentation to help build out your ideal client profile and inform the buyer journey.
Before incorporating this into your marketing efforts, it is important to have a grasp on the different categories of psychographics to determine which will benefit your audience the most. These include personality type, lifestyle and habits. Each can be utilized to create targeted content that encourages engagement.
Make sure to set aside the time and resources needed to successfully gather psychographic data. This can include customer surveys, focus groups or outsourcing to a third-party company. Most importantly, continue gathering this data as your customer base and list of leads grows.
Psychographics may change as your product continues to develop, and it is helpful to have up-to-date data to drive marketing efforts. Track website analytics to have accurate data that provides valuable insights into consumer behavior.
Consider using software like Leadboxer to uncover and qualify new leads as they interact with your site. This can help segment potential leads into audience groups as soon as they are introduced to your brand.
Allow this data to help inform your marketing content and create pieces that provide more than a sales pitch to prospects. Utilize social media channels and blog posts to create organic connections with customers based on their hobbies and interests. Use this content as a way to tie in your product or services with their lifestyle, but make sure the pieces aren’t full of fluff.
Make sure calls-to-actions are personalized. This encourages engagement from customers and can help your marketing team qualify leads by understanding where each prospect is within the sales journey.
Overall, psychographics for B2B marketing can help elevate your campaigns to the next level, as well as increase your ROI. Use these strategies as a way to nurture relationships and promote brand loyalty.
To begin incorporating psychographics and segmentation into your lead generation process, check out Leadboxer for a free trial!
Customer experience is an essential component of success for B2B companies. Building brand loyalty and encouraging long lasting customer relationships can help boost your company’s overall return on investment (ROI).
While having a good product still matters, customer experience has added an additional layer of competition between B2B businesses. A customer centric business model will require transparency across departments and a deep understanding of client behavior.
Through a single customer view, your entire company should be able to access relevant data on clients, regardless of the department. By integrating this into your business strategy, your company can stay on top of the journey and experience your clients receive.
Keep reading to learn about a single customer view, or use the following links to jump ahead:
Simply put, a single customer view is a consistent collection of data that can be accessed by all departments for an accurate summary of clients. Going a little deeper into this strategy, a single customer view is implemented through the daily systems your team uses.
By investing in software that provides the ability to collect this data across departments, your business is able to begin benefiting from this information. This should help your departments seamlessly transition customers between each stage of the buyer’s journey, which will improve the overall customer experience.
A single customer view helps avoid any issues in the buyer’s journey. By aligning data and company goals into one platform, the amount of miscommunication between departments is minimized. This also allows your company to track key performance indicators (KPIs) across all teams, which can help pinpoint problem areas and provide insight into which areas need improvement.
Most importantly, this strategy will help your team make sure the customer is central to all business decisions. According to a Gartner Trend Insight Report, 80% of organizations within the B2B industry are competing with each other on customer experience rather than solely on the product.
By having a data-driven customer strategy, your company will remain competitive within the industry. Gartner also found that 50% of companies have found a way to track the financial gain of customer experience initiatives. Not only will a single customer view help improve the overall journey, it can also provide valuable financial insights for your company.
A successful customer experience doesn’t happen overnight. While your product might help meet a client’s needs, the buyer journey is just as important as the end result. A great starting point for improving the sales cycle is taking a customer centric approach.
This means relying on accurate data to evaluate the journey as well as identify areas of improvement.
With social media marketing and online buying continuing to rise in popularity, the customer journey begins before the prospect is introduced to an actual salesperson. In some instances, they may not even speak with a salesperson until they are ready to make a purchase.
One of the biggest benefits of a single customer view is cleaner data. Information from your target audience and current customers is valuable for informing future product decisions. Traditional marketing and sales practices don’t constantly communicate across departments, which can lead to information being siloed.
By having up-to-date contact information, customer history, and data based on marketing engagements, all departments will be able to see the buyer’s journey in real-time. This helps encourage communication between teams when there is an issue that needs to be addressed or when tactics are yielding positive results.
This also helps cut down duplicate information. Rather than multiple departments logging similar data, a single view allows your team to see what has already been recorded. This keeps your data clean and coherent.
A single customer view allows your team to have access to better insights. An accurate portrayal of the buyer’s experience can help employees measure the success of campaigns and sales tactics. This provides value to your marketing department as they can plan for future outreach to find the right audience.
Alongside having a clearer idea of what the customer experiences, this tactic helps your team measure KPIs accurately. Assigning data driven metrics is a great way to encourage your teams to meet their goals. By using this data, your company is able to create realistic KPIs and re-evaluate when teams are not hitting the mark.
Understanding customer behavior helps your marketing department track which channels are best for campaigns. A single customer view tracks customer engagement across platforms to determine what’s most likely to gain interaction from your target audience. This insight can help your company allot the proper resources for the most successful channels.
A single customer view helps optimize your company’s workflow to produce the best results. From the beginning of the sales process, leads are identified and qualified in the same platform. This helps marketing and sales departments accurately segment audiences to ensure each qualified lead is being nurtured by the right team.
Leadboxer, with its unique offering of the platform’s native integrations combined with the integration of the best email marketing applications, allows your team to integrate with your current techstack. This cuts down on unnecessary duplication between programs, and allows your employees to work with familiar software.
Techstack integration is a major benefit of the single customer view. It helps your marketing department track engagement across multiple channels including email, social media and website engagement. When implemented on a lead data platform, data is collected and accessible for all teams.
What is Customer Intelligence?
It is not a secret that customers are getting quicker and more efficient during the sales process. With the rise of online sales, prospects are able to conduct their own research and engage with a free trial before speaking to a salesperson.
However, customer intelligence does not refer to an increase in self-sufficient prospects. Rather, it defines the process of collecting data to understand insights about consumer behavior. This helps companies create a successful customer journey that provides an excellent experience.
Customer intelligence is more than using data to achieve client satisfaction. It is a practice that helps companies fine tune their internal processes, tighten up marketing campaigns and boost customer retention.
Understanding the target audience, or the ideal client profile, for your product is a crucial first step to B2B success. Customer intelligence takes this one step further by helping provide insights into the behavior of real leads and customers.
Expanding upon the client profile, data from current customers and potential leads can inform the decisions your company makes for marketing and sales campaigns.
Customer intelligence comes from multiple sources and tracks a variety of consumer data. On the internal side, this information can come from outbound calls, sales pitch meetings and interactions with your customer success team.
Internal customer intelligence is generated any time a member of your company interacts with a client. Between marketing, sales and customer success, the number of interactions can start to add up quickly. To avoid missing important feedback or duplicating efforts, storing this data in a platform with a single customer view can be a huge help.
As your teams gather internal information, the client profile can be updated in real time to reflect the customer’s current position in the sales funnel. This data benefits every department.
Your marketing team will be able to segment customers to ensure they are receiving relevant campaigns. Salespeople will be able to create a timeline for communications and set follow-up reminders. Customer success can make sure onboarding materials are prepped.
External data comes from a variety of sources including personal demographics, geographic location and marketing campaign engagement. Using website metrics as external data helps your team identify and qualify potential leads as they interact with your pages.
Successful customer intelligence relies on both external and internal data to provide informed patterns of client behavior. Just like internal information, external data should be stored in your single customer view platform. This information helps give a complete client profile alongside the interactions with your company.
Overall, customer intelligence will help boost your ROI and increase customer retention. Prioritizing the customer experience and tailoring methods through data-driven decisions helps create lasting business relationships.
Having a customer centric approach means your target audience is at the forefront of all business operations. By storing your customer intelligence on a single view platform, the ‘customer first’ approach can be implemented easily across all departments.
Single Customer View Vs. Traditional Marketing Tactics
Although proper software is an important component, the single customer view is more than just utilizing a platform. It is a process for storing data that helps your company provide the best customer experience. To be successful in this strategy, using an integrated platform like Leadboxer is a good place to start.
Traditionally, marketing and sales teams work side-by-side, but not always together. The sales department may put more focus on warm leads, while the marketing team spends their time identifying prospects.
When these employees are working with different types of clients, it is easy for miscommunication to occur. Salespeople may be having active conversations with a customer while the marketing department is adding them to a segmented list of prospects that haven’t been contacted. While this may not seem like a huge slip up, it is a waste of time, and it may confuse potential clients.
The single customer view helps eliminate these mistakes by allowing both teams to work simultaneously with the same data. Using Leadboxer puts important information into one easy-to-access platform. This software allows your marketing department to track email campaigns and website engagement, while your salespeople are sharing where prospects are at in the sales cycle.
Leadboxer provides more than just the ability for teams to see the same data. It encourages collaboration between departments, so customers get the right amount of attention and client relationships are continuously nurtured.
Knowing where someone is in the buyer’s journey helps both teams develop a strategy to close the deal. Sales and marketing employees can work together to determine the best segmentation of audiences and which campaigns each lead type should receive.
Eliminating the silos of information within departments will help your company embrace a customer centric approach. There is more to a successful client experience than getting a sale across the finish line. Proper communication and clean data will make a huge difference in providing a positive experience for those in the sales journey.
The single customer view also promotes brand loyalty. It is cheaper to continue servicing an existing client than it is to onboard a new one. That does not mean prospects are not important, but it does mean cultivating strong customer relationships can lead to a higher ROI.
Implementing Single Customer View Into Your Company
Once you have a grasp on the concept, it’s time to start implementing a single customer view into your business. While your company should already have a customer centric approach, developing a process for a single customer view can further improve the client experience.
It may seem like a big undertaking, but the following steps can get you on the right track:
Collect Your Current Data
This sounds simple enough, but if you haven’t been storing your data in one platform, it may take awhile to complete this step. First, determine who is in charge of storing information in each department.
Collaborate with these employees to understand what type of data they have been collecting and why it is relevant to your customer experience. From there, begin compiling the information and cleaning up any duplicates.
This data may include contact information, personal demographics, previous customer interactions, marketing engagement and purchase history. Talk with your employees to figure out how this data is being used within each department. This will help determine the best ways to store and collect data once you have implemented your single customer view.
It is important for your team to be able to do it all in one location. From identifying leads, qualifying and scoring, Leadboxer is there to help from the very beginning of the customer journey. This platform does more than just filter through website traffic to identify prospects. It provides a series of integrations to help analyze important customer data.
Leadboxer can integrate with CRMs to help optimize workflow and make sure your sales team is spending time on the leads with the most potential. Marketing departments will benefit from its ability to track engagement and store valuable information. The rest of your company will have access to this data, which helps inform future campaigns, customer success outreach and financial decisions.
Determine KPIs Across Departments
The best way to measure the success of your customer centric approach is to set goals across departments. Using KPIs can help your teams stay on track and refine the customer experience.
While everyone will be working off of a single customer view, their tasks will be different. Therefore, it is important to provide clear objectives.
If teams are succeeding in meeting or exceeding their KPIs, your company will be able to see the positive effects within their customer relations. If teams are coming up short, it may be a sign to redirect efforts and come up with a new strategy.
The important thing to remember when implementing a single customer view is to allow room for growth. The first approach may not be the best one. Your measuring KPIs will help your managers guide teams through this process.
KPIs can also help provide insight into areas of improvement within the customer journey. If you notice negative customer feedback regarding specific parts of the sales cycle, your team will be able to adjust and improve their actions.
Utilize Data Managers
This step may be better suited for bigger companies, but if you can, dedicate a role to data management. This will help ensure that your platform contains the most up-to-date information without having duplicate or old data.
This role can also help analyze data to inform teams about how customers are feeling. With one person focusing solely on organizing and cleaning information, departments can feel confident in the data they are using.
Data managers may provide valuable insight for process improvement as well. Once you’ve taken on a platform for your single customer view, processes should be developed and implemented across departments. With constant audit by a data manager, workflow optimization can be handled easily.
Develop and Implement Company-Wide Processes
While the specific actions vary across teams, taking the time to determine best practices makes sure your company benefits from a single customer view. Managers should meet to discuss the way each department uses data currently, and processes can be built out based on these conversations.
When developing these workflows, efficiency should be a top priority. Since all of the data will be stored in a single platform, it’s important to cut down on any actions that may duplicate efforts. For example, if sales and marketing departments were both previously qualifying prospects, decide which team should take that on in the new process.
Take the time to introduce and properly train employees on these processes. Employees should feel comfortable accessing and inputting data into the new platform. Make sure they understand how their current techstack integrates and works with the single customer view.
It’s important to make sure this transition causes minimal interruption to current client relationships. Ensure your departments feel confident in the new processes before letting them loose with the new system.
When deciding what processes should be implemented, make sure customer experience is at the forefront of these decisions. Any changes made should benefit your company’s overall ability to provide top tier services.
Key Takeaways
For B2B companies that want to remain competitive in the industry, successfully taking a customer centric approach is crucial. Pairing customer intelligence with a single customer view can help put your company ahead of others while promoting brand loyalty among your clients.
Investing in LeadBoxer, a fully integrated lead generation platform, can ensure that implementation of this strategy benefits all departments. Make sure your teams are onboard with these changes by providing ongoing support so they can utilize the platform to its fullest potential.
With a constant focus on improvement, your customers will feel valued. It’s important to evaluate the current buyer experience. Using the data collected and analyzed by Leadboxer, your teams will be able to gain valuable insight into customer behaviors.
Allow data to drive your decisions. A single customer view can help take the guesswork out of marketing and sales tactics. Use previous customer interactions and tracked website engagement to plan future campaigns.
Encourage your departments to collaborate based on the gathered information. By having a sales and marketing team that works together, customers can experience a seamless hand off between stages in the buying journey. Customer success teams will be able to track and preemptively do outreach to ensure the best possible post-purchase relationship.
Using a single customer view helps create a robust strategy for managing client relationships. Prioritizing the buyer experience through segmented outreach, personalized sales calls and efficient customer support will increase client retention.
Above all, make sure your company is encouraging employees to value customers. Lasting relationships lead to repeat purchases, referrals and higher sales conversions.
While the future of sales is constantly shifting as the pandemic continues to disrupt everyday life, figuring out how to navigate the world of post-pandemic business is the topic on everyone’s mind.
The new “normal” will look a lot different than how business was conducted pre-pandemic. With an emphasis on remote working, finding ways to lean into these changes and social selling will help your company thrive as the effects of the pandemic set in.
Adjusting from the abrupt change to the way business was conducted led to a push for remote working environments to become the norm. While some companies and leaders are still hesitant to make a permanent switch to virtual or hybrid models, workers are enjoying the benefits of telecommuting. Finding a balance that allows your employees the flexibility to enjoy remote work can help your business thrive in the post-pandemic world.
In this updated guide, we dive into post-pandemic sales to provide tangible actions your team can take to make sure your business comes out on top. Once you have an idea of what the post-pandemic world may look like, you can start planning effective methods of introducing these ideas into your content marketing plans. Keep reading, or jump ahead to the following sections:
Swapping over to remote business has been a huge undertaking for most companies. Luckily, everyone is finally getting the hang of virtual work. The most important takeaway from the sudden shift to virtual—it’s here to stay.
A 2022 Gallup survey found that 8 out of 10 employees are taking part in virtual work. The demand for hybrid or remote work continues to increase as employees experience an improved work-life balance. In fact, the Career Pulse Survey found that 97% of employees want some kind of hybrid (32%) or remote (65%) work option.
What does that mean for your business? You have to be flexible and use sales AI tools for example. Continued evaluation will go a long way as you navigate virtual business for your workers and clients. Shift your thinking from short-term solutions to a long-term plan.
Navigating this new environment is important for employee retention. Despite its popularity among workers, some companies are still pushing for a return to office culture. Microsoft found that only 12% of leaders feel confident in their remote employees’ productivity.
However, the same study shows that 87% of employees feel they are just as productive at home. Virtual work can help prevent burnout among top performers, allows for more focus time, and cuts out commute times. Employers should take the time to create long-term plans that encourage productivity while acknowledging the benefits of remote work.
Before the pandemic, it was common to go to multiple conferences a year and several networking events to generate leads and cultivate relationships with potential clients. Since going virtual, the business world has come to the realization that these events aren’t actually necessary to create relationships.
This may be a huge shift for you if you are a handshake-deal kind of salesperson, but virtual networking events can be just as effective when implemented properly.
Now, you can network from the comfort of your home office, and your company doesn’t have to foot the bill for expensive travel plans. Zoom, and other video platforms, have the option for break-out rooms and screen sharing, so your networking can be focused on direct conversations with prospective clients.
Working Remotely With a Full Staff
Since the switch to remote work in 2020, employees are continuing to enjoy the benefits of their virtual environments. The demand for telecommuting has remained strong. According to an AT&T study, hybrid work models were at 42% in 2021, and they are expected to increase to 81% by 2024.
Now that everyone is beginning to adjust to virtual sales operations, it is important to set standards for your employees when they are conducting business from their homes. Outline clear goals and keep a constant stream of communication.
Overcoming Remote Working Challenges
While many employees continue to see benefits from virtual work, employers are faced with challenges in creating sustainable remote or hybrid options. Facing the issues that remote work may create can help your company find its footing and get ahead. Most importantly, understanding that hybrid and virtual options are here to stay, at least for the short-term future, is crucial to a business’s success.
Assessing pain points to help better manage a hybrid team is a great way to figure out where improvements can be made. Using the 5Cs checklist means evaluating communication, coordination, connection, creativity, and culture. These factors can help strengthen your team and boost productivity in virtual environments.
Communication remains the backbone of a solid team. Due to the abrupt transition to virtual work, teams have had to readjust the way they interact with each other and other departments. Utilizing technology and establishing workflows can help streamline communication, which allows teams to work together effectively.
Coordination and connection help make sure no one is left out of the loop in important conversations. When working in-person, employees are easily connected with each other as well as coordinate meetings. Overcoming these challenges in the remote environment will help your team remain social and committed to the organization’s cause.
Finding ways to encourage collective creativity as well as individual ideas can help your team get ahead. Working remotely can silo members and discourage team collaboration, which is when group creativity shines. By utilizing zoom meetings and sidebar conversations, ideas can continue to flow and push for innovation.
Lastly, finding a way to cultivate company culture in remote working environments is important to retaining and attracting talent. While the transition to virtual work may have kept the culture among current employees, new hires face the challenge of finding ways to integrate with teams that don’t meet in person. Company culture is important for all employees, however, and businesses should focus on differentiating themselves from competitors with the environment they create for their workers.
Get Comfortable With Your Technology
Find your favorite virtual platform, and master it. Technology can be unreliable, but knowing how to troubleshoot efficiently can save your meetings when they experience problems. Using your platforms with confidence will show clients you are prepared.
Use e-signatures and make sure your clients are on board with this practice. This practice isn’t something that developed because of the pandemic, but with fewer in-person meetings, there is a greater reliance on closing deals electronically.
Like your other platforms, find a format that works for you, and be prepared to walk your client through the steps. Address their concerns about signing documents over email. Assurance and understanding will go a long way in making this process as smooth as possible.
Generating Leads and Creating Connections
Sales has always been an industry that requires a lot of communication, especially in-person, for sales conversions. Shifting to virtual sales operations provides more options when generating leads if you supplement in-person cultivation with an online generator.
Relying on technology to help generate leads can make a big difference for your team. With the current lack of chances to meet new leads in-person, supplementing with an online platform will create new opportunities.
Leadboxer’s platform is an example of this technology. It allows you to track every movement, beginning with the first interaction with your website, so you can qualify each prospect and plan your pitch accordingly.
Creating Genuine Connections
Without the ability to hit the golf course or meet for drinks with clients, finding an effective sales process during virtual meetings is crucial. Zoom meetings can seem formal compared to your usual networking activities, so find ways to make these interactions feel natural for all of the participants.
Take a few minutes before starting your meeting to chat about non-work related things. Use your camera and crack a few jokes instead of jumping straight into your pitch. Your clients will appreciate these efforts, and it will ease tensions going into the meeting.
Virtual meetings give you the ability to screen share with participants. Take advantage of this feature. Come prepared with Powerpoint presentations, do live demos of your products, and use engaging visuals to help the customer understand your services.
These visual tactics will boost engagement and keep your attendees’ attention throughout the meeting. With virtual meetings, vying for your client’s full attention is difficult since you’re competing with web browsers, cell phones, and instant messaging. Delivering a presentation that keeps the client’s focus will make a huge difference.
Don’t Forget the Follow-Up
Virtual business means it is possible for more meetings to be scheduled back to back during the day. So following up in a timely manner is important to stay fresh on your client’s mind.
After your meeting, send a quick email summarizing your discussion. Attach your PowerPoint presentation, or send links to your website. It is important to provide clear next steps with your client while demonstrating that you are committed to helping them through the process.
Reach out when your services can be valuable to their efforts. It’ll help strengthen the relationship by showing your client how dedicated you are and it’s important for account expansion too. Try to stay fresh on your client’s mind without bombarding them with constant messaging.
Don’t forget personalization when following up. Virtual doesn’t have to be boring. Send a personal thank you card or take time for a check-in phone call.
Content-Driven Sales
Using all of your marketing channels will help as you navigate the post-pandemic virtual sales game. Let your content speak about the company’s mission when it appears in the client’s inboxes and on their social media feed.
Work alongside your marketing team to craft content that illustrates the points you make during your pitches. Use images when giving presentations and when sending information to prospects.
With the switch to virtual business, relying on content and utilizing these channels will help boost your sales. Provide concrete calls-to-action and direct steps for your clients to take when they receive your content. Create a strong lead strategy.
Key Takeaways
Embrace the virtual world. Get comfortable with Zoom meetings and online networking events. Allow technology like Leadboxer to fill the gaps in areas like generating leads and tracking client action.
Allow employees to provide feedback on remote work before making decisions about returning to the office. As senior leadership within companies begins to discuss the possibility of on-site work, it’s important to understand how that will affect workers. These transitions can have strong impacts on productivity, company culture, and overall employee wellbeing.
Invest in ways for your employees to connect. Focus on cultivating a strong culture, regardless of where your workers are located. Setting your company apart from competitors within the virtual landscape can help retain employees.
