Make your website your company's first sales tool
We often think of sales teams prospecting the hard way: the sales rep knocking on doors, the telemarketer bumping into secretarial roadblocks. Today, digital technology offers new ways of doing things and reinvents prospecting methods.
Switch to inbound marketing
Marketing has evolved
Over-soliciting has made recipients weary. Over-solicited, they have put in place strategies to protect themselves. As a result, traditional approaches to prospecting, such as phoning, are achieving much lower results than they did five years ago. It's time to change the method, and the new uses of digital technology make this possible. It's time for inbound marketing.
Inbound reverses the trend
How do you get prospects to come to you? That's the principle behind inbound marketing. It can be based on different media:
- your website
- your blog
- your newsletters
- your social networks
- your various content: white papers, case studies, success stories, etc.
These are all ways of "turning up the heat on your prospects". This is known as lead nurturing.
The sinews of war: content
Identifying your audience
It's all about providing your prospects with quality content. In this way, you legitimise your expertise while keeping in touch. This is a content marketing strategy. The aim is to target your content more effectively. You need to understand your audience's issues, so that you can send them a message that speaks to them:
- a customer case similar to their own
- a problem specific to their sector
- a topical issue that they are also facing...
Listen carefully
Prospects change. If they're not "ripe" for the product you're offering today, they may be in a month, three months or a year's time... How can you tell? By listening to them. And to do that, your content can give you a lot of clues:
- What articles on your blog has the prospect read?
- How often did they visit your site?
- What links did they click on?
- When did they download your white paper?
These are all signals that can be used to gauge their degree of maturity within your conversion tunnel. Lead management solutions like Plezi provide you with this analysis. With this information transmitted to your sales team, they can take actions that are better adapted to the expectations they have identified.
Create your standard scenarios
What you need to decide is how much marketing pressure you want to apply. How often should you distribute content? And how should it be organised? It's important to create standard scenarios for yourself. These are pathways distinguished by different variables. Let's say the person has visited the site once, you can plan to offer them the option of subscribing to the newsletter. Once the newsletter has been sent, if it has been opened and read, you can plan to send a contact email. By systematising the steps, you save time and are able to deal with a greater number of leads in a personalised way. This is marketing automation.
How do you go about it? Here's how it works
Real-time lead scoring
How can you make sure you don't make any mistakes: duplicates or inappropriate mailings? Marketing automation platforms take care of this for you. They are updated in real time. Plezi, for example, updates continuously.
Has the user returned to the site? Visited other pages? Published a new blog post? Downloaded a white paper? etc. The online application integrates all this information as it comes in. A scoring logic is applied: depending on certain signals, actions are triggered.
The application even goes so far as to customise newsletters by selecting articles that have not been read, or those that better match the profile or interests of the recipient.
It's all about the approach
It's not about having the tool, it's about knowing how to use it. So the added value of the publisher will be in the support provided. Many solutions are limited to toolkits, when the interest and spirit of the approach should be at the heart of the process. Plezi is more in line with this approach. The solution is easy to learn and use, making it easier to focus on the operational side of things, so that you can concentrate on the content you are proposing. Managing the inbound marketing chain from A to Z, it helps you to develop and structure your content efficiently.
The content strategy will be your best ally. Rather than chasing cold leads, opt for inbound marketing and warm up your contacts with qualified content. Your website, blog, newsletters and social networks can all be used to enhance the quality of your conversion tunnel.
Article translated from French