Meta: Empathetic selling, custom messaging, and value-driven solutions are central to driving lead generation in a post-covid world. Here are 5 tactics worth considering.
We’re all too familiar with the tectonic disruptions the Covid-19 pandemic dealt the business world. Some businesses saw unprecedented growth, while most barely it made through the economic reverberations that followed.
You’ve got to love human resilience, though, because teams were busy exploring innovative ways to stay afloat and attract new customers amid the disruptions.
They understood that buyer priorities and motivations had changed and embraced approaches that managed the near term and prepared for a post-crisis future.
These teams combine person-to-person communication with analytics and empathetic selling to deliver value-driven solutions to potential customers. Let’s explore several innovative lead gen strategies that will likely take centre stage.
- Account-Based Marketing (ABM)
With ABM, brands target select accounts that according to data represent considerable growth opportunities should they receive customized support.
Even though lead generation is your goal, ABM delivers a holistic view of key accounts, allowing you to target both existing and potential customers.
For existing customers, cross-selling or upselling will allow you to deliver more value while growing your revenue. And with new accounts, you’ll be closing deals.
While putting together your ABM strategy, you’ll need to consider the specific attributes of these accounts to ensure every campaign, every touchpoint is befittingly personalised.
It’s the best way to spark interest and encourage engagement.
Best practices include:
- Formalise the selection process. Strategic selection of key accounts will require an in-depth understanding of these accounts and their conversion/growth potential. You go further than demographics to uncover their business objectives, major steps that precede buying, and life cycle.
- Coordinate your teams. Traditionally, marketing-led outreaches stop when target accounts become sales-ready and sales teams now take over to close. With ABM, marketers and sales reps collaborate all the way to ensure successful and unfragmented account engagement.
- Consider an account-based salesforce approach. Each team member is assigned an account and they drive the campaigns, interactions, and progression along the funnel. Only the rep in charge of an account can update its details in the system minimising tampering or unwarranted communication with the prospects.
- Work on your tech stack. With the right software stack, you can assess the account selection process and engagement and make adjustments as necessary. Since most teams already have a Martech stack, you can add other tools along the way to address the individual steps in the process. Alternatively, you can go for the end-to-end ABM platform as it encompasses all functions in the ABM strategy.
- Consider Marketing Analytics
Determining ROI from marketing efforts, identifying which campaigns worked, uncovering potential improvements, and forecasting are key factors in lead generation.
The best way to measure them so you know what’s working, what’s not working, and the why is by analysing data. Through tools like Google Analytics, BuzzSumo, Buffer, Cyfe, HubSpot, Klipfolio, and SendPulse you can quantify your marketing efforts.
Some tools evaluate all marketing data while others focus on specific channels like social media, email marketing, or ads. It depends on your needs.
Top benefits include:
- Learning what happened. Treading the murky waters of post-COVID 19 was tough and marketers resorted to all kinds of tactics to get business back up. Through analytics, you can review these efforts and their impact to gauge their worthiness.
- Understanding what is happening now. Assessing marketing efforts in real-time allows you to pick up mistakes and pivot quickly or make adjustments. You’ll also pick up high-value prospects or those with higher purchase propensity and focus on them.
- Predicting what might happen. Predictive analytics allow you to anticipate consumer behaviour and prepare for it. You can use the information to adjust offerings or come up with novel solutions to help you access new customers and tap into new markets.
- Cold Calling
The lockdown in many ways humanised us. Today we appreciate being able to move freely, interact freely, and have real conversations with real humans all the more.
If you want to initiate relationships with potential customers, away from search engine ads and other remote tactics, then cold calling is it. It’s an exclusive opportunity to engage real people with the tone of your voice and introduce them to your offerings.
Best practices include:
- Set goals. Look at your cold calling metrics. How many calls do you need to make daily, weekly, and monthly to make your quota? What approach will you use to make your calls productive?
- Prepare. Thorough knowledge of your offerings and industry is a must lest the prospect baffles you with counter-questions. Gather intelligence about your prospect and their industry that you can leverage (not manipulate) during negotiations.
- Be script-smart. Jot down the purpose of the call, how to bypass the gatekeeper, and introduce yourself to the decision-maker. Use open-ended questions to discern their needs, share your value proposition, work with their objections, and go for your goal.
- Respect the prospect. Regardless of how the call unfolds, avoid turning aggressive or cursing the prospect. No matter how awesome your solutions are, don’t drag out conversations, keep your pitch concise and be kind.
- Infographics
Today’s audiences will hardly part with their contact info unless they believe the information you’re sharing is valuable. Communicating your knowledge of consumer needs and solutions through infographics is a non-aggressive way of reaching out to prospects.
Compared to long-form content, they are snackable and visually appealing, meaning people can go through them quickly and derive value.
As your audiences consume the infographics, they perceive your technical expertise, which builds trust and encourages them to engage your brand. These audiences will be comfortable sharing their contact since they believe you have more to offer.
Top considerations include:
- Address pain points. Use surveys, original research, information from relevant online forums, and feedback from customer-facing teams to determine consumer pain points. Create truthful infographics that address these issues and impart useful solutions for them.
- Use infographics to supplement your long-form content. Do you have an ebook out? Perhaps an industry study? An infographic that appealingly summarizes the content may help drive traffic to your ebook or study and generate leads.
- Craft compelling titles. Negative superlatives like mistakes or warnings and titles that include data or numbers are popular with audiences. Keep your titles concise and highly specific so audiences know what to expect from the infographic.
- Use a simple design. An uncluttered design along with the proper layout that allows your information to flow easily is preferable. You want to capture attention and keep the audience engaged, not lose them to poor navigation.
- Q&A Forums & Online Communities
We are naturally social and gravitate towards those who share our values, beliefs, passions, and interests.
So it’s no wonder that many people join online communities to follow critical issues or maintain touch with thought leaders. Here, they feel empowered to raise issues, ask questions and answer questions.
For the marketer, industry-relevant online communities and forums are an excellent opportunity to observe conversations around issues and provide expert advice.
You can command industry authority by consistently sharing in-depth and accurate information. Not to mention gain access to a pool of user-inspired content for your content marketing strategy.
Unwritten rules of conduct include:
- Be helpful. Respond to queries with relevant, in-the-moment knowledge audiences can appreciate and without expecting recognition or praise. People can smell a self-seeker a mile away and you don’t want to be that person.
- Read pinned posts before starting conversations or sharing answers. The permanently pinned posts provide engagement guidelines that you’ll want to follow lest you find yourself kicked out. Avoid redundancies by scanning existing conversations to ensure you don’t bring up topics that have already been covered.
- Be professional. Adopt a polite and professional tone even when your audience post snarky comments. Your posts speak volumes about your brand and you never know who is following your comments. A condescending tone can put off potential customers.