Make sure to find strategies for continuing to cultivate genuine client relationships via inbound or outbound marketing. Make time before each meeting to chat and connect. Utilize visuals and online presentations in your virtual meetings.
As we continue to navigate the new normal and adjust to remote workspaces, keep in mind— virtual business is here to stay.
When planning a new launch, understanding the market and having a solid plan before the release is crucial to the product’s success. Blindly releasing a new product to the market without research and planning can lead to failure.
Utilizing a go-to-market strategy is one way to make sure your launch is hitting the market at the right time. Before you can start planning your next release, your company will need to understand the basics of a go-to-market strategy, as well as begin creating one for your new products.
Keep reading, or use the following links to jump ahead:
Simply put, a go-to-market (GTM) strategy is the plan your company creates as a step-by-step guide for a product launch. This will include understanding the target audience and collecting data, outlining marketing needs, and creating a sales plan.
Most importantly, a GTM helps identify a need within the market, so your product can be launched as the solution. A good GTM will use data to help drive the product launch decisions, including identifying the right audience and correct timeframe for the release.
A GTM can be used for physical products, as well as services, company restructures, or new businesses. This type of framework will help keep the end goal aligned across departments and ensure bases are covered for success.
New products take time, resources, and money to create. Having a GTM can make sure all of those efforts are being used to their fullest potential. A successful product launch aims to increase return on investment (ROI), and a GTM can be a powerful tool to make that happen.
Many companies have experienced product failures, which can usually be attributed to wrong timing, bad marketing, or poor market research. Outlining a launch strategy can take the guesswork out of a release, as well as prevent oversights or mistakes.
While there is always a chance of a product flop, regardless of planning, having a GTM can help manage expectations and prepare your company for the launch. This strategy can also help your team improve future roll-outs. With a framework in place, it’s easier to see which aspects of the release were successful and which areas need improvement.
There are two types of GTM strategies: flywheel and funnel. On the more traditional side, the funnel method focuses on generating leads and helping them through the sales cycle. The flywheel method engages prospects and customers through inbound marketing to build strong relationships.
5 Components of a Successful B2B Go-to-Market Strategy
Before your team hammers out the details for your GTM strategy, it is important to understand a few key components of a successful B2B go-to-market strategy. These details will help your marketing and sales team craft the GTM strategy while using data to back up their decisions.
Creating a solution to a market need. Before getting any further along, it’s important to take a look at your product and identify how it fits into the market. Understanding how your product solves a current need in the market will help drive its success when pitching to leads and current customers.
Identifying your target audience. It is crucial for your product to reach the right customers. Focusing on marketing to your target audience will help ensure quality leads are being nurtured and pushed through the sales funnel.
Understanding your competition. Knowing which other companies are offering similar products will help your team understand the demand and role your solution can play in the market. Market research will allow your team to make data-driven decisions to decide how your product will fit into the competitive landscape.
Demand for your product. Similar to understanding your competition, knowing the demand for your solution can help determine the success of your launch. It’s important to make sure the market isn’t oversaturated with similar options before releasing a new solution.
Planning the distribution. Getting your product to the masses is one of the last steps in a successful launch. Make sure your team has a plan, whether it’ll be through an app, third-party distributor, or a website purchase.
Step-by-Step Approach to Creating Your B2B Go-to-Market Strategy
Before going any further, your team should focus on identifying the problem your product will solve. Understanding how your company is providing a solution in the current market will help guide your leads and customers to a purchase. The goal of your launch should be to address and solve a specific problem within the market.
Identify the Target Audience
Making sure the product information reaches the right audience is crucial for converting leads to sales. Starting off, your company can focus on determining who is experiencing the problem your product wants to solve.
Next, your team can start working on using an Ideal Customer Profile to define who would be the perfect customer for this product. This profile is made up of certain characteristics including demographics, geography, size, budget, and pain points. Understanding this information will help your marketing team tailor their messaging to attract quality leads that will translate to sales.
In a similar vein, understanding buyer personas will also help your team understand the best audience for your launch. Not all customers are the same, and it’s important to make sure quality leads aren’t getting skipped over. Buyer personas help your team differentiate between the unique customers your brand attracts.
Research Your Competitors
In many markets, including B2B, it’s important to know the companies that are selling similar products. Dig deeper into your competition to understand the audience they’re catering to, as well as the differences in your products. This information will help your team determine where your solution falls in the market.
Plan Your Messaging
Along with knowing your target audience, your marketing team will need to plan their outreach. Your team will need to segment audiences based on buyer personas to make sure the right information gets to each group. Making sure your efforts earn the highest ROI will boost the success of your launch.
Understand the Buyer’s Journey
Once you have a marketing plan in place, it’s time to map out the journey that your customers will take. This will help your team visualize the funnel your prospects go through while making a purchase. By having this information, your customer journey map can show any weaknesses or trouble spots in your sales journey, which allows your company to tighten up the process.
Determine which channels are best for your release, and begin creating content. This can include social media, SEO content, and email content. Make sure your chosen channels are utilized by your target audience.
Creating a sales plan means deciding how your product will be sold. It’s important to identify this process, so your sales team is able to convert leads to purchases. Determine if your team will be using a self-service model, inside sales, or field sales.
Set Goals and Create Processes
Using a GTM strategy helps set expectations for a product launch. By setting key performance indicators (KPIs), as well as using SMART goals, your company can measure the success of a release.
Creating processes will help your team know how to achieve the goals that are being set. This will help sales and marketing work together for the best results and encourage collaboration across all departments.
Tips for Creating a Winning GTM strategy for Startups and B2B SaaS Companies
Once you have a GTM strategy in place, your team can begin planning a successful product release. There is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to creating a GTM, but following the lead from other companies can help push your business to the next level. Startups and B2B SaaS companies can both benefit from creating a GTM strategy for their product launches.
For B2B SaaS, growing the user base and engaging new prospects is typically the end goal of a product launch. By taking part in community-led growth, your company can increase users and have a successful product release. This strategy focuses on leveraging your community for acquiring new leads and overall expansion.
If your company is a growing start-up within the B2B industry, utilizing a Sales-Led growth strategy can help boost revenue. This tactic requires time and effort from your sales and marketing team, but it means relying heavily on your sales team as a push for higher numbers. If your teams are aligned properly with a strong hand-off process between leads, this strategy can help scale your business and create successful product launches.
Click here to start your lead generation cycle to create a target audience for your GTM strategy by using LeadBoxer’s free trial.
In today’s digital world, your customers are skeptical. It is easy for anyone to say anything online. With all the information, your B2B customers will likely listen only to opinions from those whom they trust.
Continue reading or use the links below to “jump” ahead:
The power of referrals is undeniable. Roughly 84% of B2B customers start their buying process with a referral. Additionally, companies with a B2B lead referral program have a 71% higher conversion rate.
A solid way to close more deals is through a B2B referral program. Referral marketing incentivizes satisfied customers to recommend your product or service to business decision-makers.
A referral program involves a process, often with a web page on which customers can enter business contacts. Occasionally, contacting representatives of referred businesses is not a B2B referral program. Instead, these recommendation programs track referrals and reward your customers when their recommendation produces a sale.
The Advantages of Having a B2B Referral Network
A network of customers who refer businesses to your brand can expand your B2B referral program and improve its effectiveness. Below are some advantages of a B2B referral network:
Increased Sales
Word-of-mouth advertising is the basis of B2B referral marketing. When a prospective client is referred to you through someone they trust who loves your brand, they most likely will convert. Referrals can improve conversion rates by up to 71%.
A referral network builds relationships, improves customer experience and expands word-of-mouth advertising about your products and services. These three B2B referral program benefits increase sales.
Lower Acquisition Costs
While getting new customers boosts sales, acquiring them can be expensive. It costs five times more to get new customers than keep current ones.
B2B referral programs lead to lower acquisition costs for new customers. Leads and signups recommended by a current customer are more likely to buy. This is because these new leads trust the opinion of the person who loves your product or service.
You will have customers leave over time. Churn rate is the percentage of customers who stop doing business with you. You must have new customers to balance the amount of existing ones.
Besides lowering acquisition costs, a B2B referral program can lower churn rate. In fact, referred customers have a retention rate 37% higher than non-referred ones.
B2B referral marketing programs are powerful lead-generation tools that attract high-quality leads. These leads will likely stay and do business with you over the long term, reducing churn.
Increase in Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)
Customer lifetime value (LTV) is the total revenue a customer generates for your business. LTV increases the more someone spends and the longer they are a customer.
A B2B referral program improves customer LTV with enhanced engagement with your company. Referred customers loyal to your business have a 25% higher lifetime value when recommended by friends, family members or colleagues. Customers will invest in your brand when the social proof and reputation of someone they trust are on the line.
Promote Brand Awareness
B2B referral programs are excellent ways to promote your brand through word-of-mouth advertising. The more people talk about your brand, the greater your exposure, resulting in more sales.
Brand awareness offers the following additional benefits:
Builds brand equity
Makes scaling up easier
Allows you to collect data on your audience for future marketing endeavors
Why B2B Referral Marketing Is So Effective
B2B referral programs increase the likelihood of closing deals. Below are some ways referral marketing is effective at producing sales:
1. Customers trust referrals.
Customers trust referrals from people they know. Reviews and recommendations from others perform much better than conventional advertisements. Studies show people are four times more likely to buy when referred by a friend.
2. Referred customers are more loyal.
When customers are referred to your company by someone they trust, they will stick around. Referral marketing helps potential customers start with a high opinion of your company.
3. Increase ROI
Referral marketing programs increase your return on investment (ROI) because it is more cost-effective than other forms of marketing. Getting customers through referrals can be up to five times less expensive than traditional advertising channels.
While there are costs with the rewards you offer, the benefits to your customers will be worth it. As mentioned, these referred customers are high-quality and will likely become loyal customers.
Your B2B referral program can be even more cost-effective with the types of rewards you offer. Awarding points or credits to people who recommend your brand can be cheaper than giving an immediate gift or discount.
4. Increase your marketing reach
Word-of-mouth marketing is an effective way to spread awareness of your brand and build credibility. Customers trust you when they hear good things about your offerings from those they respect.
People who recommend your brand to others become your brand ambassadors, offering free advertising. Referral advertising is limitless since nobody can prevent people from talking about your business. You also expand your potential lead base as your ambassadors will have diverse circles of acquaintances.
5. Easy setup
B2B referral programs are quick and easy to set up because many are automated. All you have to do is decide which rewards to offer and what people must do to earn the rewards.
You can also create a referral marketing program by asking customers to share the name of whoever referred them. You then reward them according to what your program outlines.
B2B referral programs allow you to gather information on prospective leads and market trends. When you know your referrals, you can give them an engaging and personalized experience by meeting their needs.
7. Increase customer engagement
Consumers buy from brands that are engaging with them. Customers are more engaged in sharing your brand through a referral program. A B2B referral program will drive brand advocates back to your website, increasing the chance of a sale.
8. Boost your social media
B2B referral marketing allows people to refer friends to your business via social media. Incentivizing loyal customers to promote your brand on their social networks will expand your social media presence.
How to Build a B2B Referral Program for Your Business
You may be wondering how you start building a B2B referral program. The first place to start is to figure out the right rewards for your B2B referrals.
To offer the right perks, you must know your audience and provide rewards that your referrals will enjoy. Gift cards, discounts on goods and services and credits are popular B2B referral program rewards.
After deciding on your B2B referral marketing rewards, here are some things to consider when building your program:
Establish a service agreement with a referral section built in. When onboarding new customers, let them know you appreciate and reward referrals.
Request referrals either via phone or in-person from satisfied customers. If you get a glowing review from a customer, ask them to refer your business when thanking them.
Send follow-up emails. After communicating your referral program to customers, follow up with an email campaign.
Conduct customer satisfaction surveys and questionnaires. Ask your customers about the quality of their experiences with your brand and services. Follow up with the ones most likely to refer you.
The benefits of having a B2B referral program have convinced you to create one of your own. You know what you need to get one off the ground, but what does a good referral marketing program look like? Here are some examples of companies with effective referral programs:
1. Bench Accounting
Bench Accounting is a fintech company that provides automated bookkeeping software. Bench Accounting’s B2B referral program offers a free month of accounting to friends of existing customers.
2.Airtable
AirTable offers an all-in-one solution for teams to collaborate and communicate. Their referral marketing program gives credits to those who recommend the company to others.
Those who refer others to Airtable receive 100 credits for new accounts and 25 credits should those customers upgrade. Credits go towards discounts and perks.
3. SurveyMonkey
SurveyMonkey is a SaaS company that allows businesses to create and analyze the results of surveys. SurveyMonkey uses referral software to run its program automatically. Their referral marketing program gives members $500 for every organization registering a SurveyMonkey account.
4. DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean provides businesses with a workforce management tool to help them with their IT needs. DigitalOcean offers many perks based on the actions taken by the referrals.
With their B2B referral program, members receive a $25 credit when a referral spends $25. Members receive $100 and a 60-day credit when a referral adds a payment method.
Hotjar allows businesses to analyze and understand the behavior of people who visit their websites. Their referral program offers different rewards for different levels of referrals
The top referrer receives a free lifetime business account. The top-five runner-ups get a free hoodie. Those who make five referrals get a free T-shirt.
6. Jawfish Digital
Jawfish Digital is a content marketing and web design agency offering clients content creation, web design and e-book production services. Their B2B referral program awards $100 Amazon gift cards to anyone who recommends their content or web design services.
Businesses that want to attract quality leads and close more deals need a B2B referral program. These marketing programs offer many benefits and are easy to set up and customize.
Conclusion
Check out LeadBoxer today to learn how it can significantly help your company increase its lead generation through custom lead scoring combined with 20 of the most popular and requested app integrations.
As we emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic, businesses are continuing to face a challenging economy. For those who weathered the uncertainty of 2020, current rising interest rates and inflation are pushing businesses to streamline spending as much as possible. Despite fears of a recession, there are ways to grow and increase revenue for B2B companies.
Strategically using marketing and other tactics to shorten the sales life cycle (SLC) can help your team capitalize on existing resources, while improving return on investment (ROI).
Keep reading or use the following links to “jump ahead”:
Superb customer experience (CX) should be the chief focus of your sales and marketing efforts. This includes reaching out to your target audience in a timely manner and ensuring your messaging contains helpful information. Customers most want to know how your product relates to their needs!
Incorporating automation and taking advantage of data-driven marketing techniques can help improve the individual CX throughout your sales cycle. Rather than trying to apply a one-size-fits-all approach, hyper personalization addresses the unique needs of each customer to help close a deal. This method relies heavily on data collection and proper data analysis, which gives your marketing team an informed understanding of their target audience.
Before jumping into using this strategy, it’s important to create and know your ideal customer profile. Effective lead segmentation is also key for success.
While you can’t personalize your outreach for each individual customer, content should be segmented based on audience groups in similar stages of the buying process. This helps funnel customers through the sales pipeline by providing relevant product information on a timeline that suits their needs.
Instead of selling your product to the masses, hyper personalization provides educational content to help cultivate and deepen customer relationships. This happens by using data to help uncover more information about prospective leads and current customers. This data includes browsing history, content engagement, purchasing behavior, and their activity timelines.
This type of marketing allows your team to capitalize on money that’s already been spent, rather than upping the budget. Your company may need to invest in lead generation software that tracks website engagement and stores data. Once in place, a quality lead information platform can prove pivotal in boosting your ROI.
Costs will begin to decrease as automation, audience segmentation, and a streamlined workflow helps reach your customers. Research conducted by Deloitte shows that in return for more personalized service, 22% of customers are willing to share personal data. In the same report, Deloitte asserts evidence suggests companies can see an 8x increase in ROI when hyper personalization is executed properly.
Maximizing revenue with this tactic can come from boosting online sales, improving CX and increasing customer retention. Start with focused content that showcases your product and brand making it stand out from your competitors. By creating this content, your marketing team can push educational resources to customers throughout the sales cycle to aid their product research.
How To Implement Hyper Personalization Into Your Marketing Strategy
Once you understand the concept, implementing this tactic takes a bit of advance work. Through techstacks, automation, artificial intelligence (AI), and data analytics, your team can apply hyper personalization to shorten the sales life cycle (SLC).
Get to know your customers. While this seems self-explanatory, this strategy relies heavily on a deep understanding of your current clients and leads. Buyer personas and ideal client profiles are a great starting point for this.
Digging a little deeper into your current customers and their product usage can help you understand what motivates new leads to seek out your services. Take time to gather feedback from your current customers. This can be done through social media, sales conversations, and website forms.
Gather insight through analyzing website and content engagement. Understanding how prospects interact with your page can inform the content your team creates. This information can be gathered and stored through a lead generation tool like Leadboxer for easy access.
Create a strong techstack. Utilizing technology will help streamline your marketing process, remove siloes between sales and marketing teams and shorten the SLC. Collecting clean data is vital to this strategy, and technology is the best way to gather reliable information.
Invest in a lead generation and lead management platform that integrates with your CRM to update data in real-time. This technology will capture prospect information, segment and score new leads, and track content engagement.
Build your content strategy. Using the data your marketing team has gathered, begin crafting a strategy to push out content. This will be a collection of social media posts, educational content, and email marketing.
Rather than rolling out all of this content to every customer, your team should focus on audience segmentation for a hyper personalized experience. Consider trigger points for promotional deals or educational pieces. For example, if an interested lead fills out a web form, your site can offer an informational guide about your industry.
Segmentation will help make sure email marketing campaigns are being sent to customers at the right stage in the sales cycle. By dividing groups based on being in similar phases of the customer journey, your content can help push customers to quicker sales conversions.
Take advantage of automation. Remove some of the burden from your marketing team, and replace repetitive tasks with automation. This will help eliminate room for human error from the marketing and sales cycle, while freeing up resources for other activities.
Using automation to send out content based on different trigger points can help you keep your product top of mind with your customer base. Automated email marketing keeps prospects informed of changes and advancements in the service or product you provide. Automation also helps cleanse your data, as an automated process collects and stores information in real time.
Successfully Using Email Marketing For Targeted Outreach
Shortening the SLC requires good communication to help nurture customer relationships. While your salespeople may be making a good effort to connect with prospects over the phone, engaging leads with email marketing can help increase ROI.
Rather than spending money on prospecting, take advantage of the contacts your company has gathered over the years. These are leads who have already heard of your service or product, so capitalize on their brand awareness to re-engage them in the sales funnel. Continuing communication through triggered email newsletters or drip campaigns can ensure your team is reaching out at the right moment.
Using segmented email lists can help your sales team time align its outreach efforts with customer needs. Your team can track lead engagement to pinpoint when potential customers are gearing up to make a purchase.
Key Takeaways
Shortening the sales cycle is a great way to increase ROI during an economic downturn. With customers spending less time in the sales cycle, resources are freed to engage new leads and attract new prospects. Using hyper personalization can help your team strengthen customer relationships while simultaneously introducing new leads to your brand.
By segmenting audiences and ensuring relevant information is reaching clients during their customer journey, your sales team can pitch your product in a timely manner. Hyper personalization relies on up-to-date data and automation to run smoothly. Incorporating this strategy with a techstack that includes a lead generation tool can help boost your success rate.
Take time to understand your current customers. Evaluate the ways in which your products are meeting their needs. This information will help attract similar leads, while providing valuable insight into the ways clients interact with your brand.
Plan content accordingly, and utilize trigger points to get relevant information into the hands of the most eager customers. By having content ready for all stages of the sales cycle, communication can help prospects make informed purchases.
Automate processes to free up time and other resources for sales and marketing teams. By allowing technology to play a key role in this strategy, your team can avoid human errors and plan content with the most accurate data points.
Increase brand loyalty by promoting new services or product lines to satisfied customers through email marketing. Utilizing email for continued communication, even after the sale has been made, can help retain clients and encourage repeat purchases. Targeted outreach helps demonstrate your willingness to meet customers’ needs.
Get started with a free Leadboxer trialtoday to experience what quality lead generation, lead management, and easy integration with the popular tools you already use can do to improve your bottom line!
Finding someone’s email is a crucial part of cold email outreach. Here are 30 best email lookup tools that can help you in 2024
Without an email address, you’re left to call or message prospects. Options which are likely to lead to low reply/answer rates. With someone’s email address and the right email tracking app, you can reach out to them directly, know that the email has arrived in their inbox, and find out whether or not they’ve opened your email.
While some prospects list their email publicly on social media and their website, others require a little more work. The good news is you don’t need to be a professional detective to find a person’s email address.
Note:- The difference between email lookup tools and email marketing tools is that, email lookup tools help you find emails of your prospects and leads, whereas email marketing software are used to run email campaigns to your list of newsletter subscribers and sign-ups.
We’ve scoured the internet for to tools to find email addresses and these most popular email lookup tools on the net, are here to help you source and approach your candidates with ease. Take a look!
1. LeadBoxer
LeadBoxer is actually not an email lookup tool, but the ultimate tool for tracking and managing the leads that are generated by email lead generation. This GDPR compliant marketing tool comes with everything you need to safely capture and convert prospects for your business. LeadBoxer offers multiple ways to identify potential customers, filter your email lists, and qualify your leads through dynamic scoring. This is one of the best Lead Generation tools there are.
With the app, you can also receive notifications and updates when specific customers engage in conversion activities on your site or read your emails. Additionally, you can identify the contact information of your website’s visitors. This reduces the need for spending time finding leads to reach out to.
We offer Lead Identification and Lead intelligence through website & email tracking.
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2. RocketReach
RocketReach uses its large database of 700 million contacts across 35 million companies to help your organization reach the right person. Their browser extension makes finding information on LinkedIn and other sites super easy. Rocket Reach is probably one of the top tools to find anyone’s email in the current market.
Their plans start at $39/month, which offers access to basic email lookup and can be upgraded to fit your business needs.
3. ZoomInfo
With over 100 million companies, ZoomInfo allows your team to find the contact information for millions of employees. Their browser extension works with LinkedIn and other sites. Specialized search features help narrow down the pool to help your outreach.
