How to Generate Demand and Win More Deals
Nurture, Engage, and Delight Your Customers Through Personalized Messaging and Content Recommendations
Most sales leaders would like to get a hold of new contacts as soon as they enter the pipeline, but that tactic seldom leads to more closed deals. Today’s consumers like to take their time doing their research and evaluating their options before making a final purchasing decision, and they also expect organizations to deliver the information and resources they need to get them there.
This consumer expectation requires modern marketers to move beyond batch-and-blast email to develop and deliver more targeted campaigns that speak to their consumers’ specific pain points, interests, and stages in the sales cycle. The best way to deliver the right message at the right time is to adopt the following strategies:
Segment Your Audience
If you take a close look at your contact lists, you’ll find that your leads all have different interests, pain points, work in different industries, and are probably at different stages of the sales cycle. Grouping your contacts into segments that reflect those commonalities can help you deliver more targeted and effective communication that will inspire them to engage.
Nurture Leads Through Automated Campaigns
Regardless of how long the sales cycle is, you have to stay on your leads’ radar if you want to remain an option when they’re ready to make a purchase. Automated nurturing campaigns allow you to continue to build a relationship with your prospects while directing them to valuable content and information.
If you’re used to using a basic email service provider (ESP), launching multiple campaigns might seem like a huge undertaking. A marketing automation platform, however, can eliminate most of the manual labor traditionally involved by allowing you to automate many of these processes. All you have to do is develop a campaign, choose a target segment, and your contacts will automatically get entered as they meet the specified criteria.
Deliver Personalized Content Recommendations
Content is the best way to provide your leads the information they need to learn more about your product and how you can solve their pain points. Your team should develop a variety of web pages, videos, eBooks, infographics, and other informative content pieces that your target audience can refer to as they progress through the buyer journey.
How you deliver this information depends on your target customer’s preferences and engagement history, so keep that in mind when developing your distribution strategy. A tool such as Act-On’s Website Prospector allows you to gain a sense of how specific customers interact with your website so you can identify trends in what they’re searching for and distribute your content accordingly.
Although many marketers are already familiar with the strategies listed above, the challenge in implementing them usually exists in the execution. Many of the tasks involved in delivering a personalized experience require a great amount of time and resources, especially for organizations using an ESP. Marketing automation platforms allow marketers to automate many of the processes mentioned above so they can focus their time and attention toward creating more creative and effective campaigns.