While their pricing varies per team, starting a free trial is the best way to explore the tool. From there, a sales rep will reach out to help determine the best plan for your needs.
4. LeadGibbon
LeadGibbon cares about quality. With their program, your team doesn’t pay for email addresses unless they are accurate. This lead generation software checks deliverability on the domain before sharing the information.
Track verified email addresses with a single click using LeadGibbon. Starting at $49/month, your company can get 250 email credits and 25 phone credits to discover across LeadGibbon’s 26 million contact records.
5. Vocus.io
An email lookup tool designed for Google Chrome users, Vocus.io is a comprehensive email solution that expands your Gmail capability to find anyone’s email address. Just one of the features included in the system is email prospecting. The tool also includes email tracking, scheduling, and snooze functionality.
To use email lookup tools, type the name and company domain of the person you want to connect with into the search bar. Vocus.io will create a list of possible email addresses, which it runs through a “verification” service. There’s no bulk search available on Vocus. Pricing starts at $5/month.
6. Voila Norbert
Voila Norbert makes it easy to find any email address. Create an account and you’ll instantly receive 50 free searches. To find someone’s email, type the company domain and person’s name into the tool’s search bar, and Norbert will generate a result. You are only charged for emails that the tool is able to find.
The starter plan is available at $49/month for 1,000 leads (emails found).
For companies who prefer one-off usage, Viola Norbert provides pay-as-you-go email verification and email enrichment. For as little as $.003 per email address, this software can verify the contact information. Email enrichment starts at $.04 per email, which can help your team gain access to more leads through quality data.
7. Hunter.io
Previously known as “Email Hunter,” Hunter.io. is a popular email lookup tool that allows you to find an email address by domain. To use the tool, you simply enter a company’s URL and Hunter.io will return a list of emails that belong to that company.
There is a free plan available for 100 “requests” (email searches). Paid plans start at $39/month for 1,000 requests.
A free plan provides 25 monthly searches and 50 monthly verifications, whereas paid plans start at $49/month.
8. HireEZ
This email lookup service is geared toward recruiters, HireEZ helps push candidate information to your ATS or CRM. While their goal is to help find qualified candidates, B2B companies can benefit from their AI-generated search that pulls contact information for accurate outreach. Their email sequencing campaign feature allows your team to schedule touchpoints in advance.
Using artificial intelligence, the service collects information from around the web to build a full profile on the person you’re looking for. The service integrates with Gmail and Outlook. HireEZ pricing can be found by speaking with a sales rep.
9. Lusha
Tool that helps you find emails fast and efficiently, it’s also personal. Companies can customize the Lusha experience by adding the service to Salesforce, LinkedIn, or Twitter. There’s also a “Contact API” available for developers to plug into their existing technology stack.
Lusha has options for all business needs, starting with a free trail that allows 5 annual credits. The Pro plan is $29/month, Premium goes up to $51/month, and they’re happy to discuss pricing if your company needs a larger credit allowance.
10. FindThatLead
Intended for account-based sales, FindThatLead is quick and easy to use. Type a company URL into the search bar and click “Find Leads” to generate a list of email addresses within that company.
Billed monthly, FindThatLead’s plans start at $49/month for 5,000 monthly credits and can go up from there.
11. Skrapp
Skrapp is an email search tool that verifies information from LinkedIn. It syncs with your CRM to easily store leads. Pricing starts at $49/month for 1,000 emails.
12. AnyMail Finder
With Anymail Finder, you can look up email addresses by entering a person’s full name and company URL or name.
For smaller needs, Anymail Finder has a plan for $14/month that gives 50 verified emails. Premium plans are available at $49 per month for 1,000 verified emails, and pricing goes up for there. You only pay for emails that Anymail Finder knows won’t bounce.
13. Nymeria
If you’re hoping to gather prospects from your LinkedIn network, then Nymeria is the perfect tool for you. Offering users the chance to find emails with a single click, the browser extension scans through LinkedIn profiles to find right email addresses. Once found, you can export emails to a spreadsheet.
Nymeria offers monthly or annual billing, depending on which best fits your company’s needs. Their Nano plan is $33/month for 100 credits.
14. Clearbit
Clearbit is an advanced email finder tool that integrates with your CRM system. It currently supports Segment, Zapier, Marketo, and Salesforce. It also comes with a “Connect” feature which works with Gmail and Outlook.
The “Prospector” system scans through 20 million companies to create lists of targeted accounts that fit specific criteria for your business needs, like the number of employees within a company, or preferred technology stack.
Once you find the contacts you need, you can import them directly into your CRM system. Clearbit is a customizable platform based on volume, and their pricing varies. Schedule a demo today to begin chatting with a team member to see what best suits your company.
15. FindEmails
FindEmails.com is a cheap alternative for businesses who want the ability to look up bulk emails. While they don’t provide an accuracy guarantee through email verification process like some of their competitors, plans start at $29/month and go up based on the amount of credits your team needs.
16. LinkedIn Sales Navigator Lite
Another powerful email tool that integrates with Gmail, LinkedIn Sales Navigator Lite is an extension for Chrome owned by LinkedIn. Once you install the extension, you can compose new emails in Gmail by typing a potential address into the “To” field. The system will draw data from LinkedIn to help find email details.
Usually salespeople and other professionals find LinkedIn Sales Navigator to be the most useful sales tool for leads. However LinkedIn sale navigator lets you find LinkedIn profiles of your prospects but it doesn’t provide email address information with it. Hence you have use another tool on our list with this one.
Pricing varies based on your business needs, and you can contact a sales rep to get started with the conversation.
17. SellHack
Sellhack is a simple and effective browser extension. The service uses an “industry leading” 12-step email verification engine to identify correct email addresses. You can even use its one-click integration to sending an email with personalization from your email account to the prospects you find.
Prices start at $3/month for their ‘Lite’ version that comes with 100 email credits. Their ‘Pro’ plan is $60/month with 2,500 email credits and access to other features.
18. UpLead
UpLead focuses on bringing accurate data to the prospecting game. Rather than simply scraping the internet, UpLead spends time gathering clean and up-to-date data including email addresses to make B2B outreach easier and more accurate.
Plans start at $74/month, and can go up based on your needs.
19. Email Permutator
Email Permutator is a free tool that allows you to enter in a person’s full name and their company URL in order to generate a list of potential email addresses. There is no type of verification service with this tool. Using it will require a trial-and-error approach to correctly identify a person’s email.
20. Findymail
Findymail is another email finder… but not only! You can use their Chrome extension to export Sales Navigator search results with verified email addresses, but it also works on Apollo and any Linkedin profile.
They take great pride in the finding accurate email addresses, which means contrary to other email finders, you won’t need to use an email verification tool on the provided data. Pricing is $49-$249 per month, with unlimited users
21. BuzzStream
BuzzStream works by turning search result pages and website lists into a browsable list of prospects. When you search for blogs or influencers on Google, the tool shows up in the right-hand side of your browser to suggest possible prospects and email addresses pulled from those websites.
You can also use keywords like a person’s name to search for specific contacts and find their email address and social profiles. Once you find an email, Buzzstream adds it to a spreadsheet for you, alongside other information like the website the email is associated with, that site’s domain authority, and the prospect’s Twitter name. Their most popular plan is $124/month, which gives access to 25,000 contacts, bulk emailing, and link monitoring.
22. Ninja Outreach
Ninja Outreach helps with finding business leads and influencers by browsing through social profiles and websites online. Simply type keywords like “technology company” into the system, and it will list possible contacts from its internal database. You can also use the system to track your email campaigns and conversions with a built-in CRM system.
Their prices range from $155/month to $459/month, and all come with a free trial. All of the options allow for full search of their 120 Million influencers.
23. LeadFuze
LeadFuze is an email lookup tool that helps you to find the email and build your contact lists extension for Google Chrome. With LeadFuze, you can create relevant prospect lists without all the hard work and time. The system checks through social media profiles, email addresses, and prospect information on your behalf.
For scaling teams, LeadFuze starts at $147/month which provides access to 500 lead credits. However, they offer an unlimited plan for $397/month if more credits are needed.
24. Getemail.io
A simple yet effective email lookup tool from a startup in France, Getemail.io comes with 10 free credits to get you started. Each credit equals one email search. Although you won’t receive as many free searches with Getemail.io as some of the other tools on this list, the service comes with access to machine learning algorithms and big data for more accurate searches.
The “Basic” plan costs $49/month for 300 searches and email support. The “Standard” plan costs $99/month for 1,000 searches and instant chat support.
If you upgrade to the “Premium” plan at $149/month, phone support is also available, and you’ll receive 2,000 searches. They even offer an ‘Ultra’ plan for those who need 10,000 credits.
25. Snov.io
With Snov.io, you can find all the emails associated with a single person and verify them instantly. A green dot next to a prospect’s name means that the email is valid. On the other hand, a yellow dot suggests that the email may or may not be correct.
The Snov.io free account comes with a generous 100 domain searches a month, 100 verified LinkedIn searches, and the opportunity to upload and verify 200 of your own emails.
Their paid plans start at $30/month which provides the ability to use 1,000 credits and email 5,000 recipients. For custom plans, the starting rate is $999/month and features are determined to best suit your needs.
26. Email Magpie
Email Magpie is an email tool that searches through available public information on the internet and its own database. It finds influencer, company, and customer leads according to your chosen categories online.
For instance, you can look for tech companies, software brands, marketing companies, or any B2B clientele you choose. You can also search for lists according to geographical location or industry vertical. Paid plans $300 per month for 2,750 targeted emails.
27. AeroLeads
With AeroLeads, you can find phone numbers, email addresses, and social media profile information for businesses and their decision makers. AeroLeads is a Google Chrome plugin, so you’ll need to download and activate it before you start searching. With this tool, you can find emails through LinkedIn, Google, and various other blogs.
When you add a prospect name or domain to AeroLeads, the service automatically checks for verified email addresses and phone numbers. Pricing starts at $49/month for up to 2,000 searches.
28. Name2Email
Name2Email is a Gmail extension. To use the tool, compose an email and add a full name and domain to the address bar. The tool automatically generates a list of common corporate email addresses for the person you want to reach.
To improve your chances of finding a valid email with email lookup tools, you can hover your cursor over the generated addresses. If a popup shows the person’s name, then you’ve chosen the right address.
While using this tool will be more time consuming than using some of the other options on this list, the extension is completely free. All you need to do is add it to Chrome.
29. Discoverly
Discoverly works in the background as you search through websites and social media pages. It’s a Chrome extension that integrates with Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, and AngelList, among other services, to automatically pull email addresses and profile information from pages.
The extension is completely free to use. You simply add it to your Chrome browser to get started.
30. ContactOut
A tool frequently used by recruitment teams, ContactOut helps recruiters find valid candidate email addresses. The tool installs as a Chrome extension that’s specifically designed to search through LinkedIn profiles.
ContactOut claims a 97% accuracy rate when finding email addresses. The extension is completely free to add to your Chrome browser.
Choosing from the Best Email Lookup Tools
There you have it, a selection of some of the best email lookup tools online today. Finding someone’s email is a crucial part of cold email outreach.
The perfect tool for you will depend on a range of factors including pricing, whether or not you need to find contacts from LinkedIn profiles, using an email tracking pixel, and if you want to find email addresses at scale.
While most of the tools on this list will help you find email addresses for a list of leads you’ve already identified, what about the ones you haven’t? What about the people who have already visited your website but haven’t contacted your company?
This is where LeadBoxer comes in. With LeadBoxer, you can identify your website’s visitors and their contact information without them reaching out to you first. This way, you’ll never miss out on connecting with a potential lead. To get started, schedule a free demo here.
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B2B lead generation services are an essential element of any successful marketing and sales strategy for 2023. Lead generation is the first step in creating a full sales pipeline. Along with lead qualification, lead management is an important tactic to use as customers begin their sales journey.
Understanding the upcoming trends across the B2B industry can help your team plan for future success. Lead generation is a proven methodology that has doubled in popularity since 2017.
To get started with your lead generation strategy, keep reading, or use the links below to “jump ahead”:
Simply put, lead generation is the process of finding prospects who may be interested in your product and adding them to your sales pipeline. These potential clients should be qualified and scored based on their readiness to make a purchase. Then, they will be handed over to either marketing or sales to continue their customer journey.
Creating a lead generation strategy will help your marketing and sales team plan out where their energy should be used. This strategy will help uncover new leads as well as re-engage those who may have fallen out of the pipeline.
More than half of all marketers are spending at least 50% of their budget on generating leads, yet only 80% of marketers rate their efforts as somewhat effective.Capitalizing and improving lead generation tactics can make a huge difference in return on investment (ROI) for marketing departments.
There are four main components of a lead generation strategy: lead capture, lead magnets, conversion techniques and lead scoring. Understanding all of these elements will help your company create a well-rounded strategy and take advantage of upcoming trends.
Lead Capture
Many buyers do their own research when looking for solutions for their businesses. There’s a good chance most start with a Google search and click through the web pages that pop up.
It takes at least three months for 63% of generated leads to convert.This means identifying, capturing and engaging website traffic is extremely important for filling your sales funnel with prospects ready to start their customer journey.
Capturing leads can be accomplished in a few ways, including contact information forms and the use of lead generation software. Software like LeadBoxer helps your team identify and score prospects based on their activity on your website. Using these tools can help your team gather contact information and interact with interested customers.
Lead Magnets
This component can help your team avoid losing touch with one-time visitors to your website. If your attempts to gather contact information are stalling, lead magnets are a great way to interact with the customer and begin establishing a relationship.
A lead magnet is a type of content that provides value information to online visitors in exchange for their contact information. Lead magnets can be as simple as a free trial or webinar. White papers or eBooks are also great lead magnet options.
Educational blogs see 52% more organic web traffic than blogs focused on company information. Search engine optimization (SEO) still matters, and prospects are interested in the value your content can provide. This type of marketing material may persuade website visitors to join your mailing list or schedule a sales call.
When a prospect goes to register or download your gated content, they will need to put in their contact information, which allows your team to easily add them to the sales pipeline.
Conversion Techniques
Using a lead generation landing page is another way to gather contact information from prospects. Utilizing this practice can help your team stay on top of the newest trends for 2023. Currently, just 68% of B2B companies use landing pages for lead generation.
These types of pages serve two purposes:
Adding customers to your pipeline while educating them about the services you can provide.
Combining landing pages with ads is a great way to direct web traffic to your site.
Lead Scoring
Before pushing your generated leads to the pipeline, it’s important to rank prospects based on how likely they are to convert. This will help manage your leads and make sure customers are receiving communication that fits their current stage in the buying journey.
As the B2B industry continues its emergence out of the COVID-19 pandemic, some lasting effects can still be felt. In 2023, lead generation strategy will continue to remain fully digital.
Webinars and video content will continue to grow as key components of marketing for the B2B buyer in 2023. Insider Intelligence found that webinars about the product are attended by 55% of prospects before they accept a sales meeting,
Taking advantage of this opportunity can help funnel more interested prospects into your pipeline. Research predicts the use of chat bots will help facilitate $142 billion USD of consumer spending by 2024.
Lead management is the strategy your marketing team uses to capture, qualify and track leads before passing them along to your salespeople. It is crucial to organize this data. If your company isn’t focused on executing a strong lead management system, resources and efforts will go to waste, which can contribute to an overall lower ROI from marketing costs.
Inbound leads can lower costs per lead by 61%; outbound leads tend to cost 39% more. This means using lead generation strategies and creating a successful management plan can help lower overall costs for your organization.
A main component of successful lead management is automation. Investing in the right software can help your team reduce manual labor, maintain clean data and analyze leads in real time. 80% of marketers believe incorporating automation into their marketing efforts helps generate more leads, as well as conversions.
Using LeadBoxer as your lead generation and management platform can help you identify, qualify, score and manage leads in one place. It also includes integrations that work seamlessly with other software in your tech stack. This helps streamline communication between sales and marketing departments.
Leadboxer successfully helps with data cleansing by using profile enrichment to update customer information. The platform also provides marketing insights, which helps give automatic data analytics for your team to use.
LeadBoxer’s Custom Lead Scoring Tool works to make sure your sales team is concentrating on customers who are most likely to convert. This cutting edge software automatically calculates a lead score using a variety of factors to determine how each prospect should be ranked.
Using lead management and qualification can help your company stay ahead of the curve. For companies working without automation, verifying leads and deciding their value can be a difficult challenge.
The B2B lead generation services market is trending upwards for 2023 and beyond. This data can help predict what to watch for in the coming years.
Experts predict the market will continue to benefit from technological innovation. With new advancements, products will continue to improve, which will increase usage across the industry.
The market is expected to expand to multi-millions by 2027. Reports show the 2021 market held a value of 1900.34 million USD, which is predicted to grow to 3733.52 million over the next four years.
Business Research Insights revealed challenges the industry may face in 2023 include a lack of awareness around its services. Smaller businesses need to discover the market so they can boost participation.
Get a jumpstart on your lead generation strategy for the new year, and see how LeadBoxer’s lead scoring feature can help your company with a free trial!
Running a software as a service (SaaS) business is exciting but challenging. By offering a digital product or service, a traditional business model won’t help your company scale. A B2B SaaS lead generation model is needed.
Read on for the full article or “jump ahead” to the following topics:
The traditional software business model is losing popularity compared to the SaaS model. With the former, lead generation is based on acquisition. With the latter, it’s based on customer retention. This is because it costs 5-25 times more to acquire new customers than it does to retain existing ones.
The SaaS lead generation model shows how incremental improvements are highly profitable. Bettering customer retention by a small amount can greatly scale a SaaS company as customers support the brand. In fact, a 5% increase in customer retention can boost revenue by up to 95%.
Of course, you’ll need to have a scalable SaaS company in order to take full advantage of the SaaS lead generation model. Successful SaaS businesses have the following elements:
Find an unmet need and offer a solution to it.
Have a minimum viable product.
Have a deep understanding of your market and customers.
Add product features based on customer feedback.
Once you launch a SaaS company, you are ready to implement your SaaS lead generation strategy. A big part of this strategy is subscription payments.
How Subscription Payments Help Your Budget and Financial Forecasting
Subscriptions are the backbone of a SaaS business. Your budget and profitability likely depend on these predictable transactions.
The B2B SaaS lead generation model “rents” access to software users instead of charging a one-time cost. This subscription payment method is effective at generating a profit and scaling a business. Instead of relying on new customers to make a purchase, SaaS companies can safely depend on monthly subscription payments.
To get people to subscribe to your product or service, they need to become customers. Afterward, the customers need to engage with you to make those payments. The SaaS business model emphasizes the use of smaller, regular subscriptions.
The SaaS lead generation model stresses the use of more frequent, cheaper subscription payments. Instead of converting prospects into customers and then having them pay you for subscriptions, you direct customers to your website. Once on the website, customers can sign up for a subscription.
Regularly charging customers smaller subscriptions removes the high price that keeps some prospects away. Additionally, this business model increases customer loyalty and upgrades, and reduces security vulnerabilities.
These frequent subscription payments help SaaS companies maintain a healthy budget that helps them plan for the future. This is because the subscription payments are predictable. You’ll have consistent money coming in.
The lower subscription costs help attract and retain more customers. A high customer retention rate means companies save on high acquisition costs. SaaS companies scale by relying on loyal customers to pay subscriptions.
The Data-Driven SaaS Model
Companies that adopt a traditional business model tend to make decisions based on intuition and gut feelings. With SaaS lead generation, the emphasis is on data, and there are numerous tools readily available for data analysis.
In the SaaS business model, information about website visitors and prospects is gathered and used to attract and retain customers. Prospect information leads the nurturing process. Data obtained in the SaaS model also helps the company to see which areas are going well and which areas need review.
While it is easier than ever to analyze business data, an astonishing 73% of organizational data is never analyzed. This means non-data-driven organizations are not able to make the best decisions to scale.
Customer feedback is some of the most valuable data you can get for B2B SaaS lead generation. When you make necessary feedback improvements, you acquire more prospects, have higher net revenue, and accelerated product growth.
Feedback from current customers helps you identify your ideal client profile. The information you obtain can also be used to create buyer personas that direct your sales and marketing efforts.
When you listen to your current customers, you provide better customer service and experiences. These go a long way in acquiring and retaining customers. Forward-thinking, customer-driven SaaS companies do the following:
Segment their customers.
Design customer-friendly onboarding and in-app product walkthroughs.
Reach out to customers to increase engagement based on product data.
Create health scores on prospects and automate plans of action based on those scores.
With customer feedback-driven data, companies can meet their customers where they’re at. Your business can do its lead generation for SaaS with less time and cost using automated triggers.
The benefits of customer feedback include improvement of your product or service, higher brand loyalty, and better lead generation endorsements. These will help your SaaS lead generation efforts succeed and make your company grow.
Under the traditional business model, the sales team is responsible for pushing product or service upgrades onto customers. This creates a one-sided, transactional relationship between a company and a buyer. As a result, customer service dwindles and buyers don’t have a positive experience.
With lead generation for SaaS, the customer success team drives customer attainment and upgrade conversations into authentic experiences. When customers don’t feel pressured to upgrade but have positive relationships with a brand, they are more likely to convert. When clients have a good experience with your brand, they will enjoy your product and be eager to upgrade.
SaaS lead generation increases net revenue retention (NRR), which indicates potential business growth from customers. This metric measures recurring revenue from existing customers. Upgrades, churn, and downgrades are included in the NRR.
Automation helps your customer success team in getting upgrades and renewals. Your sales managers will be freed up for high-risk accounts. Automation enables your customer service teams to better their outreach prioritization with growth likelihood and churn forecasts.
SaaS B2B companies that use automation give customers consistent service that leads them to value a brand, product, or service. These businesses rely on user experience gained from customer segmentation, behavioral data, and buyer’s journeys. Through data and analytics, SaaS businesses can improve the adoption of their product or service.
Increase Brand Loyalty
Customer feedback can help increase brand loyalty by letting companies know how to improve and better meet customer needs. You can better market your product and service to meet the pain points of your customers.
You can develop a customer journey map once you know their needs. Monitor your customers as they go through the sales process. If a customer stalls in the funnel, your team can intervene to keep them progressing forward.
Conversely, if a customer masters your product or service, you can use feedback to upgrade or upsell advanced features. Strategic touch points along the buyer’s journey help sales teams track customer engagement throughout their lifecycle.
These touchpoints go beyond specific milestones such as onboarding and renewing. Observing customer behavior, where they are at, and what they need, creates more touchpoints. Additional touchpoints lead to reduced churn, customer value maximization, and improvement in customer service.
Encourage Endorsements for Lead Generation
Word of mouth is one of the most powerful SaaS B2B lead generation strategies. People are more willing to do business with you when they see others benefiting from your products or services. Endorsements are a great way to up your lead generation.
Endorsements of a product or service are through a distinct, outside party, usually an influencer, celebrity, or industry titan. These people or companies help sell your product or service to your customers. Credible spokespeople boost your company’s brand so your products and services appeal to and are trusted by a wider customer base.
Product and service endorsements are an important component of lead generation for SaaS. This is because the SaaS business model is customer-centric. Customers are skeptical of working with a business unless its brand, services, and products get approval from trusted others.
To scale a SaaS business, you must attract and retain customers. B2B SaaS lead generation is customer-centric. Each person in the company needs to make customer success their priority.
One way to get lead prospects interested in your brand, service, or product is through retargeting. This effective advertising strategy shows targeted, customized ads to each prospect. The tracking of a customer’s interaction with a business’s website generates these ads.
Retargeting is a way to get prospects into your sales funnel to begin the nurturing process. These ads keep your business at the top of a customer’s mind, making it more likely they will convert.
Lead nurturing is also important and is tied to retargeting. Nurtured prospects are higher quality and more likely to make a purchase.
Nurtured leads will have consistent interactions with your brand and are more likely to convert. They will know your brand and what you offer. The personalized treatment they receive will give them increased confidence in your company.
The most effective lead strategy methods are constantly changing and your company must evolve with them. The nuances of technology mean what worked for lead generation even a year ago may not be applicable now. If you aren’t regularly reassessing your lead strategy tactics, you’re missing opportunities to find new prospects.
We’ve compiled a list of the top lead strategy approaches for 2023. We have included statistics that will make you want to start using them. We will first go over some of the foundations of an excellent lead generation campaign.
When it comes to data collection sources, you have two options: your own data or data from a third party. While there are instances when using data collected from an outside business can be helpful, your own data is better. First-party data analytics are important for many reasons including:
The data is your own, meaning it’s readily available and it’s free to use
The data is obtained from interactions with your customers
The data can be easily tweaked and improved upon
Third-party data gets gathered by a company that likely doesn’t fully know your target audience. They aren’t as familiar with your products or services so they can’t relay the same convincing messaging that you can. This can lead to inaccurate, less thorough data analytics on which to build your lead strategy.
The foundation of a strong lead generation strategy begins with the quality of your data. The source by which you collect data will impact how successful your lead generation campaign will be. Your own first-party data takes time to collect and requires effort, but will better bolster your bottom line.
Once you decide to use your first-party data collection, you need to research your target audience and competitors.
Know Your Audience
It’s important to get your content in front of people who want to read it. Potential leads who are interested in what you offer are more likely to convert into a sale. On the other hand, those who aren’t interested will leave your site and/or delete your emails.
You need to figure out who your target audience is, those who see value in what you offer. Once you identify your audience, you’ll need to find them and learn how to reach them.
You likely already have access to information on your target audience. Analytics tools such as Google Analytics give you insights into your target audience such as demographics and preferred communication channels.
Analytics tools identify your ideal customers and what channel source they will most convert through. Researching your target audience includes taking note of the following:
Age
Gender
User’s interests
User’s location
Language
Browser type
Device
Channel
Source
Referral
In addition to learning about your target audience, Google Analytics can also reveal information on your competitors. Competitor research gives you valuable insights into what the competition is doing and alerts you to their strengths and weaknesses.
The next step requires you to dive into competitor research to uncover where your competitors are investing. You can find everything your competitors are doing using tools like Google Analytics Benchmark Reports, SimilarWeb, Semrush, and SpyFu. These tools will show you which networks they’re advertising on and how much they’re spending to do it.
Then, you need to figure out what is in-between where you are and where your competitors are. To help you with this, ask yourself the following questions:
What is your spend, and what is theirs?
What is your cost per acquisition for each channel?
How much can you scale each channel?
What is the saturation point for each channel?
What is the plan to improve each channel so that it converts for less?
After you get first person data and research your audience and competitors, it’s time to look at lead generation strategies.
1. Product Demos
You can extensively market your product, but people need to be convinced that what you offer meets their needs. Product demos show people how the item works and how it can help solve a problem. Demonstrations are an excellent way to sprinkle video into your lead generation strategy.
Product demonstrations are one of many video formats you can use. Some other lead generation video ideas include explainer and straight offers.
2. Email Marketing
People check their email up to 20 times a day, making email marketing an effective lead generation channel. What makes email marketing so effective is that it captures email addresses. An email address is another avenue by which you can interact with a lead.
There are numerous ways to get a lead’s email address off your website including:
Email capture pop-ups.
Nano bars.
Footer captures.
Gated content.
A strong email marketing campaign centers on testing and analysis. A/B testing of messaging, performance, and delivery will help your emails avoid the spam folder. In addition to testing, map every page on your website to a micro-conversion for improved tracking.
A cold email campaign is a great place to start an email marketing strategy. The content of a cold email is valuable to readers and features links to your website.
Getting Started With an Email Marketing Campaign
The purpose of an email strategy is nurturing leads into customers through continuous touches. Each email should offer content that urges prospects onto the next step of the buyer’s journey.
The first step in developing an email marketing strategy is to implement a tracking pixel into your email campaigns. The tracking pixel will provide better statistics to measure email engagement and give real-time data. Use software that will integrate with website data for the most accurate view of users’ behaviors.
Lead Nurturing Campaigns
With the average conversion rate of 2-5%, lead nurturing campaigns are vital to lead generation.You need to foster relationships with those in your sales funnel. Lead nurturing takes time and effort and must be done correctly to maximize conversions.
Implementing a lead nurturing campaign that uses marketing automation sends relevant information based on what leads view on your website. This increases the possibility of them converting into customers.
Newsletter
If you don’t already send out a newsletter, you need to start. Newsletters help inform your current customers of your service or product offerings to cross-sell them on other services. People are more open to reading an e-newsletter than an email ad, which makes newsletters great for getting contact information.
Around 75% of marketers generate leads through event marketing with 85% of leadership teams saying events are important for business. At events, you meet with people who are more likely to be interested in the services or products you provide. Also, conferences are a great place to show people your company’s brand and let them know what you stand for.
Networking is one of the best ways to get to know other people who may be interested in your services.
When you go to trade shows, you can expect to acquire 5% to 20% of your new customer base. When networking, you need to remember you’re not meeting these people with the intent of selling to them.
You’re simply making new business connections. Even if you’re able to help them or sell them something they need, it shouldn’t be your top priority.
5. Cold Calling The Right Prospects
You might hear people say cold calling is dead, but in fact, cold calling was still relevant. When you combine this tactic with the right tools, it can be extremely effective.
Use a lead intelligence tool that can identify website visitors and provide you with their information. This way, you’re only calling people who are interested in your services.
Though poorly-trained marketers and pushy salespeople tarnished cold calling, it’s still one of the most effective lead-generation tools. In fact, according to marketing research by MarketingSherpa, 92 percent of B2B buyers are open to cold calls.
According to a leading lead generation company, SalesHive, cold calling is still one of the fastest ways to get direct prospect feedback. This, in turn, optimizes your pitch and marketing strategy. The goal is to allow your reps to focus on one thing and one thing only – booking meetings.
To be effective in cold calling, consider outsourcing qualified B2B sales cold-calling specialists. Such reps are dedicated to your account, are more comfortable with your market, and consistently book meetings with prospects.
6. Video Campaigns
More than 90% of people say videos make their buying decisions, and 84% say a video makes them more likely to purchase. Below are some great ways to begin creating videos:
Webinars
You can start creating video content by hosting live and recorded webinars. Create a content calendar to schedule topics, dates, and times when the webinar will go live. Then, send people emails asking them to sign up for the webinar, and promote it on your social media channels.
Facebook/Instagram/LinkedIn Live
Another way to get started with video content is by going live on social media platforms. You can do this from your smartphone. You’ll notice you reach a larger audience compared to the response you receive from a standard image or video post.
Nearly 4.5 billion people use social media, allowing you to easily reach new people who fit your target demographic(s).
Facebook
Facebook is great if you’re looking for a less formal way to reach your potential customers. Two-thirds of Facebook users regularly visit a local business’ Facebook page.
Posting interesting content and images that grab people’s attention allows you to build a large audience without advertising. If you use Facebook advertising, you can do so without spending much money as the cost ranges from .63 to $3.77.
LinkedIn
LinkedIn is one of the best places for B2B companies to generate leads. More than 90% of marketers use LinkedIn because it produces 80% of all B2B leads. The leads from LinkedIn far outpace those from all other social platforms.
One of the best tools LinkedIn offers to aid in your strategy is its lead generation forms. These are specific LinkedIn ads that get people to fill out their information so you can contact them.
These lead generation forms work so well because people are actively engaging with you by volunteering their information. Additionally, they understand that you’re going to reach out to them. Once a cold lead, they have now been converted to a warm lead ready to receive your pitch.
For companies that have products and not a service, Instagram is a great place to showcase it. The platform only allows posts with images or videos, making it the perfect venue for grabbing attention with eye-catching photos. Around 90% of Instagram users follow one or more businesses, so posting on this platform can yield great results.
8. Public Relations Strategy
Most companies only look at public relations (PR) strategies after something bad has happened. With most people having a cell phone to share videos, your company could easily find itself facing a PR disaster.
Consider hiring a PR manager if you don’t already have one. Work with them to start doing community outreach and implement positive campaigns before a crisis occurs. Be sure to fully inform employees about your company’s values and guiding mission.
Any kind of negative publicity is bad, especially if you’re trying to generate leads. With easy access to information and countless competitors, prospective customers will be critical of your brand. Show your leads that your company can be trusted with great PR.
9. Content Marketing
Content marketing is a popular and effective solution when done right. That’s because, like consumers, business firms want to equip themselves with the right information before a big buy.
Approximately 47 percent of buyers read three -five pieces of copy before contacting a salesperson. This means that nearly half of your potential customers have already done research on your company. When a salesperson contacts them, many likely have already decided whether or not to make a purchase.
It is important your content provides targeted, valuable information so it can sell your brand before your salesperson contacts them. You can also make sure you integrate your content with lead magnets. Whitepapers, courses, or e-books are free resources you offer your visitors in exchange for their information.
Create A Content Marketing Plan
Companies that blog generate 67% more leads than those who don’t. Blogging generates 3 times as many potential customers compared to outbound marketing. It also costs 62% less than traditional marketing campaigns, making it a powerful lead strategy.
Blogging is one of many content marketing strategies. Others include social media and video. However, it’s not enough to create content; you need to have a plan that includes the following:
Search Engine Optimization
It would be unproductive to create content, only to find you’re not showing up in search results. This is why you need to create a search engine optimization (SEO) plan. This way you can understand the types of information your customers are searching for and develop your content accordingly.
A foundation of any SEO strategy begins with identifying keywords to use in your content. The keyword tool on Google lets you see the search volume for words and other valuable content information.
You can go on with ongoing SEO campaigns with B2B content marketing support to generate meaningful leads. It aligns with your intentions by offering first-rate content that educates prospects and moves them through your lead generation funnel.
You can do this in a variety of ways. For example, you can start by understanding how keywords attract different users. Keyword use will drive different people to your website, so it is vital to understand each set.
A good content marketing plan can go wrong if you have a bad or outdated website. Google recommends websites aim for a loading time that’s less than 2 seconds. If you create a great article relevant to your target customer, but it loads slowly, people will not read it.
Keeping your website updated is an essential component of your lead generation strategy. When looking at your website, implement both inbound and outbound marketing strategies.
Start Generating Leads Today
Now you know how to start a lead generation campaign and use the top lead strategies it’s time to get started. Read this post on B2B lead generation strategies for additional information on drumming up more profit for your business.
There are people out there who need and want your products and services. You need to find them, engage with them, and deliver quality content. If you’re ready to get serious about your lead strategy, Start free or get a demo with LeadBoxer today.
You know how important it is to find potential customers most interested in your products or services. These are the consumers who will make a purchase. Quickly finding these prospects with a lead management platform shortens your sales cycle, increasing profits.
To learn more about lead management software and the importance of qualifying leads, keep reading or use the links below to jump ahead:
To make any sale, you need to invest in building relationships with the best prospects.
Relationship-building takes time and energy. A lead management platform helps salespeople qualify good leads and disqualify bad ones.
Why is it important to qualify leads? 67% of lost sales are a result of sales reps not properly qualifying potential customers. Unqualified prospects will not go through the entire sales process, so they won’t become paying customers.
Qualifying leads will not only result in more sales. It shortens your sales cycle and betters the use of your sales team’s time by focusing them on ideal leads. Sales teams can prioritize building relationships with the most promising prospects with lead qualification tools.
There are people out there who want your product or service. Lead qualification software helps your sales team identify and build relationships with them. Engaging the right people will bring more sales at a quicker pace.
Lead qualification is the process of identifying prospects most likely to make a purchase. The process prioritizes the nurturing of the most promising leads.
Below are the three types of qualified leads:
Marketing qualified leads (MQL): These leads gain interest in a brand, product, or service through marketing strategies. These leads come by clicking on a link in an email, downloading an e-book, or subscribing to a newsletter.
Sales qualified leads (SQL): These leads are interested in a brand, product, or service after interacting with a sales representative. They often will ask about pricing and agree to a presentation or demo.
Product/Service qualified leads (PQL): These leads are interested in a company, service, or product. They usually contact a salesperson after a free trial or consultation.
Lead management platforms identify the prospects your sales team needs to prioritize in nurturing. Qualified leads will progress through the sales funnel at a more rapid rate, resulting in revenue.
Qualified leads are crucial in generating revenue for your organization. Lead qualification tools can help you quickly identify your most promising prospects. Here are some lead qualification tools you can use to attract and nurture quality prospects:
Interactive PDFs
PDFs are effective ways of informing people in a way that is easily accessible. They are downloadable, saveable, and shareable. Interactive PDFs add engagement and shorten your sales cycle.
Interactive PDFs are lead qualification tools that allow you to add filtering questions, thereby identifying your most promising prospects. These PDFs can help tailor your follow-up and move them quickly down the funnel.
Solution Finders
Other effective lead qualification tools are solution finders. They help identify and provide a custom-tailored solution to a customer’s problem. When leveraged appropriately, solution finders can shorten the sales cycle.
Solution finders, also called product pickers, help leads navigate the various products or services your company offers. Prospects get personalized product or service recommendations with short assessments.
Qualified leads may not always know what they want or the best solution. Through solution finders, you help prospects avoid frustration and headaches. This goes a long way in building relationships between your salespeople and customers.
ROI Calculators
ROI calculators work similarly to solution finders in that they provide tailored customer service. These tools generate numeric results for each lead based on a formula generated by customer input. These calculators quickly identify and evaluate pain points, speeding up the qualification process.
ROI calculators offer personalized, valuable content tailored to each stage of the buyer’s journey. ROI calculator data can be used for scoring, disqualification, and trigger campaigns.
Leads don’t automatically get qualified or disqualified on their own. There is a lead qualification process that is simplified using lead qualification tools.
1. Establish Lead Qualification Criteria
The first part of the lead qualification process is establishing prospect criteria. This has two parts: whether the lead is a good fit and how interested the lead is in your offerings.
When looking at whether a lead is a good fit for your offerings, use the BANT methodology. This looks at the following four factors a lead will consider when faced with a buying decision.
Budget:What is the financial capacity of the lead to make a purchase? What budgetary constraints are there that will affect their willingness to spend?
Authority: What is the lead’s position, authority, or power to finalize a deal or make a purchasing decision?
Need:How useful are your products or services for meeting the wants and pain points of the lead?
Timeline: When does the lead need to make a purchase?
The second stage of lead qualification is lead generation. Once you have the qualification criteria set up, you’ll need to attract prospects. There are a variety of inbound and outbound strategies you can use for lead generation.
Inbound lead generation involves methods to get leads to come to you. These include referrals, social media ads, and web form submissions.
Outbound lead generation strategies involve seeking potential leads and using sales strategies. Cold calling, introductory emails, and meetings are examples of outbound lead generation activities. Once you’ve generated leads, you can begin the process of qualifying them.
3. Lead Score and Categorization
Once you have your lead qualifying criteria and the prospects pouring in, it’s time to score and categorize them. The leads that show the greatest interest through your inbound or outbound sales activities will earn more points.
It’s important to separate sales and marketing qualified leads. As you’re interested in sales leads, assign fewer points to prospects that interact with your marketing campaigns. They will be nurtured differently.
You can score and categorize leads manually, though lead management platforms and customer relationship management software does this automatically. After you score your sales prospects, it’s time to rank them.
4. Distribute and Rank Leads
Once you generate your leads and score them, it is time to distribute and rank them. MQLs and SQLs require different lead nurturing techniques.
For example, a sales qualified lead will get a sales presentation or demo to understand your product or service better. Each sales prospect should be ranked and prioritized by lead score or BANT analysis.
To nurture MQLs, offer more in-depth content. Start with emails and free trials for top-of-funnel prospects. Offer an e-newsletter and then whitepapers and e-books to bottom-of-funnel leads.
Once you categorize and distribute your leads, it’s time to rank them. Lead qualification tools prioritize sales-qualified leads with the highest score and rank. These will be your most qualified leads.
5. Continue Qualifying Leads Throughout the Pipeline
The last step for lead qualification is to continue down the steps of your sales pipeline. The goal of lead qualification is to move prospects through the funnel.
For SQLs, your salespeople may ask additional probing questions during presentations and demos. They are qualified and nurtured to move on through the sales funnel.
For marketing-qualified leads, you need to get them sales qualified and handed over to your sales team. MQLs will continue receiving lead scoring points as they show additional interest and interact with your campaign.
Lead management platforms that qualify leads make it easier to move prospects through your funnel. The quicker leads become paying customers, the more closed sales you’ll have.
Every company has a sales process or funnel whereby prospects enter as mildly interested leads and leave as paying customers. Along the way, you employ various marketing and sales tactics to move them onto the next stage. If your sales process is long, there are more opportunities for leads to drop off before becoming customers.
When you nurture your ideal prospects, they quickly progress through your sales funnel. As they are already excited and knowledgeable about your service or product, a long sales process is unnecessary.
Lead qualification tools shorten your sales cycle. A shorter sales funnel leads to more conversions and quicker sales.
The Growth of Lead Management Software
Lead management software is by no means going away anytime soon. Lead qualification software use will increase. Technavio predicts that the lead qualification solutions market will increase by 17.5% between 2021-2028.
Some of the driving factors that contribute to the growth of lead management platforms include:
The development of cloud-based and SaaS software and solutions (especially on mobile)
Increased demand for social interaction between companies and consumers
The heightened popularity of crowdsourcing
The increase in CRMs integrating lead qualification into their marketing and sales automation platforms
More companies looking to improve the relationship between their sales and marketing departments
The higher likelihood of sales conversions
The increased need for enterprise-level lead management software
With information at their fingertips, your leads and prospects will be selective about who they do business with. Building relationships and nurturing the right people will make them paying customers. Lead qualification platforms do this.
Lead management platforms like LeadBoxer are becoming increasingly popular because they allow salespeople to focus on the most promising prospects. There are various lead qualification tools to move prospects through your funnel. Maximize your prospect generation efforts by following a lead qualification process.
Remaining competitive in the B2B sales industry relies on customer retention and overall satisfaction. Many companies are embracing the idea of product led growth (PLG) to help boost their numbers and increase brand loyalty.
It seems obvious you must have a good product, but the value of providing quality services continues to increase. PLG is more complex than simply having something worth buying. It relies on ensuring a user-friendly experience and excellent customer service to create lasting relationships.
Marketing is no longer the only way to push leads through the sales cycle. By combining a focus on the customer experience, sales and marketing can create a cohesive end goal. Not only does a product centric approach help align departmental goals, it allows the customer to have a voice throughout the sales cycle.
To learn more about the ways your team can benefit from PLG, keep reading, or use the following links to jump ahead:
Like many trending B2B strategies, product led growth is not a new concept. It is, however, an important strategy to empower customers and retain sales. As PLG continues to increase in popularity, your team should better its understanding and implementation of the concept.
Simply put, PLG allows the product or service to drive sales and retain customers. This relies on several factors like ease of use and excellent product experience. Rather than expecting marketing to do the heavy lifting for brand awareness, this strategy incorporates product functionality directly into the sales process.
By putting the product at the center of all conversations, it can help align goals across departments and boost business growth. This also means employees will be working toward the single objective of excellent product experience for all customers.
Through this all-company collaboration, more people are introduced to the user experience, which drives conversations with customers from all angles. However, PLG isn’t solely based on your team’s understanding of the services your company sells.
Another key component of this strategy is allowing customers to see the product value before asking for a purchase. This means having a strong user experience that allows prospects to dive deep and trial the product on their own.
Rather than watching product demonstrations or Q&A webinars, customers should be able to test the functionality on their own. Through implementation of this strategy, success relies on overall customer satisfaction before a sale has been completed.
For example, free trials work hand-in-hand with product centric approaches. Allowing customers to test how the product can provide solutions to their unique problems helps provide valuable insight before purchase. It also allows prospects to address concerns and work out potential problems with a company expert.
PLG helps instill confidence in clients through transparency of service. By providing an inside look at user experience, your team can boost customer satisfaction and increase overall retention rates.
It is not surprising that the B2B industry saw rapid digitization during the COVID-19 pandemic. Before this sudden shift to virtual sales, leaders in the industry were finding ways to innovate customer experience through increased use of technology. While the pandemic sped things up, trends like PLG are here to stay.
Buyers have the resources to be more educated than ever on products before making a purchase decision. This means remaining competitive in the industry relies heavily on customer experience throughout the entire sales cycle.
As brands continue to have an increased online presence, customers are able to interact with products before they even speak with a salesperson. In fact, research shows 94% of B2B buyers perform online research before initiating contact with a sales team.
Educated buyers are now interacting with demos and free trials as early as possible in the sales cycle. Rather than wanting to speak with salespeople for a product introduction, clients are eager to have a hands-on approach to testing solutions. According to a 2015 Forrester survey, almost 75% of buyers would rather make an online purchase than go through a sales team.
This has shifted initial sales conversations to focus more on product details and the technical capabilities of products. Customer preparation has led to an expectation of expert customer service throughout the sales process. In most cases, buyers want salespeople to act in tandem with the website so they can navigate the process alongside an expert.
To understand how this strategy can benefit your business, it is important to make a comparison between traditional growth methods. Starting off, marketing teams usually qualify leads through online interactions like targeted ads, web forms, and email marketing. From there, leads enter the sales funnel and the salespeople reach out for an introduction.
Next, the sales department focuses on showcasing product benefits and providing details on how the product can provide needed solutions. If interested, the customer chooses to make a purchase.
Once the sale has been completed, the customer works with the success team for onboarding and implementation. Assuming things go well, the customer becomes a repeat buyer and the sales cycle restarts.
The traditional strategy allows for a long period of time before the customer is introduced to the product’s functionality. In a time where buyers are prone to making quick decisions and competitors can offer easy demos, following a traditional timeline may not land your company the sale.
In contrast, PLG allows the prospect to jump right into the product. Marketing and sales departments act as experts to help guide customers through the user experience. Rather than client information being captured from online traffic, this cycle starts as soon as the customer signs up for a trial.
Known as product-qualified leads (PQLs), these clients begin interacting with the product as soon as possible. Rather than waiting to be contacted by a salesperson, clients are most often familiar with the brand before the introduction occurs. Once a salesperson reaches out, the conversation can focus heavily on the client’s specific areas of interest, potential personalized features, and any other questions the customer may have about the product.
This kind of transparency is a huge benefit to companies. PQLs convert at a rate 3-4x higher than traditional marketing leads. When customers feel confident in a product before making the purchase, retention increases.
PLG is a great way to gather feedback from customers and improve overall product functionality. When the product is a driving force behind sales, customers are able to provide honest feedback to companies about their experiences.
When a sale is completed, your team is able to hear what was the deciding factor. On the flip side, offering your customers a free trial of your product, even if the sale falls through, helps provide insight into areas that need improvement.
This strategy is cost-effective. Customers begin the onboarding process by themselves, which frees up your employees to concentrate on providing excellent customer service. Less time and money are wasted on deals that don’t come to fruition.
Providing a better user experience increases customer retention and provides incentives for word-of-mouth advertisement. When clients are able to test out a product for free, they are able to share this information with others in their network who may be looking for similar solutions.
Since there are no hold-ups on anyone being able to trial the service, these leads come directly into the pipeline once they sign up. Along with increasing a user base, this helps speed up the sales cycle.
Gaining valuable customer contact information is easier when your product leads the marketing strategy. Usually, web traffic may visit a page or interact with an online ad, but their contact information might never reach your pipeline. Since users have to fill out a full form for free trial access, your marketing team is able to take PQLs directly to the sales team.
For example, when using Leadboxer to capture web traffic, your team can tell these customers are already qualified and scored since they began the demo. This pushes them to the top of the sales cycle, which allows for speedy outreach from your team. By encouraging a quick turnaround time, PLG helps outreach happen faster while leads are still interested in the product.
Implementing PLG Into Your Business
Before jumping into this strategy with your employees, it is crucial to understand PLG is a long-term approach rather than a short-term fix. Implementation will take time and resources to be successful. It may require departmental changes and an overhaul of the company mission to ensure a product-centric focus.
When implemented correctly, PLG will help lead your team to higher sales and increased customer retention. Below are tips on successfully getting started and utilizing a PLG strategy:
1. Evaluate your product
Having an intimate understanding of your product, including its flaws, is the first step in implementing a PLG strategy. Before it can sell itself, your company needs to thoroughly understand the value the product brings to the market.
Evaluation can begin with a few simple questions:
What is the core function? What solutions does your product provide to customers? What feedback is most often received?
Compare your product to the competition. Notice the similarities and differences.
Find the best way to engage prospective customers when speaking on these topics. Educated clients are willing to ask directly about these types of variances. Be prepared to answer honestly during these conversations.
For example, your product may lack certain features compared to that of a competitor. However, your starting price point may be lower. Understanding how to explain this to prospects will help build trust within the relationship.
2. Focus on the customer experience
When the customer is driving the sale through self-education, a user-friendly experience is crucial to finalizing a deal. Beginning with initial onboarding, signing up for the product should be self-explanatory and easily accessible. Prospects are eager to get started, so the sign-up process should be quick enough to hold a customer’s attention.
Sales conversations should bring value to the customer. Rather than relying on old-school tactics, your team needs to focus on acting as product experts to prospective clients.
Removing fluff from these interactions is one way to increase trust within the relationship. Make sure customers feel like they took away valuable information from each conversation with your salespeople.
Allow ample opportunities for clients to provide feedback. Not only will this help customers feel more valued, but it will give your team vital information regarding potential product improvements.
Customize features when possible. Buyers love the idea of personalization, especially when they’re looking for solutions to unique problems within their organization. 80% of customers favor the ability to customize their user experience.
3. Provide continuous onboarding
In the initial onboarding process, users will be signing themselves up for a trial. That doesn’t mean your team should take a backseat to onboarding, though. Instead, customer success teams should concentrate on secondary and next-tier opportunities to increase user engagement.
Customer retention increases when there is a strong need for your product. By encouraging clients to continuously use new features and engage with your software, your product will quickly integrate into their daily workflow.
This is another opportunity to allow conversations with customers about their user experience. As they add more features to their product usage, make sure your team is doing their due diligence.
Having check-ins about new features during the continuous onboarding process will help your team have internal conversations about product performance. This allows your team to collect data on what is working, as well as find areas that may benefit from improvements.
4. Align departmental goals within your company
Overhauling long-term business strategy can be a big undertaking. For success, departments must be on the same page about the company’s mission. When practicing a PLG strategy, marketing and sales teams will be trying out nontraditional tactics.
It is important to make sure the product is always central to the mission. Marketing teams should work closely with sales and customer success to understand the feedback being given. Adjust your marketing outreach to lead with the product.
These efforts from all departments should encourage excellent customer journeys and work to increase brand loyalty. Even though the product and customers are doing a lot of heavy lifting, it is still the goal of your team to provide value throughout the sales cycle.
5. Tailor your marketing practices to showcase the value
Since much of the beginning sales cycle in PLG strategy involves solitary customer research, messaging is key. Customers will want to see an overview of key features as well as pricing when comparing brands.
Make sure your pricing sheet is accessible and easy to understand. Marketing content should help explain how clients can benefit from the premium version of your product. Simple explanations of which plans work well for specific groups can encourage prospects to explore the features that are most relevant to their needs.
Online resources, like blogs or social media posts, should showcase the features your product offers. Many users will be looking at multiple options during their research. It is important to make your product stand out by providing valuable information about the user experience rather than fluff content.
6. Utilize upsells and premium features
Once a sale is made, the goal should be to encourage repeat purchases from that customer. This typically happens through contract renewals, but there is an opportunity to add more revenue through upsells and new features.
If a client is thoroughly enjoying the service your product provides, your team should brainstorm ways new features may bring additional value. Asking customers what they want to see in future rollouts is a great starting point.
Offer items in discounted bundles or find ways to include an option for premium features. These types of add-ons may be an easier sell once clients are familiar with your product. Ongoing outreach from the sales team to current customers is crucial for landing these upsells.
7. Encourage user referrals
PLG provides ample room for customers to refer your product to others in their network. If your trial period is easy to access, prospects can sign up and get started within the same day of hearing about your product.
Capitalize on your customer experience by offering a referral program that incentivizes current relationships to bring in new business. This type of program can help boost brand loyalty, as clients can continue to tell others about your product.
User referrals can help boost overall customer satisfaction. Current clients will feel appreciated when their recommendations are rewarded by the brand.
8. Follow through on your advertisements
When customer experience is a major driving factor for sales, following through on promises is crucial. The classic saying ‘under promise, but over deliver is a good motto to have when implementing PLG.
Your product will be doing most of the selling, and it should be able to stand alone while customers are participating in a demo. However, if your salespeople make promises about product features or capabilities in conversations, it is important to see them through.
Transparency is huge when utilizing product led marketing. It will negatively impact customer retention if users don’t see sales agreements come to fruition.
This comes into play when customers are making the transition from the free trial to the premium version. If your team offers specific features or personalized capabilities, it is crucial to ensure these are available as soon as onboarding begins.
Clients have educated themselves on the benefits of your product versus your competitors. Since they’ll have spent time with your services, they will notice any lack of follow-through on promises.
PLG relies heavily on customer retention, and the easiest way to lose a relationship is by not providing the right service. Make sure to have honest conversations about the features your product has, and address any concerns as soon as they arise.
9. Use data to drive product choices
PLG strategy relies heavily on accurate data to understand the customer’s needs. Data analytics will help your company ascertain what value users are receiving from your product. This information can also help develop product improvements as your team rolls out new features.
When implementing a PLG strategy, it is important for your company to equip itself with the right tools and resources for success. Make sure you have a way to track data and pilot the user experience.
Along with using these kinds of tools, manage expectations among departments by setting KPIs and reviewing targeted goals. This allows your employees to easily measure success throughout the process.
Key Takeaways
Product led growth may be the newest trendy buzzword in the B2B industry, but the strategy is here to stay. In order to remain competitive, your company should be looking at the long-term benefits of a product-centric approach.
As customers continue to push for more virtual sales options, your product will need to be able to sell itself during the trial phase. Focus on having your salespeople become experts on product features. Tailor your marketing to showcase features that set your product apart from competitors.
Understand the best way to implement PLG into your organization. Invest in the right resources to ensure this strategy increases your customer base and retention.
Allow user experience and customer feedback to drive initiatives within your departments. Build lasting customer relationships through transparency. By focusing on the customer experience and product value, your company can benefit from this strategy.
To get started with Leadboxer, click here for your free trial!
Using a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software and strategy is vital to a successful B2B sales team. CRM software has become a major asset for many companies as it helps organize, integrate, and streamline customer management.
With more businesses offering remote or hybrid work options, keeping up with customers has begun to rely heavily on the successful use of CRM software. While using a CRM is great once a lead has come into the pipeline, there is value in developing a pre-CRM strategy.
To learn more about the function of pre-CRM strategy and the usage of a marketing CRM, keep reading or use the links below to jump ahead:
Tracking website activity and importing potential customer data into a CRM is usually the first step in creating a relationship. Although, there are probably more website visitors than contacts in your CRM. Not every prospect is going to input data into your web forms, so there needs to be a strategy in place to anticipate prospects who may eventually enter the sales pipeline.
Having a Pre-CRM strategy means your departments are working to improve initial customer interactions to begin developing a strong business relationship. Before companies were able to have a strong digital presence, salespeople needed to greet customers and have organic interactions to cultivate their pipeline.
By taking these old-school tactics and adapting them to fit your company’s digital presence, the pre-CRM stage can help present your company to prospects. Engaging potential customers before they’ve been entered into your CRM can be tough. Utilizing social media, email marketing, and a website can help introduce your brand before customers are familiar with your team.
Most importantly, taking advantage of the Pre-CRM stage means your company is using its marketing and digital presence to help create product awareness. Many customers only become active when they have a need, but engagement can start before then. Marketing should focus on sharing what your company offers while allowing customers to interact with your content.
Reaching Out to Pre-CRM Leads
How do you reach out to customers before you know their needs, or before they understand what your company specializes in? Finding ways to engage pre-CRM leads takes creativity, but the payoff can help boost your sales pipeline.
Thinking of it as similar to greeting customers in the offline world can help map out the best way for outreach. Find ways to humanize digital communication, like displaying employee profiles and making contact information readily available. Encourage engagement through chatbots, and utilize video features to showcase products and salespeople.
The goal of this outreach is to improve initial customer impressions. When your company is able to create a positive first touchpoint, prospects will be more inclined to continue engagement with the brand. This will help filter leads in your pipeline and CRM, which will help boost sales.
What Is a CRM?
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is software that can be used to manage your company’s relationships and interactions with clients and prospects. This technology helps streamline your business, grow your pipeline, and organize goals across departments.
A CRM can be used throughout the entire customer lifecycle, including marketing, sales, and customer service. This software stores prospect and customer information, which helps build out your database for maintaining relationships.
By keeping data all in one platform, your CRM can help make sure all of the necessary steps are being done to provide clients with quality service. It also allows your teams to track customer engagement, plan outreach, and identify future sales opportunities.
Many teams have turned to a remote or hybrid working environment, so utilizing a CRM can make a big difference in collaboration when employees are stationed across multiple locations. This software can also align your sales and marketing departments to tighten up the lead generation and nurturing process.
Along with creating more efficient workflow within departments, CRMs can integrate with other technology to streamline the sales process. Many CRMs have the ability to work with your current tech stack to free up time and resources for customer outreach. For example, Leadboxer integrates seamlessly with CRMs to improve lead-generation processes.
The CRM Cycle
CRM is a great strategy for improving the quality of your outreach, and in turn, creating stronger customer relationships. Rather than aiming to cast a wider net, successful customer management will help encourage repeat sales and brand loyalty.
There are seven stages within the CRM cycle, and each plays an important role in customer success. Walking clients through this journey will help fill your pipeline with quality prospects and increase sales.
The Pre-CRM stage begins with brand awareness and creating an environment that encourages customer engagement. Inputting a new lead into the CRM happens once your team has contact and basic information about the prospect. Log the details in your CRM and begin walking them to the next step in the cycle.
Once a prospect begins interacting with your brand, like clicking on an email link or filling out a web form, the nurturing process can begin. By using features in your CRM software, you can tag clients and track their engagement. This helps your sales team determine which leads are cold or warm.
Moving toward the sales opportunity happens once a lead schedules a sales call. This moves the customer from warm to hot.
Your team should be tracking the movements of this client as they move through the sales funnel. Enter the details from the sales call to log the outcome in your CRM. This helps your team see which leads are actively working their way toward closing a deal.
A little over halfway through the cycle, the goal is to have hot leads converted into closed deals. Once the client says ‘yes’ to your sales pitch, you can consider them an active customer.
However, the CRM cycle does not end here.
Next, delivery of your product or services should be scheduled. It’s important to create follow-up reminders to keep in touch with the customer as they begin using your product. This phase should also include gathering feedback and providing any additional training or information that the customer may need to be successful.
Instead of moving on to the next cold lead once a deal has been completed, try bringing your customers into the ‘upselling’ stage. If clients are happy with the product and experience they’ve had so far, pitching an upgrade in your services can help boost the overall sale. Engage with customers to see if there are any additional needs your team can help fill.
Lastly, the CRM cycle relies on continuity to cultivate strong customer relationships and promote lasting brand loyalty. Continue reaching out to current clients.
Schedule regular check-ins and encourage feedback. These actions can help increase repeat purchases throughout the length of the business relationship.
Implementing a CRM can play a huge role in the success of your marketing department. Since the goal of marketing is to create awareness and generate leads for the sales team, a CRM can help align the efforts of these departments.
By breaking down barriers to avoid organizational silos within your company, a CRM helps increase the flow of information between teams. This will improve the overall quality of customer service as your marketing campaigns direct qualified leads into the sales pipeline.
As website visitors interact with content and email recipients click on links, a marketing CRM can help your team track these actions to qualify leads. By integrating with other technologies like lead generation software, the CRM increases conversions and campaign effectiveness.
While a CRM can be a huge asset to many companies, there are a few challenges to be aware of before implementing the software. For employees who are unfamiliar with the system, learning how to use a CRM effectively can be a daunting task. Provide extensive training to make sure your team is confident in the program.
Integration with tech stacks is a great benefit to using a CRM, but it is important to make sure the CRM you choose works with your current technology. Marketing campaigns can benefit from tracking customer engagement, and a marketing CRM can help organize this data.
Key Takeaways
A Pre-CRM strategy can help humanize your company and begin nurturing leads before they have entered your pipeline. Use this strategy to create positive brand awareness with potential prospects. Encouraging early engagement will help drive customers to your business when they have a need for your product.
Utilizing a marketing CRM is a great way to create a communication flow between departments and increase campaign effectiveness. Tracking and tagging engagement from customers can help inform future marketing efforts and outreach for sales pitches.
To see how Leadboxer can integrate with your CRM, click here for a free trial!
Automated lead generation software is paving the way to success for B2B companies. These highly integrated platforms have continued to rise in popularity. For businesses who want to keep a competitive edge within their sales and marketing departments, lead generation software has become a necessity.
Diving deeper into the market trends and forecasts, several reports have closely inspected how lead generation and automated marketing will trend through 2029. Keep reading, or use the links below to explore these findings:
According to an Insight Partners study, the lead generation market was valued at 3,103.80 million USD in 2021. It is expected to see a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 17.5%, and reach a value of 9,589.11 million USD by 2028.
The Global Lead Generation B2B Software Market Research Report 2022 shows that the lead generation market is split up into four areas. They are lead capture software, lead intelligence software, lead mining software, and lead scoring software.
These sections each play a role in successfully generating and nurturing leads while saving companies time and valuable resources. 20% more sales opportunities are created when leads are properly nurtured. However, 65% of B2B companies have not established a process for lead nurturing.
Technology-driven processes are crucial for companies to identify quality leads. In fact, 44% of marketers are already using software like automated marketing for lead scoring.
Lead generation software continues to increase in popularity due to its flexibility, low maintenance, and resistance to corrosion. As businesses continue to grow within the digital space, this software helps companies remain competitive within their industries.
Forbes reports that 58% of business leaders see lead generation as a key challenge. Lead generation platforms like Leadboxer are instrumental in helping companies find qualified prospects to fill their pipeline. Through automation, data collection, and software integration, these platforms are able to improve processes across multiple departments.
Lead generation software has benefited from the advancement of technology, and it will continue to optimize its product performance. Integration between customer relationship management (CRM) and lead generation platforms is a step toward success.
The Global Marketing Automation Market Analysis Report 2022 released by researchsandmarkets.com takes a closer look at the current environment for this software. The report finds the market was valued at 5.45 billion USD in 2021. As automated marketing software continues to gain traction among businesses, it is projected to reach 8.58 billion USD by 2026.
Due to the increased usage of these platforms, the market is expected to grow by 9.49% between 2022-2026. The report notes the advantages of using this software include improved efficiency, reduced staffing costs, and an overall increase in revenue.
Cloud and On-Premise are the two studied segments of marketing automation deployment types. Cloud deployment was found to cover a market majority at 58%.
This report studied eight channels of marketing automation:
lead nurturing
mobile application
campaign management
inbound marketing
social media
email
reporting/analytics
other
Out of the channel categories, email marketing automation led the way with 17%.
A Demand Gen Report found that 53% of marketing teams say that early-stage lead generation is most effective when done through email. With email automation pulling ahead of other channels, automated marketing software can help companies save time and resources in producing email campaigns.
Across industry applications, it was observed that healthcare began utilizing marketing automation software strategies. This implementation has helped create consistent messaging and improved customer service. During 2022-2026, the use of marketing automation in healthcare is expected to grow by 12.5%.
As for regions, this report discovered that North America made up the largest share of marketing automation at 34.3%. Over the forecasted period of 2022-2026, Europe and North America are expected to be the largest markets. Due to a rise in mobile usage and increasing use of advertisement campaigns, the Asia Pacific is projected to be the fastest-growing market.
How the COVID-19 Pandemic Shaped Automated Software
COVID-19 continues to show lasting effects on the way businesses handle sales outreach. With quick switches to digital communication as in-person meetings were canceled, many B2B companies had to adapt to a virtual environment.
58% of experts believe poor technology infrastructure led to businesses struggling to deal with the pandemic. The Global Marketing Automation Market Analysis Report 2022 suggests that the pandemic highlighted the importance of marketing automation as companies made the switch to digital channels to keep in touch with customers.
Automation and artificial intelligence (AI) are playing a significant role in the post-pandemic world.50% of businesses plan to push forward with their AI strategies as they enter into post-COVID operations.
While the pandemic caused upheaval across all industries, it also helped drive innovation and advancement. 43.42% of B2B marketers plan to switch their in-person meeting budgets to digital efforts.
By investing in automated marketing and lead generation software, B2B companies will be prepared to face a post-pandemic world.
The Future of Lead Generation and Marketing Automation
While many marketing budgets continue to shrink, a survey from Gartner finds 26.6% of Chief Marketing Officers plan to increase their spending on automated tools. Statista Research Department shows that 2.6 billion USD was spent on lead generation in the United States in 2019. This number is predicted to hit 3.2 billion USD by the end of 2023.
The demand for these tools continues to increase, but this market does face challenges as well. Cyber security and data quality issues were found to be impeding issues for market growth. The quick nature of social media and continued internet usage has posed security and compliance challenges for marketing teams.
As the B2B industry continues to evolve within the digital sphere, lead generation and marketing automation will increase in marketing and sales departments. The content marketing platform is expected to grow the fastest between 2022-2026. Global Marketing Automation Market Analysis Report 2022 suggests it will increase at a CAGR of 17%.
85% of marketers say their biggest focus from content marketing is lead generation. Research shows an emphasis on producing quality customer experiences and a growing need for analytics-based content will drive content marketing growth.
AI integration, predictive analytics, and a focus on personalized marketing are contributing to the market increase.
The combination of AI and automation software is pushing businesses toward better customer service and creating stronger interactions with prospects. Lead generation platforms help target the correct customers to drive marketing efforts in the right direction.
Key Takeaways
Lead generation and marketing automation are paving the way for companies to save time and resources when filling the sales pipeline. 80% of marketers saw an increase in their leads after using marketing automation.
Both markets continue to grow and are projected to rise to new levels by 2029. B2B companies will need to include lead generation platforms and automated marketing into their business strategies to remain competitive in their respective industries.
Marketing automation provides a huge boost in sales leads. Using this software for marketing campaigns can increase these numbers by 451%. Content marketing is used for lead generation by 80% of companies. It is expected to be the fastest-growing channel for automated marketing between 2022-2029.
Lasting effects of the COVID-19 pandemic will continue to push companies toward digital communication. Customer trends show that many prefer buying in a virtual space. These habits will most likely increase as social media marketing trends upward.
While lead generation and personalized outreach benefit from automated software, challenges with consumer privacy and data quality will continue to be part of the conversation. Salesforce found that 86% of consumers want more transparency regarding the usage of their personal information.
Investing in highly integrated platforms like LeadBoxer will help departments utilize their existing tech stack to its full potential for lead generation, marketing automation, and customer management.
See what LeadBoxer can do for your business. Get your free trial today!
Creative lead generation can help your B2B company fill the sales funnel with qualified prospects. Social media continues to be vital for marketing teams, and jumping on the upward trend of video content is a way to boost your outreach.
Utilizing video marketing is a great way to increase brand awareness and encourage content engagement. This tactic can push your outreach to additional target audiences and help increase your lead generation. Video marketing can also work when trying to retarget and engage potential prospects.
Keep reading, or use the following links to jump ahead:
While the strategy isn’t new, video marketing has become crucial for staying relevant in a competitive market. According to WyzOwl’s 2022 Video Marketing Statistic Report, 86% of businesses already use video in their marketing strategy.
This marketing tool is important to have across all channels. Videos are an easy way to educate prospects on your product, as well as create brand awareness.
In a Hubspot survey, it was found that video content was the second most popular way to increase social media engagement. By encouraging interaction from customers, this strategy can help boost shares and expand audience reach.
Even though video marketing has been around for a while, many businesses saw a rise in demand for this content during the pandemic. 64% of marketing teams feel the pandemic has affected their 2022 video marketing strategies. Coupling this with the rise of marketing on social media platforms like TikTok, utilizing these tools can make a big difference in engagement.
Increasing Sales Conversions Through Videos
Marketing teams work hard to reach audiences that can be converted successfully for the sales department. These tactics require a lot of planning and resources to make sure content is being delivered to the right prospects.
Video marketing is an accessible tool that helps engage customers before they’ve even spoken to a salesperson. If you’re just beginning your video strategy, a great place to start is finding ways to include this type of content on your website.
According to BizCommunity, conversion rates can be increased by 80% if you include video content on your landing pages. When leads are visiting your site for the first time, videos are able to introduce your product and brand quickly. This type of content encourages engagement as prospects are able to get a glimpse of what your company has to offer.
Additionally, adding videos to your site can help improve search engine optimization (SEO). By having this content on your pages, visitors are more likely to spend more time on your website, which helps boost your page in search engines.
Moving on from initial lead impressions, video marketing can play a role in boosting customer retention. This content has the ability to support salespeople as they walk clients through the sales journey. By having video tutorials and demonstrations, leads are able to interact with your product before making a purchase, which can increase customer confidence.
The options for video content are endless, and it is a great tool to build trust while showcasing an authentic brand to prospects. Utilizing how-tos, customer testimonials, and customer support videos are just a few ways your team can take its marketing strategy to the next level.
How to Create a Successful Video Strategy
Creating content that encourages audience engagement is a good starting place. With high-quality smartphone cameras and a multitude of editing apps to choose from, access to video creation is easier than ever.
However, starting without a plan can be an overwhelming undertaking for any marketing team. Take time to allocate resources and prepare your team for the content rollout. This type of foresight will help align the marketing and sales department to ensure the highest return on investment (ROI) is being achieved.
Once your teams are ready to go, begin by evaluating your company’s needs. Determine which pages and social platforms will benefit most from the content. Laying out the areas that will receive videos can help decide what the content will showcase.
Next, determine the target audience. For video marketing lead generation, have your team identify what platforms see the most traffic from prospects.
Bizcommunity found that videos help 90% of customers make buying decisions. By getting this content on pages that see the most interaction from leads, video influence can help push these prospects into the sales funnel.
Align the goals of the campaign across departments. Multiple videos can serve different purposes, but it is good to have a clear objective before creating any content. This data will also play a role in determining the video’s success late in the journey.
Decide on the video distribution platform. There are a few factors that will help narrow down the best place for your content. Consider your budget, including money for sponsored posts, and your current tools.
Shorter videos may find their home on TikTok or Instagram, whereas Youtube remains a leader for long-form content. Determining a platform before filming will help drive the subject matter. It is important to take into consideration the type of audience on each social media channel, as well as how engagement is measured.
Platforms like Instagram reels and TikTok rely on short, snappy videos that can quickly grab a viewer’s attention. These sites also work off of algorithms that rely on comments, likes, and shares. Longer videos may do better on Youtube or LinkedIn, especially if the goal of the content is to educate.
Begin scripting and filming content. If you are not sure where to start, look at similar businesses or competitors to see what type of videos they are sharing. This can help your team gather an understanding of where your industry fits into the digital sphere.
Once posted, begin measuring the content’s success. While each business may track unique metrics, there are a few basic ones that can help your team see what works and what needs improvement. Engagement is huge. Track comments, likes, and shares.
Time spent on your site is another great metric to consider. If you have longer videos, are your visitors watching the whole thing? Take a look at any generated leads or conversion boosts.
Are your visitors interacting with other areas of your site after watching the video? For example, keep an eye out for any upticks in form completion.
Lastly, continue to re-evaluate and produce video content. While you shouldn’t fix any content that seems to be working, don’t be afraid to add new posts. Variety in content can boost engagement and encourage frequent customer interaction.
Revisit any videos that don’t produce the results your team wants. This form of content is constantly evolving, and it is good to be prepared to embrace changes as needed.
Best Practices for Video Marketing
Once you have a strategy ready to go, implementing best practices can help boost the success of your marketing campaigns. Understanding the different types of video content can help your team see a positive ROI from this work.
Videos like product demonstrations, educational content, or expert interviews can help increase lead generation. While content like customer testimonials, live streams, or personalized messages from employees can create brand awareness.
Use video marketing to retarget old leads. This content can help encourage prospects to re-engage with the sales journey. Maybe the lead wasn’t sure your product was the right fit, but an educational tutorial or how-to guide can help show the ways their company can benefit from a purchase.
The rise of platforms like TikTok and Instagram has expedited the evolution of video content. Now, businesses are able to utilize these channels and interact with leads at a faster pace. In turn, social media has also helped shape marketing trends.
Viral trends dominate the ways content is viewed across platforms, and brands are not exempt from participation. While being TikTok famous isn’t the goal of video content for your business, it’s becoming more common for companies to participate in these trends.
Influencer marketing has also continued to rise in popularity. Videos like a how-to or product reviews from influencers help create brand awareness and build trust with customers. This type of sponsored content speaks to viewers without seeming too forced.
According to HubSpot, 64% of businesses found new customers because of a Facebook video. Social media helps successfully mix business with pleasure, as many adults spend time scrolling through Facebook and Instagram throughout the day. By posting video content on social media, your company can see a higher ROI on video marketing.
Get started with lead generation by trying out Leadboxer today!
Attracting qualified leads to the sales pipeline is crucial for B2B businesses. Identifying prospects and cultivating relationships will increase sales conversions and create loyal customers.
With email marketing filling up a prospect’s inbox from your company and competitors, it is important to offer valuable content that will help your product stand out. Finding ways to establish yourself as an expert in the industry and producing informative marketing materials can help create lasting customer relationships.
When trying to find potential clients and obtain their contact information, utilizing a lead magnet can kickstart the conversation. Use the links, or keep reading, to learn about lead magnet examples and how your company can benefit from their usage:
Simply defined, a lead magnet is an incentive that companies can provide to prospects in exchange for contact information. More than that, though, this type of offer can start building trust with potential clients from their first interaction with a business.
Types of lead magnets can vary across industries, but all of them should provide value to the recipient. For example, retailers may offer first-time website visitors a small discount code if they join their mailing list.
By utilizing a lead magnet, prospective clients can begin to see the value your product offers. With this in mind, planning and executing lead magnets may be different for each potential customer.
There isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach to this marketing strategy, and businesses that provide innovative and informative lead magnets can boost themselves ahead of competitors. The content within the lead magnet is crucial to forming the foundations of a strong business relationship.
Lead magnets are not seen as optional for businesses that want to remain competitive within their industries. These tools can help plot the trajectory of a prospect’s customer journey by providing a valuable glimpse into a business’s product.
For technical industries, a lead magnet tends to lean into a demonstration of a product’s solution. This can be done in many ways, like White Papers or Webinars, but the content should provide valuable market insight.
The Importance of Customizing Lead Magnets
Just like any other marketing tool, customization of outreach is important for lead magnets to be used to their fullest potential. Whether your business has a large array of products or only a few solutions to offer, customers will be coming to you with unique problems that are specific to their organization.
Initial content provided by your business, especially as a way to gain contact information and create first touchpoints, should begin the process of selling your solution. The magnet isn’t a sales pitch itself, though. Rather, it’s a marketing tool to generate interest and educate prospect’s on your product’s capability.
The goal of your marketing efforts is to be seen as an expert in the field. This means prospects and current customers will look to your content for industry insight. Using a lead magnet should entice prospects to provide contact information because they want to engage with the content of value.
Knowing your audience and understanding their needs will help create trust between customers and the business, as well as cultivate interest in your products. Alongside providing solutions, loyal customers will appreciate customized content that caters to their interests.
Before choosing the types of content you want to produce, it is important to identify your target audience and take the time to understand their needs. Research prospective clients, find pain points that your product can help alleviate, and pay attention to market trends.
Along with customization for specific customer bases, making sure your content is up-to-date and relevant to current events can help create engagement. Utilize statistics to show ongoing trends in your industry. For example, as the economy continues to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic, providing customers with content that addresses this topic will help your business be seen as an informed source.
Email marketing, lead generation, and content engagement are all important tools for becoming a successful B2B company. These are no longer optional if you want to be a competitor in the market. On top of utilizing digital marketing to reach prospects, any content provided to potential clients should begin to build a relationship.
Creating sales pipelines and adding qualified leads to the funnel can be a tough task. Some prospects may be weary of providing contact information, and others may have no idea who your company is.
By creating and providing quality lead magnets, your business should be able to showcase its value to these potential clients to build trust and begin the sales journey.
Not all lead magnets are the same. Some will serve different purposes depending on the type of customer you are working to attract. All of these tools should be enticing enough to earn contact information.
Digital marketing continues to evolve as new social media platforms pop up and customers continue to be inundated with content. However, lots of clients are still beginning their search for solutions by turning to Google.
Attracting potential clients through organic web traffic is a great way to score contact information from potential leads. This is where lead magnets can become a huge game changer. This content should be accessible on your website, in exchange for contact data, and it should be interesting enough to catch a prospect’s attention.
Below are lead magnet examples that can help your business take its lead generation to the next level.
White Paper
This tool is one of the top lead generators for B2B companies, but it needs to be interesting enough to garner interest from website visitors. There are several approaches you can take to white papers, and any form should provide unique information that is specific to your client’s industry.
As with all lead magnets, the content within the paper should be valuable, and it is important to make sure it’s enough to convert a prospect into a qualified lead. The subject should be creative, but something that can be heavily backed by data.
Providing a professional reference guide or one written by a C-Suite member can be a great start for a white paper. Allowing the CEO or COO to be the face of a paper on a trending topic in the industry can help establish your company’s expertise.
A professional reference guide would act as a comprehensive resource for professionals in your industry. While this type of content may seem basic and geared toward beginners in the field, it helps show off the knowledge of your company. This content is also easily refreshable, which takes fewer resources to maintain.
Taking a more statistical approach can help gain points from prospects who may value insight into market trends. Analyze a case study or write about market predictions based on past trends. This content can help establish your organization’s credibility and focus on how your product fits into the current market.
A simple type of white paper can be a comprehensive product breakdown to provide crucial insight into the solutions your business provides. This helps with the technical aspect of your sales pitch and can help introduce prospects to your tools.
Webinars
Leaning into a product demonstration, webinars are an easily accessible avenue for prospects to become acquainted with your company. Live webinars are a great resource to pitch your product to potential customers who may be exploring several solutions.
These live streams provide in-depth product demonstrations and leave time for questions that participants might have. By showcasing your product and demonstrating your team’s expertise through answering questions in real time, webinars help prospects familiarize themselves with the solution your company provides.
Also, webinars make capturing contact information extremely easy. Many platforms require participants to sign in with their email addresses and include information regarding their role within the company. This allows your team to start targeted outreach to these prospective clients as soon as the webinar begins.
Live webinars help give easy to provide participants with a call-to-action at the conclusion of the demonstration. After seeing your product and its features, potential clients can easily take the next step to set up a meeting with one of your business development employees.
Another option for webinars is creating an ongoing series that is relevant to current market trends. This moves the presentation away from a simple demonstration and allows your team to discuss your product’s role within the industry.
This type of series helps create fresh content to promote engagement from prospects and loyal customers. Along with providing valuable market insight, these conversations and the Q&A following can help potential clients see the way your team interacts with existing customers.
By showcasing your customer service and your expertise within the industry, prospects may feel more inclined to move along within your sales funnel.
Risk-Free Trials
A classic lead magnet for many B2B companies is offering a free trial of the product. This is particularly popular for businesses that are promoting software as a solution. Some prospects may benefit from exploring the product on their own to determine if it’s a good fit.
Important factors for a risk-free trial to be successful in qualifying leads include clear communication about the trial’s terms and ease of cancellation before being charged for the service.
Free trial sign-up forms will capture contact data so your team can reach out to these prospects and discuss their needs while they’re trying out the product. This is a great way to establish a relationship and help potential customers see the full benefit of your services.
Another aspect of the risk-free trial is gaining feedback from prospects as they self-navigate your product. Conducting check-ins to the contact information provided can start the conversation and allow your team to hear about the customer experience.
This type of lead magnet does require a product that can be easily trialed, but other types of products may be able to utilize a virtual demonstration if a free trial is not possible. Allowing prospects to test the software before purchasing can help build trust.
Communication is important for successfully providing free trials as a lead magnet. Make sure your team is able to reach out to the user as they work, listen to feedback that’s given, and be transparent about the subscription details.
eBooks
Similar to a white paper, an eBook is a long form of content that can serve as an informational guide to prospects. However, an eBook tends to cover general topics and may combine multiple pieces into one piece of content.
This type of lead magnet is great if your marketing team works heavily with blogs or has a series on specific topics that relate to your product and industry. Different from a white paper, an eBook tends to be less academic and bundles more information together.
Sharing an eBook with prospects helps them save time that they would’ve spent searching through your website. The information covered in the content can go over trending industry topics and the solution your product provides.
Since prospects won’t be able to view the content in your book before providing contact information, the brief overview and title should be catchy enough to catch their interest.
A quiz can be a fun way to introduce your product and help clients feel comfortable sharing their contact information with your business.
Making sure you’re implementing an appropriate quiz format is important for this type of lead magnet to be successful. Create a relevant title that entices website visitors to engage.
For example, if your company offers multiple solutions to workplace problems, you could use something as simple as “What Type of Product is Right For You?”. Next, the length of the quiz matters. Avoid making it too long because you don’t want prospects to get bored and abandon the activity.
The results of this should prompt action from the prospect. Try to tailor the results to collect contact information from qualified leads. You can take it a step further by using a quiz to assess where the prospect is in their customer journey.
This type of lead magnet can provide your team with data to move the lead within the sales funnel, as well as encourage prospects to take the next step with your product.
Templates
Offering a way for a prospect to streamline their process by simply providing contact information in return is an easy way to start building a relationship. Often, potential clients are trying to achieve something through their search and that’s how they’ve ended up on your webpage.
By providing templates as a lead magnet, customers are able to gain access to a quick solution and then explore your product in more depth as your team begins targeted outreach. Templates are a great resource for your marketing team to create as well because they don’t require constant refreshing.
Templates can also be used for most industries since they are easy to create in any form. For example, your business can offer email, design, social media, or spreadsheet templates. This type of content targets qualified prospects by tapping into their needs and providing a quick solution.
While templates don’t necessarily demonstrate how your product works, they are able to provide market insight. Tailoring these templates to things such as “Cold Outreach” or “Instagram Posts” can help your prospect see the understanding you have of the industry.
Email inboxes are cluttered with promotional emails and irrelevant content, so it is important to find ways to reach your prospect with valuable information. Email courses are a great way to allow potential clients to opt-in to a sequence providing insight into industry topics.
This helps establish a relationship between your company and the customer, and they are actively engaging with your content by reading the course. Also, it can help promote the ways your product integrates with the topics covered in the emails.
An email course provides multiple touchpoints to continue nurturing the lead and qualifying their needs. While some prospects may download an eBook but never get around to reading it, email courses provide a consistent stream of digestible content.
This helps your company stay at the forefront of prospect’s mind while they are searching for solutions to their needs. By sharing educational content, the customer will feel like your business has added value and they may be more inclined to move forward in the sales process.
Using Lead Magnets to Demonstrate Product Solutions
Lead magnets are resources that your marketing team is investing time and money into creating, which means you want it to serve a strong purpose. Rather than passively capturing contact information, a lead magnet should do more than just expand your email campaign lists.
Using these tools to their full potential means finding ways for them to demonstrate how your product provides solutions. Potential clients want to see the value your business can share, and a lead magnet is a great first step.
By relating the magnet to your service, your business should be able to qualify the incoming leads and ensure they are getting to the right salespeople. High-tech service providers need to demonstrate the value of their product, whether its data analytics or AI software. By using a lead magnet to begin showcasing the product’s features, potential clients will start to understand the solution.
While it may seem like the easiest way to do this is using a free trial as a lead magnet, other formats can provide the same kind of experience. Webinars, email courses, and white papers help establish businesses as key players within their industries while building trust with clients.
The important thing is to make sure lead magnets are providing educational information, not just serving as an advertisement for the tools your business offers. White papers can lean into your product’s ability while providing data-backed research on market trends. Webinars and email courses can cover industry-specific topics and demonstrate the solutions offered by your product.
This content should be specific to the audience you are trying to engage. Lead magnets should be tailored to the interests of your potential clients and refreshed as needed to stay relevant within the industry. By demonstrating how a product works and the features it has, targeted prospects should feel more confident in allowing your business to provide the solution.
To get started with engaging prospects with these lead magnet examples, check out Leadboxer’s free trial.
The subjects of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) are leading conversations surrounding best business practices. While discussions about diversity in the workplace have increased over the past few years, these topics are more than just trendy buzzwords. Research suggests that diversity in sales can increase return on investment (ROI) and improve customer satisfaction ratings.
Staying competitive in the sales industry starts with creating a company that attracts diverse talent. Accomplishing this takes more than simply acknowledging the need for a diverse sales team. To benefit from DEI, companies must work to provide welcoming environments that offer a pathway for professional success for employees of varying backgrounds, genders, races, and ethnicities.
Keep reading, or use the links below to see how sales team diversity can help your company succeed:
Every business to business (B2B) company shares one major goal: increasing sales. Successful companies work hard to drive higher sales each year.
A diverse sales team can be the key to higher numbers. According to a study by Forrester, 60% of sales teams surveyed attributed increased sales to having a diverse and inclusive sales force.
Creating a diverse work environment means more than hiring from underrepresented groups. Successful teams will create a culture that celebrates diversity and allows these differences to become a driving force for their sales process.
Racial and cultural diversity has been at the forefront of these discussions, and with good reason. According to a 2019 study, only 5% of employees at Silicon Valley tech firms were people of color. The same study found women filled just 28% of roles in the tech industry.
These numbers provide insight into the glaring DEI issues many industries are still facing. Along with obvious race and gender gaps, diversity in age and life experience are important for driving increased sales.
The Census Bureau notes that an annual $4 trillion dollars in buying power comes from Millenials, African Americans, and Latinx populations. Having a diverse sales team that is representative of these groups can help you tap into this lucrative market.
On top of achieving higher sales numbers, diverse hiring practices can help bridge the gap for unfilled positions. Many companies struggle to fill sales roles with employees who meet or exceed their quotas. By expanding the candidate pool outside of the usual network and into more diverse groups, the time it takes to fill these open positions can decrease.
Sales team diversity also leads to innovation in the workplace. When collaboration is needed to explore new sales tactics, having a team with members from different backgrounds can make a huge difference.
The Harvard Business Review reports that companies leading in diversity are 45% more likely to report market growth from previous years. This research suggests that sales team diversity drives innovation and allows new ideas to be heard.
Widening Your Lead Pool
Leads are vital for any B2B sales model, and most companies spend time and resources to widen their lead pools. Sales team diversity is another tool to help add leads to your pipeline, and research suggests diversity leads to higher conversions.
According to Forrester, teams leading in diversity see a conversion rate of 54% for leads to opportunities. In contrast, other teams only see a 26% rate.
When more groups are represented on your sales team, it is easier for customers to connect with salespeople. This helps engage leads and nurture them throughout the customer journey.
Harvard Business Review found that salespeople who share ethnicity with a potential client are 125% more likely to understand their needs. This statistic shows how vital diversity is for converting leads. When new prospects enter the sales pipeline, being able to provide a positive customer interaction is crucial for landing the sale.
Customer bases are diverse, and reaching out beyond your immediate network can help introduce your team to new leads. It’s important to acknowledge that American consumers expect brands to embrace DEI practices. Forrester found that 55% of consumers will buy from a brand that reflects their personality.
These statistics show how important it is to employ a diverse pool of salespeople. For your sales team to succeed, it is crucial that it be made up of different ethnicities, races, ages, and backgrounds your customer base can relate to.
40% of Americans identify as diverse, based on race or ethnicity. With such a large group of diverse consumers, sales teams must reflect this reality.
Increasing ROI With Diversity and Inclusion
Successful sales practices are an investment for any company. These costs include hiring, software, lead generation, customer retention resources, and marketing. The goal of these business investments are to see a higher return due to increased sales conversions.
By attracting a diverse sales team, the ROI for your company can increase. Through higher sales forecasts, lead conversions, sales attainment, and customer satisfaction, DEI can play a huge role in bolstering B2B sales success.
During a 2021 study, Forrester found that the sales team leading in DEI initiatives had already hit 43% of their sales attainment goals, while other groups were sitting at 31%. Understanding the value of DEI can help set your team apart from those who are lagging in diverse hiring practices.
inclusive practices will pave the way for future success.
While creating a diverse sales team with an inclusive environment does not happen overnight, taking the necessary steps can pay off by leading your team to higher sales. To begin, analyze the demographics of your existing team and look for areas where improvements are needed. Survey current employees to better understand how their gender, race, or background affects their experience at your company.
Harvard Business Review found that in the absence of diverse leadership, underrepresented groups are less likely to see idea endorsement compared to their counterparts who are straight, white, and male. Women are 20% less likely, LGBTQ+ are 21% less likely, and people of color are 24% less likely to have their suggestions seriously considered.
Understanding how these numbers can harm your business will help unlock insight into ways to drive a higher ROI. Establishing a culture that encourages innovation from diverse employees will help tap into underrepresented markets.
Customers are the most important part of B2B sales. Retaining customers helps increase ROI, as it is five times more expensive to attract new customers than it is to engage current customers. By improving customer satisfaction rates, your company can save money and increase sales conversions.
Sales teams leading the way in DEI report a 24% increase in customer satisfaction scores. Having an accurate representation of your customer base on your sales team can help improve customer relations.
Leaning on the ideas of your employees can help engage customers in a personal way. By diversifying your sales team in age, race, and gender, each customer can interact with a point-of-contact that understands their needs.
Along with customer representation, sales team diversity helps bring fresh ideas that can appeal to other demographics. For example, having older employees on your team can help engage customers in the same age group through proper marketing channels.
With multiple generations in the workforce and a diverse American population, understanding motivation is the key to customer success. These varying viewpoints can allow your team to see what types of sales pitches, products, and marketing materials different groups prefer.
Marketing and sales work hand-in-hand to identify and qualify leads. Creating targeted audiences for marketing materials is important for a personalized customer experience. Through DEI practices, these resources are more easily refined to appeal to each target base.
Through research, Facebook found that 71% of consumers want to see promotion of diversity and inclusion in their online marketing materials.Yet, 54% don’t feel represented in online ads. Utilizing diverse sales teams can help encourage marketing that accurately represents an equally diverse consumer base.
By representing customers accurately, customer loyalty will follow. In fact, 59% of consumers are more loyal to brands with inclusive marketing practices. Incorporating DEI into your hiring practices and customer experiences can have a huge, positive impact on customer loyalty with your brand.
Key Takeaways
Sales team diversity is not just the right thing to do, it has a direct correlation to success in the current market. Investing in the resources, tools, training, and employees who can bring diverse outlooks to your sales team takes time and money, but ultimately increases sales and ROI.
The consumer base wants to feel represented when buying from companies, and diverse sales employees can lead to improved customer experience rates. Alongside marketing tactics, inclusive practices will help engage underrepresented communities and generate brand loyalty.
The research is clear: diversity in the workplace leads to more innovation. Remaining a competitor in B2B sales is vital, and leading teams in DEI see higher sales attainment coupled with longer employee retention.
Understanding and acknowledging the importance of an inclusive company culture is the first step to creating sales team diversity. Next, listening to employees and improving DEI practices can help launch your B2B sales to a higher level.
Your business wants to up its lead generation game. However, there are many strategies out there that promise you exceptional results. How do you improve your lead generation?
You may already have some of the pieces in place. Before you stress out over what new lead generation trend to follow, here are some strategies to try:
Your website is the first interaction customers have with your brand. Make a good first impression with an updated website.
Updating your website doesn’t mean going overboard with videos, graphics, or text. If you think your website is “cool” because it has Adobe Flash Player, think again.
Great websites are optimized for search engines, have user-friendly designs, and valuable content. You may already have these on your website, but here are more tips to make your website great:
Don’t Overwhelm Visitors With Options
People like having choices. However, too many choices can be a bad thing.
When people have too many options, they can get confused and overwhelmed. They may get flustered and bounce from your website because they can’t make a decision.
To see how easy (or difficult) it is to navigate the options on your website, explore it yourself. Better yet, have someone else poke around your site. Ask them to write down questions and observe their experience.
Pay attention to how easy it is to go on to the next step. Look at whether your pages make sense and accomplish your company’s goals.
Put in the Effort to Tell People Who You Are
Chances are you put more blood, sweat, and tears into certain pages of your site. Your product or services pages and testimonial pages likely took much of your attention. How much time did you devote to your About Us page?
It’s great to give specifics on your products and services and share the experiences of satisfied customers. Consumers want to know about your company before doing business with you. Your About Us page is your chance to give a good impression and build trust with potential customers.
Your customers will feel more comfortable working with your business if they know its background, staff, mission, values, and awards. Think of it as introducing your business to a new customer or friend.
Be sure to include high-resolution images of your leadership and staff on your About Us page. For content, include your mission, value proposition, and a clear call to action.
Get Information on Who Visits Your Website
Gone are the days when you hope the right people find your website, make a sale, and return. With our Lead Identification solution, you can know valuable information about who visits your site. We can tell you:
Who visits your website
What company do they work for
All the company’s firmographic details
What services or products they are interested in
Visitor’s company contact information
How many visitors from this company visited
Based on above and more, what is the visitor’s lead score value
Embedded Lead Identification into your website requires no buttons or forms to fill out. All the data is collected automatically and discreetly.
Utilize Effective Landing Pages
Landing pages are good at capturing leads. However, a poorly-created one will not give you the amount or quality of leads you want. Here are some tips for creating effective landing pages:
Keep Your Landing Pages Simple
Marketers can overthink when it comes to creating landing pages. They want them to be complex and sleek. An overly-complex landing page, however, will lead to more bounces.
The purpose of a landing page is for people to leave their contact information to access valuable content. It is important to grab people’s attention and offer high-quality content. You also need a clear call to action telling people what to do next.
Get straight to the point in telling visitors why they need your services or products. Also clearly show them what they need to do to get started.
Include Testimonials on Your Landing Pages
You know how powerful testimonials are. You use them on your website. Why not use them on your landing pages?
Testimonials by satisfied customers let people know your offerings are effective and your brand is trustworthy. Adding testimonials to your landing pages are simple and effective lead generation strategies.
It is easy to find testimonials. Look at your company’s social media channels, customer support emails, and product reviews. Before you use a testimonial, reach out to the source and get permission.
Have a Mobile-Friendly Landing Page
Your leads and customers are more likely to view your website and landing page on the go via their cellphone. Your landing page needs to be optimized to fit on the tiny screen of a phone. If it isn’t, your landing page will look clunky and unappealing.
Since your landing page will be formatted and look different than it would on a desktop or tablet, shorten your opt-in forms. Be sure to optimize your call to action (CTA) buttons and make them highly visible.
Remove Menus From Your Landing Pages
Menus on your landing pages are distracting. Going back to the first point, the simpler the landing page, the better the conversion rate. Remember, you want them to stay on the landing page and follow the call to action.
Upgrade Your Content
Using the text on your website and blog simply as an area to stuff keywords won’t get you conversions. To generate leads, you need to know your desired customer and what content will be valuable to them. You’ll attract customers most likely to convert and your informative content will boost your brand’s authority.
There are many ways to use high-quality content. You can have it on your website and feature an opt-in form for visitors to read more. A blog with good content has a better chance of getting noticed and shared.
Start Blogging and do it Consistently
Blogs are real estate for you to share valuable information with website visitors and they can boost your SEO. A blog adds personality to our brand and improves your brand’s credibility. They can also attract 67% more leads per month.
First-time website visitors will want to know more about your company than the great products or services you offer. They expect your business to be knowledgeable in your industry. They also want to be treated with the utmost importance.
Once you start a blog, you need to regularly produce high-quality content. If you’re not consistently blogging, customers will get bored. Your blog content will no longer be engaging, current, or relevant.
When you blog consistently, you help create an engaging interaction with potential leads. The longer a lead engages with you before signing up or opting in, the more likely they will become paying customers.
A relationship with a lead not only increases their likelihood of becoming a paid customer, but also a returning customer. Loyal customers can be counted on for repeat business and they can become valuable brand ambassadors.
Before you write your blog posts, research your target audience and keywords to use throughout the content. If you need help coming up with topics to write about, look up trends happening in your industry. When writing your blogs, be sure to include clear CTAs (call to actions) alerting readers what to do next.
Email Marketing is Your Friend
You may think flooding people’s inboxes with emails is a bad idea. However, email marketing is one of the most effective lead generation strategies around. It is also one of the easiest to do.
According to Neil Patel, email marketing has an effectiveness of 48% and a difficulty rating of only 18%. Email marketing beats out content marketing, landing pages, social media marketing, and SEO. Only the creation of landing pages is easier.
To get results, you’ll need to carefully plan out your content, segment your audience, and schedule your emails.
Get Active Online
Your blog isn’t the only way you can engage with leads online. Here are some ideas you can try to share your expertise:
Answer questions on Q&A sites like Quora or HARO (Help a Reporter Out) that relate to your industry
Get involved in relevant conversations on Twitter
Cross-promote content on other websites and blogs via guest posting. (Remember: guest posting is reciprocal)
Get Active on Twitter
You may think that LinkedIn is the go-to source for professional social networking. Twitter offers options to form valuable business and sales connections.
When you create a Twitter lead card and attach it to a tweet, you can get people’s emails. This happens when someone clicks on the CTA button on your tweet.
Whether you need a landing page, a blogging or email strategy, or to get started on social media, LeadBoxer can help you to translate your Lead Generation Strategies into qualified leads. They know how important lead generation is for your business.
Effective online lead generation is easier than you think. You may be doing some of the listed ideas already. Regardless of what strategies you try, remember it is about the customer.
Want to stimulate interest in your brand without paying for ads? Content marketing is the answer. This type of marketing involves making videos, blogs, and social media posts that solve problems for your ideal customers, thus building loyalty to your brand and encouraging them to buy from you.
This strategy is essential for staying ahead of competitors. A 2021 report from HubSpot found that 70% of over 1,500 marketers surveyed are actively investing in content marketing. The same study noted that 40% of marketers consider content marketing vital to their overall strategy.
Creating and implementing a content marketing strategy doesn’t have to be time-consuming. The following techniques will set you up for success.
Great content marketing happens when everybody in a company collaborates. To do this, you’ll need to get the leaders of various teams and departments behind you.
Ardath Albee of Marketing Interactions explains, “You need executive backing to fund and source a content strategy. You also need the support to ensure there is enough commitment to see a content marketing strategy through.”
To get leaders of your company on your side, position content marketing as a way to help their departments reach their goals.
Understand Your Audience
Before creating content, you need to think carefully about your ideal customers and anticipate what videos, blogs, or resources they want. Consider these questions:
Who is the ideal person reading your content?
What information do people want that isn’t readily available?
What pain points are your customers feeling?
How does your target audience make buying decisions?
By creating content that anticipates and answers your ideal customer’s questions and pain points, you can simplify their decision to buy from you.
Invest in Branding
Consider hiring a reputable agency to develop your brand’s look. The visuals and messaging used to represent your company impact your bottom line. A 2019 Reboot study of 2,500 consumers found that the right color can increase brand recognition by 80%. Furthermore, a 2019 Lucidpress survey of 400 organizations found that a consistent presentation of brand imagery, messaging, and values across channels can increase revenue by 33%.
Publish Guest Blog Posts
Curating blog posts from thought leaders in your industry is a win-win for all involved. It creates new content for your website with less lift from your marketing team and gives contributing writers a platform for sharing their ideas.
Guest blog posts also encourage the creation of backlinks, or links connecting one website to another. This happens when the contributing writer shares the article on their personal site. Backlinks signal to search engines that your content is valuable, which in turn boosts your site’s ranking on search engine result pages (SERPs).
Here are some tips for finding and recruiting credible guest bloggers:
Visit other blogs in your industry and see who is writing for them
To grow your audience quickly, reach out to in-demand writers with large audiences and offer to pay them
Mention the benefits of writing for you, such as the number of monthly visitors to your site and the exposure writers will receive
Create Evergreen Content
While new content is helpful for keeping social media and email audiences engaged, there’s no need to churn it out all the time. Instead, invest energy in creating evergreen content, or resources that are always relevant. Examples include:
Frequently asked questions
How-to guides
Tutorials
Encyclopedia pages
Troubleshooting articles
Over time, these pieces of content will rise to the top of SERPs and draw new prospects into your audience.
Repurpose Content
Another way to save your marketing team time is to reconfigure content for different channels. For example, transform an interview between a member of the marketing team and one of your executives into a podcast episode, blog post, infographic, and series of social media posts.
This gets more mileage out of the original piece of content and can help you reach audiences on various platforms.
Organize Content on Pillar Pages
A pillar page is a high-level article that provides prospective customers with an overview on a topic. The page includes links leading to blog posts or pages that cover subtopics in more depth.
Pillar pages help keep your site organized. They’re also another effective way to reuse existing content.
Include Videos and Graphics
Visuals help break up long blog posts, appeal to visual learners, and can increase site traffic and the amount of time visitors spend there. A 2020 survey conducted by Wyzowl found that 86% of marketers say video has increased traffic to their website. The same survey noted that 83% of marketers credit video with helping increase the average time visitors spend on a page. Similarly, engaging graphics can also significantly boost your website’s appeal and traffic. If hiring a professional graphics designer is beyond your reach, you can use Picsart’s templates and craft stunning visuals for your content.
Measure Your Results
Analyzing the effectiveness of your marketing helps determine what types of content lead to the most sales and what parts of your strategy need improvement. To measure your results, use a tool like Google Analytics or LeadBoxer to study your site’s data.
LeadBoxer tracks what your leads do on your website or when you email them. You can see what pages they visit, how much time they spend there, and what resources they download.
By comparing customer journeys, you can identify common pathways or pieces of content that lead to sales. You then know which content types are most effective and worth replicating. You can also determine which pages to keep updating and sharing on social media.
Final Thoughts
Content marketing is vital for attracting, nurturing, and retaining customers. By anticipating and answering questions with your content, you establish your brand as a thought leader with unparalleled customer service.
Techniques like publishing guest blog posts, creating evergreen content, organizing content into pillar posts, and repurposing content across channels help your marketing team reach the most people with the least amount of lift.
A tool like LeadBoxer helps you analyze your strategy. With LeadBoxer, you can see what pages or downloadable resources are driving the most sales. Get started today with a free trial.
Having a deep understanding of customer behavior can increase sales conversions. As technology continues to advance, businesses have the advantage of utilizing data to target their audience and successfully pitch their products.
Collecting this data helps marketing departments better understand their ideal customers. Sales teams are able to improve outreach and streamline their communication with potential clients.
Use the following links to jump ahead, or keep reading to learn ways to successfully increase sales through internal data.
As industries continue to face constant evolution within technology, the way sales are made have changed. Most customers begin their journey for new products or services through a web search. Online behavior can provide crucial insights for sales teams.
Intent data is information that is collected regarding a user’s online behavior, specifically through content interaction. By tracking these actions, businesses are able to see patterns and gain knowledge about their prospect’s interests.
Most importantly, this data can provide clues that help sales professionals understand the likelihood of a purchase from customers. This helps tailor sales tactics, drive marketing campaigns, and increase the chances of conversions within the pipeline.
Behavioral data is collected through the ways users are interacting with your content. This allows your team to see what areas of your site are most attractive to potential customers. This information can also help sales professionals gain an understanding of where a client is at in the buying process.
Having access to this information helps take the guesswork out of the sales process. Intent data can help pinpoint the market for your product, how to segment clients for marketing outreach, and what their purchase intent looks like.
Analyzing behavior is a huge asset for marketing. This allows teams to personalize content to target the proper audience for your products and services. By reaching these prospects, your sales team will have more leads funneling into their pipeline.
Behavioral data can help with brand exposure. Having an accurate idea of the topics and areas on your site that get the most traction provides marketing with important insights. The team is able to customize messaging to drive similar customers to your web pages.
This type of brand awareness helps your business reach more individuals who are still in the research stage. By having content that reaches customers in need of your solutions, information on how your business is the best fit for prospective buyers is provided.
Another major benefit of behavioral data is aligning your marketing and sales to see a higher return on investment (ROI) on your outreach. Research shows that companies become 67% better at closing deals when marketing and sales collaborate for account-based marketing (ABM).
This data allows your teams to sync up by higher quality leads and better understanding of client behavior. Marketers are able to discover unique interests among target customers, and this information allows sales to strengthen relationships with their accounts.
Behavioral data provides your business with the necessary tools to accurately predict buying patterns. By having insight into their actions, it is possible to track where customers are at in their purchase process. This allows marketing and sales to accurately plan outreach to nurture leads and walk clients to the end of the sales process.
First Party Intent Data Vs. Third Party Intent Data
While intent data can help increase sales, it is important to understand the different types and how they can play a role in your business. First party data is collected through your website and content pages. This tracks how visitors are engaging with your marketing.
First party data is something most businesses already track in some form. Analytics, automated tools, and the backend of your website keep up with this engagement. Internal data provides deep insight into customers, but often, it comes across as anonymous engagement.
Leadboxer helps your business discover the leads behind internal data. The platform captures the cycle of behavior from online engagement, starting with the first visit to your site. By uncovering this data, Leadboxer is able to identify who your visitors are.
This allows your team to have access to qualified leads, which helps plan client outreach. The identification of these customers happens through IP addresses, email engagement, and other touchpoints.
Third party data comes from providers who are able to collect the ways prospects are engaging on other sites. This allows for a complete view of buyer activity to see how customers are interacting with competitors. Behavior data can provide a sense of consumer purchasing patterns online.
This side of things provides valuable insight into any backtracking or missteps that are made throughout the buying cycle. By seeing where customers are spending their time, it is easy to pinpoint their pain areas and see where their greatest needs lie.
Most third party intent data will surface during the research stage. This information can provide crucial guidance for future outreach and marketing tactics. Third party data shows what keywords customers are using, which brands they interact with first, and what solutions they are searching for.
While first party data comes directly from users interacting with your content, third party information can be trickier. As privacy concerns push for tighter restrictions, companies that rely on third party data are beginning to focus on ways to utilize what they are able to collect.
The biggest concern regarding third party data is that it can be unknowingly collected. This information comes from tracked behavior across websites, and it can contain personal identifiable information (PII). As concerns have grown, actions have been taken to promote transparency within the data.
Sites that use third-party cookies, which track engagement across sites, are putting banners on their content to ask for consent from visitors. These regulations have caused restrictions on the data that third parties are able to provide. This shift promotes the need for businesses to rely on first-party data.
Internal Data and Its Importance to Closing Deals
Once your business understands the importance of intent data, it is time to optimize its use. Most importantly, internal data is a tool that can help increase sales conversions by encouraging warmer leads and stronger client relationships.
Businesses must qualify prospects as part of their sales planning. In order to see higher sales conversions, the team must know where to spend their time and resources. Not every lead that comes through a website will be a buyer.
Through behavioral data, engagement can provide insight into how serious a customer is about making a purchase. From the first website visit, Leadboxer tracks the content, forms, and emails that see prospect interaction. This helps put together a timeline for sales professionals, as they are able to gauge where a client is in their customer journey.
Creating Customer Profiles Based on Internal Data
A customer profile helps your business keep personalized records of your clients. This information helps marketing segment their messaging and allows sales to keep up with their pipelines.
Each profile is a detailed record of a customer’s needs, demographics, and behavior patterns. By using intent data to fill out these descriptions, your team can keep track of customer relationships and note their behaviors to increase conversions.
By understanding what problems individual customers are facing, sales will be able to drive solutions to their doorstep. Online behavior can provide insights through touchpoints to help illustrate a customer’s current needs.
When a qualified lead begins interacting with your product page, downloading your content, or filling out interest forms, sales will be able to reach out at the right time. This data helps sales nurture leads through the process.
Providing Insight to Identify, Segment, and Score Leads
Each visitor is tracked when they reach your site, but it is important they make it to the right place in the sales funnel. Throughout their time on your site, Leadboxer collects information and tracks their actions to accurately discover the lead’s identity.
From there, leads can be integrated with a business’ tech stack to move them through the cycle. After identification, prospects can be segmented into groups to receive appropriate marketing. These segments allow your team to filter leads by company name, size, location, or behavior.
Most importantly, Leadboxer handles automatic scoring to keep the most relevant leads at the top of your pipeline. This distinction is based on customer behavior, interests, and properties. Sales will be able to begin their outreach to provide the proper solutions according to specific customer needs.
With internal data, lead scoring is accurately ranked to help pinpoint prospects who are most likely to make a purchase. Their behavior helps determine where they are in the process, and what they need to get to the finish line.
Get started with your internal data analysis today by signing up for a free Leadboxer trial!
Successful businesses thrive on strong customer relationships. These connections help increase the number of sales conversions. Most importantly, the resources used to create a strong customer connection will see a strong return on investment (ROI).
Professional relationships go beyond initial contact points as good sales teams work hard to personalize the customer journey based on individual needs. By cultivating a strong relationship with clients, the likelihood of their repeated patronage increases.
As technology continues to evolve, businesses are constantly competing for attention from prospects in the digital realm. Focusing on relationship-based sales can help boost engagement with your social media, as well as direct your messaging to the correct target audience.
Keep reading, or use the following links, to learn more about how these connections drive customer relationships to a sale:
The Link Between Customer Connections and Increased Sales
The goal of every sales team is to increase their numbers. There are many tactics out there to see higher conversions, but it is crucial to start at the beginning of the pipeline. Customer connections can happen during the first introduction to a prospect.
Making the most of interactions, even while a prospect is still in the ‘Lead’ stage, can have a huge impact on finalized sales. Before starting the process of making these connections, it is important to understand the driving idea behind this strategy.
Relationship based sales happen when a salesperson prioritizes the interactions and connections with a client to complete a sale. While price and types of services will always be a factor for customers, relationship based sales primarily focus on building customer loyalty.
Utilizing this strategy to foster relationships will help each customer feel more valued by your business. Clients will lean towards loyalty to brands when they are appreciated by the company.
B2B businesses can see a huge benefit from adopting this mindset. Since purchases of these services typically require a higher-level of commitment due to the size, customer loyalty goes a long way.
Personalized outreach is a great starting point for creating strong customer engagement strategies. Customers start their buying journey when they have a problem, so it’s important to segment your marketing for tailored audiences. Once a lead enters your pipeline, allow your salespeople to take time to nurture the prospect and gather insight into their needs.
These customer relationships have many aspects that will require personalization. The more effort your team puts into creating these lasting bonds, the higher your conversions will rise. Starting off with personal interests, encourage your salespeople to get to know their customer contacts.
By knowing their geographical location, personal hobbies, and basic profiles, it will be easier for your sales staff to find similarities to create connections. For example, an easy connecting point between sales and clients could be a similar interest in sports teams or graduation from the same alma mater.
On the other side of things, ensure that your sales team is working hard to listen to the needs of each customer. Find out if your services or products can be tailored to provide the best solution possible. Take time to listen to customer insight before pitching specific packages.
Another crucial aspect to forming lasting customer connections is having continued contact once a sale is finalized. If your product requires training or onboarding, make sure the correct resources and enough support staff are available during this time. Be proactive in your outreach to gather feedback, and listen to any suggestions these customers may have.
Ensuring Loyalty Through Customer Experience
Once you’ve started focusing on the ways to foster strong connections, it is important to make sure these interactions are increasing customer loyalty. The key to this strategy is good customer experience throughout the buying journey.
Before implementing a customer connection strategy, you need to have an understanding of what your current clients think about your services and their experiences. According to Forbes, 80% of businesses believe they excel in customer service, but a mere 8% of customers agree with that statement.
Conducting research and opening the conversation for genuine client feedback can help your team see where improvements can happen. This information is valuable for sales strategies, and these interactions will help your customers feel valued and appreciated. Be sure to incorporate as much of their feedback as possible into your future relationship.
Looking ahead to future customer experiences, it’s important to understand how much each interaction matters in the cultivation of customer loyalty. Forbes asserts that within a day of a poor customer experience, 47% of consumers are willing to take their business to a competitor. Due to the ease of finding other options through a quick web search, there is little room for mistakes during the buying journey.
Speed and efficiency are key elements of a positive customer experience. While B2B sales cycles tend to be longer than B2C due to the nature of service, clients still value quickness. Instead of looking at ways to shorten the sales cycle itself, focus on the ways your communication can be streamlined.
Many people are conditioned to expect answers within seconds due to the availability of instant online search. While having salespeople within reach as soon as every problem occurs may not be possible, there should be resources in place to help customers. Make sure your web forms work, check emails regularly, and don’t be afraid to hop on a call to quickly offer solutions.
Start by focusing on the entirety of the process rather than singular pieces. Analyzing the customer journey from beginning to end will help your team pinpoint problem areas. From there, begin tracking customer behavior to identify patterns throughout your target audience.
Personalized messaging, optimized payment options, and convenient sales processes are all ways to engage modern consumers. Clients are online more than ever before, so use the data detailing their actions to your advantage.
Make sure your team is setting realistic conversion rates. Despite all of the great customer service your business provides, not every lead will result in a sale. To have an understanding of the genuine ROI from marketing and sales efforts, reasonable conversion goals are necessary.
Focus on communication while making customer connections. At the end of the day, most clients will appreciate when a business goes above and beyond to listen to their needs. Fostering strong relationships and ensuring quality customer journeys requires time, commitment, and consistent communication.
While it is one of the newer resources in the long line of sales strategies, social media has begun to dominate the playing field. Utilizing these platforms can help accelerate your numbers, and provide valuable insights into consumer behavior.
The top platforms, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Youtube, will be enough to help provide your business with the tools for successful social selling. Starting off, social media will generate leads and track data for better understanding of customer behavior.
Leadboxer’s platform integrates with your team’s tech stack to access data, generate leads, and provide tools for higher conversion rates. Throughout your email and social media campaigns, Leadboxer is able to uncover data to provide contact information and behavior patterns for potential buyers.
One of the key benefits of social selling is gaining insight and learning about customers to create meaningful connections. By integrating your workflow with technology like the Leadboxer platform, your team will be able to gain a broad understanding of this data.
Generating leads through social platforms helps your salestaff find new prospects for outreach. From the very first interaction, customer connections can begin to take shape. Social media offers vital personal information to help your salespeople find similarities with their contacts.
Using social media as a way to teach about the industry and your products is another great use of the tool. By reaching your target audience with educational information, your business will be able to establish itself as a reliable leader in the industry. This allows prospects to find your product before your team even has a chance to discover them during a search process.
Engagement through social media helps to continue the professional relationship with clients. According to Hootsuite’s Digital Report 2021, 22.7% of internet users are using social media to network and handle work-related research. Continued social media outreach and marketing is crucial for maintaining strong customer connections, with many consumers using the internet to develop business relationships.
To see how social media integrations can help with customer connections, check out LeadBoxer with a free trial.
Generating leads is a crucial part of building revenue for any business. This involves having a constant stream of new customers to nurture into repeat, loyal patrons. Your prospects are looking online for products and services to meet their needs and solve their problems.
The lead generation process begins with your website, your company’s online presence. With more than 455 million websites built on and hosted by WordPress, chances are yours is too. WordPress is a solid website builder that offers easy customization and SEO-friendly items.
If you use WordPress, the many plugins can be overwhelming. Which ones are best for your business? Which ones will generate leads?
Below are the 16 best WordPress plugins for business – read on or use the following links to jump ahead:
Your website must have a way for customers to reach you. WPForms allow you to easily create surveys, payment forms, order forms, contact forms, and subscription forms. With WPForms, you can access 300+ pre-built landing pages and forms and see valuable analytics like tracking and abandonment.
2. MonsterInsights
MonsterInsights connects websites to Google Analytics which allows you to gather data on who visits your site and how they find it. With MonsterInsights, you can make the necessary changes to boost subscribers and traffic.
3. All in One SEO
More than three million websites use All in One SEO. This plugin is SEO-friendly and offers all the tools you need to maximize your on-page SEO. With an SEO-maximized site, you’ll boost your website traffic, which increases revenue.
4. OptinMonster
OptinMonster is the most widely-used plugin for boosting sales and email subscribers. It allows you to convert bounced website visitors into email subscribers. With hundreds of conversion templates, it is easy to build personalized campaigns.
Push notifications allow you to send targeted announcements to website visitors. PushEngage plugin offers A/B testing, drip campaigns, tracking, segmentation, and opt-in reminders.
6. Shared Counts
Social sharing effectively allows your customers to tell others about your company. With Shared Counts, you can add social sharing buttons to your website. Additionally, this plugin lets you see how many people shared your content.
7. WPML
With the Internet connecting people worldwide, you likely have customers in different countries speaking various languages. WPML allows your business to create multilingual websites.
8. WooCommerce
WooCommerce is a must-have plugin for e-commerce businesses. More than five million websites and online stores use WooCommerce. WooCommerce offers a WordPress ecosystem that includes hosting and themes.
Believe it or not, people do still contact you by phone. Nextiva’s plugin allows your business phone to have online faxing, unlimited calling, call routing, and more.
10. Ahrefs
With Ahrefs, you can get an inside look into your competition. You’ll be able to see the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors. Ahrefs also track your and the competition’s backlinks.
11. Smash Balloon
Smash Balloon boosts website engagement by sharing your new content. It offers plugins to many popular social networks. Smash Balloon allows you to customize your feed anywhere on your website.
12. BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo helps you get your content out there with the ability to connect with influencers and generate high-performing content. It also allows you to find trends in your industry.
With the speed of the Internet, customers are impatient. If your website takes too long to load, people will abandon your site and head to another. WP Super Cache improves your site’s speed by converting dynamic pages to static ones.
14. Pure Chat
Having more than one way for customers to contact your company will help you retain them. In addition to contact forms, offering live chat with Pure Chat will allow customers to talk to someone at any time. With someone always available, your customers will be satisfied.
15. MailChimp for WordPress
It is crucial to have an email list. MailChimp allows you to access customer emails from comments, contact forms, and opt-in pages. MailChimp is one of the best and easiest-to-use email platforms around.
16. LeadBoxer
LeadBoxer tells you who visited your website. This notifies your sales team and lets them know who they need to reach out to. People who repeatedly visit and spend time on your site are interested in what you offer.
Source
Leads are what generate sales for your business. One of the most important lead-generating options out there is a WordPress website. A website will ensure your company will be found online.
Having a website for your business is a great start. However, if you want to maximize the effectiveness of your website, you need customization. With these 16 WordPress plugins, you’ll be on the fast track to building your business.
Marketing strategies are constantly evolving to keep up with the fast-paced digital world. Now, more than ever before, customers are able to see a comprehensive list of solutions in a matter of seconds.
As technology continues to get smarter, potential buyers are becoming even more accustomed to personalized product searches. In order to stay relevant, businesses must remain on top of the trends to make sure the internet is working to their advantage.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is not a new term to those familiar with digital marketing practices. However, SEO has become a major buzzword as these campaigns continue to rise to the forefront of marketing plans. With this increase in popularity, successful digital communications rely on an accurate understanding of SEO and best practices for campaigns.
Search Engine Optimization is the process of improving your digital resources to increase visibility and engagement through web traffic. The goal of SEO campaigns should be twofold: to grow the volume of visitors and to improve the quality of their online experience.
This works when your content is able to show search engines that it is the best answer for the topic. While all search engines are powered by different algorithms, Google has a market share of about 92%. Focusing your optimization efforts around this platform is the best place to start.
Spending money and allocating resources for marketing strategies is an investment for future growth. You want to make sure your return-on-investment (ROI) is as high as possible. By using SEO, you should start to see an uptick in web traffic from qualified leads as your site reaches your target audience.
Successful SEO campaigns are based on thoughtful and targeted keyword research, link building, and web analysis. An in depth understanding and correct implementation of fundamental SEO principles will significantly boost your ROI.
The first step to successfully implementing an SEO campaign is understanding who your target audience is. A target audience is a real group of people that could be interested in the products or services offered by your company.
Your SEO campaign should work hard to direct as many potential buyers to your site as possible. This kind of brand exposure will help increase your sales conversion rates and build out your sales pipelines with new leads.
By understanding the ideal base for your audience, you will be able to map out your SEO strategy. This will help guide your keyword search as you narrow down the most likely used terms for optimization. Tailor your online content toward this specific group of visitors to help improve your overall customer experience.
There are a few ways to determine your target prospects. Start by understanding your current client demographics. Open communication between marketing and sales teams will allow salespeople to share profiles of their customers.
Identify the questions being asked by potential buyers. Which problems does your current customer base have that are solved by your products? If you can pinpoint the topics of discussion, your content can reach similar groups facing these issues.
An organic keyword attracts free traffic through SEO, whereas pay-per-click (PPC) words are bid on through paid campaigns.
On average, there are 3.5 billion Google searches happening each day. Organic keywords can help drive traffic from those searches to your website. Using words in your content that people are actively searching for is the best place to start gaining organic traffic.
Organization is also key. Avoid dumping words onto one page, and make sure to use them throughout your site. Unique content that offers genuine information is the best way to utilize these organic keywords.
Data-driven marketing means using collected data as the main component when creating your SEO campaigns. This tactic allows your research to guide the build-out of marketing strategies for effective implementation.
Use data analysis tools to better understand the ways traffic interacts with your content. By analyzing your data, you will gain a better understanding of visitor behavior and drive more organic traffic to your site.
Developing and Implementing a Successful SEO Campaign
Now that you have the basics down, executing your SEO strategy should be easy. Try the following steps to get started.
1. Evaluate Your Current Site and Its Content
Are you using a modern website builder? If your site’s platform is up-to-date, optimization will be a much easier undertaking. SEO will not work outside of a user-friendly environment.
Audit your current SEO plan. Maybe some of your pages already have a good foundation. Don’t throw out anything that is already working.
Make sure to pinpoint the areas that need change. Focus on evaluating your current URLs and page structures.
2. Topic & Keyword Research
Before you can develop a list of keywords, you will need to create a set of topics to explore. A topic is a set of related search terms broader than your keyword list. Gather all relevant details when building out these sets.
You will want to dive deep into the research to have comprehensive knowledge of your chosen topics. Figure out the total search volume for these words, analyze the type of existing content appearing, and gauge competition levels.
3. Create Quality Content
It’s a simple step, but it may be the most important one in creating your campaign. Content needs to be authentic and relevant to your audience.
Your site should be free of technical errors. Pages should include strong titles, which is a key element in SEO.
Try to produce evergreen content. If your blog is full of pieces that are relevant to the industry, chances are you will see more engagement. This can include ‘how-to’ articles, product reviews, and videos.
Establish partnerships and create strong relationships with social influencers. Your content should provide shareable information. Earn credibility by producing pieces to share your brand’s mission with your target audience.
Use backlinks to help build confidence in your brand. This helps signal to search engines that other sites approve of your content. Earning backlinks from highly respected sites should be a desired goal.
4. Implement On-Site Optimization
Once you have content ready to go, it is important to maintain your website for SEO-friendliness. Utilize keywords in your URL slugs. Optimize the alt-text for your digital media, and be sure to incorporate long-tail keywords.
Don’t forget about technical optimization as well. Server speed, source code, and IP addresses should be evaluated for the best user experience.
Making sure your content is mobile-friendly is extremely important. To help with this, use the smallest file sizes possible for graphic content.
Create meta titles and meta descriptions that look natural while featuring keywords. Optimize the layout for user experience and search engines. Focus on fixing any accessibility issues such as any 404 redirects from Google.
5. Combine Your Campaign With Other Marketing Resources
Use personalized blasts to drive qualified traffic to your site. Test content through email, and add successful elements to your site.
While social media isn’t a direct ranking factor, you can still use it to boost your overall brand awareness. Increase engagement through social shares, find link opportunities, and have positive interactions with potential web traffic.
Thought leadership allows your brand to establish itself as a leader in the industry. 47% of C-Suite executives said they shared contact information after reading thought leadership content.
When providing this type of content, make sure it fits within your SEO plan. If potential decision makers engage with your site, it’s important to make sure they are directed to the right place.
Integrations and SEO Campaigns
Once you have a plan to roll out your SEO campaign, use integrations for smooth implementation. Leadboxer connects with email marketing tools like MailChimp to help track data from audience engagement.
This software allows you to see who is visiting your site so you can learn what they do once they land on the page. Use this information to fine-tune your content and improve the customer experience.
By tracking engagement, Leadboxer helps demonstrate which parts of your SEO campaign are working and which areas could use improvement.
To see how your business can benefit from the LeadBoxer lead generation platform and its many app integrations, sign up for your free trial today!
Your business wants to see revenue flowing in. Understandably, it makes sense that the more inbound leads you land, the more paying customers you’ll get. You devote your time and resources to gain new leads.
Lead generation is popular as 53% of marketers say half or more of their budget goes to lead generation. While over half of companies engage in new lead generation, only 35% of B2B marketers have a lead nurturing strategy.
What about your old leads? In the rush to get your brand out there in front of new prospects, they can sometimes be forgotten.
For years, marketers and salespeople have relied on outbound sales to generate new leads. Cold calling and spam emails are common outbound methods of reaching out to prospective customers.
However, people don’t like to be pestered by businesses. Today’s best leads will reach out to you through inbound marketing and sales. Inbound leads are much more likely to convert.
What are inbound leads? They are prospective customers that respond to a piece of content as part of a business’s inbound strategy. Some examples include filling out a survey, downloading an eBook, or contacting a salesperson after reading an article.
Why should you use an inbound strategy? Why is it necessary to pay attention to nurturing your old leads instead of continually generating new ones? The section below highlights statistics that may inspire you to alter your lead generation strategy.
Stats on Recapturing Old Leads
Your business needs customers to make a profit. Constantly devoting resources to generating new leads is not the best strategy. Here are some reasons why:
Companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales-ready leads at a 33% lower cost. More than 35% of B2B marketers surveyed have established a lead nurturing strategy.
Inbound leads promise more for your business than outbound ones. To fully maximize the power of inbound leads, they need nurturing. Here are some reasons lead nurturing works:
68% of B2B companies will use landing pages to nurture new sales leads for future conversion.
The leads for 49% of businesses require “long cycle” nurturing with many influencers.
Those old leads you’ve forgotten are important. It is equally important to nurture them.
Maybe you have leads that have gone cold. How do you re-engage old inbound leads? Here are some effective strategies to try:
Continuously Offer Fresh Content
New leads are drawn to your company via interesting, valuable content. However, if the content doesn’t change, they will no longer engage with your brand and will go elsewhere.
To keep people coming back to your website or storefront, you need to continuously provide fresh, interesting content. This content can be website content, new product descriptions, blog posts, webinars, white papers, vlogs, etc.
Invest in Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of the most effective lead nurturing strategies out there. They can be sent with minimal effort and costs and they are received immediately.
However, email marketing is more than sending a massive e-blast every so often. Emails spared from the spam or trash bins are those that are interesting and personal. To have a solid email marketing strategy, you need to know your customers.
Categorizing your customers based on where they are on the buyer’s journey is the best way to get conversions. Researching who each audience is along the buyer’s journey will make your emails personal and eye-catching.
Use Paid Retargeting Ads on Social Media and Google
Customers are on social media and/or browsing the internet at least once a day. While social media marketing and SEO are great lead generation strategies, they may not be enough.
Paid Google ads and social media retargeting ads only show advertisements the customer would most likely be interested in. The customer won’t be overwhelmed by irrelevant products or services. This means your offerings will only be shown to those customers most likely to make a purchase.
Send Personalized Notes Through the Mail
In this day and age, it may seem odd to send notes to customers via snail mail. Because of the rarity, personalization, and thoughtfulness of mailed notes, they are effective in warming up cold leads.
The effectiveness and feasibility of mailing notes to leads also depends on your targeted audience and your customer base size. If your ideal customers are younger and your business has thousands of customers and prospects, email is a better option.
Ask For Customer Feedback Via Surveys
In most cases, an inbound lead grows cold because it’s either been neglected, or it’s been engaged in the wrong way. Asking the potential customer to provide feedback will empower them, which sparks engagement.
Asking a cold lead to provide suggestions for marketing efforts shows you care about the customer. Online surveys via email, text, or social media are quick and cost-efficient. They can also be viewed by the customer anytime, anywhere.
To improve the likelihood of survey completion, offer the customer a ‘thank you’ gift or discount.
LeadBoxer Integrations Can Boost Your Inbound Strategy
If your company hasn’t done inbound marketing or invested in lead nurturing, getting inbound leads can be a daunting task. However, you don’t have to go it alone. LeadBoxer is a sales and marketing platform that offers numerous features and integrations to help recapture and nurture leads.
With LeadBoxer, you’ll obtain valuable insights and analytics into your customers and their behavior. Learning who they are and what types of outreach they respond to will boost your marketing strategy and generate quality, loyal leads.
LeadBoxer works with a variety of marketing and sales tools you already use. The LeadBoxer platform identifies, enriches, and provides custom lead scoring so you know you’re targeting the right people. The insights provided also help you reach out to those most promising leads.
Some of the benefits of using LeadBoxer include:
Enjoying cutting-edge, big-data technology
The ability to identify, capture, enrich, score, segment your leads and customers
The ability to combine lead and customer activity and gain valuable insights into profiles and email/website behavior
Email Marketing Integration
You can’t recapture and nurture inbound leads without a strong email marketing strategy. LeadBoxer offers a variety of integrations for the email marketing programs you currently use. These include Hubspot, Marketo, Gmail, MailChimp, Outlook, Pipedrive, and Active Demand.
LeadBoxer provides thorough email tracking that allows you to import and export data. You can gain valuable insight into your audience and their behavior.
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MailChimp Integration
MailChimp is one of the most popular email marketing programs. LeadBoxer can help you identify your audience and track their behavior on your website. This offers valuable information about what your leads do once they click through from the email to your website.
Once an inbound lead is identified, you can see their future visits to your site. By learning who visits and returns to your website and which pages they visit, you will be better equipped to nurture your leads effectively.
Through the integration of your MailChimp email marketing platform with LeadBoxer, you can:
Identify more users on your website
Learn what your audience does after they land on your website
Better understand your email marketing campaigns
Be notified when your audience is ready to make a purchase
Qualify leads based on profile data and behavior
Segment leads based on scoring algorithms
Data can be exported and synchronized to multiple programs
Data Analytics
Why are data and analytics important to your inbound marketing strategy and nurturing old leads? The short answer is that it allows you to foster relationships with leads. Your marketing activities are personalized based on each lead’s behavior and preferences.
All your customers and leads are unique individuals who respond to different messaging and strategies. When you send out generic email blasts or paid search ads, they will turn away many leads. Effective inbound marketers know that one size doesn’t fit all.
Inbound leads come to your website looking for something. They chose to do business with you over the competition. To keep them coming back, you need to nurture them.
Lead nurturing involves a relationship between your brand and each customer. When your leads feel like your business knows them and values them, they are likely to come back. Using analytics to track audiences and preferences means you can alter how you connect with each lead.
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The insight you gain from data analytics will help you market to each lead in a way that sparks their interest. Additionally, the relationship they build with your brand will encourage them to become loyal customers.
There are people out there who want your products and services. If you don’t invest in an inbound marketing strategy, you miss these qualified leads. You need to recapture old leads by nurturing them.
LeadBoxer can help you with nurturing inbound leads and take your inbound marketing strategy to the next level. Contact LeadBoxer today and start generating high-quality leads who will become loyal customers.
