How to turn prospects into customers in an effective way: it’s been the holy grail of sales since the first business opened its doors. Let’s say you have a list of email addresses, for example. It’s tempting to simply send out an email blast. However, email blasts need support to be effective. It’s never as easy as it seems.
The key is to create a process for approaching and communicating with prospects. By developing an overall strategy that is intuitive and repeatable, your sales team can be taught how to do their part to make the process successful. Let’s say that prospects attend an event at which you have a presence. You begin your process by geofencing digital ads to be displayed on anyone’s phone who is in the area. These ads continue for 30 days. In the meantime, you send an email blast to all prospects and reference the event and the digital ads. Shortly thereafter, your sales team makes follow-up phone calls. That is a very rough draft of a process, but it gives you an idea of how a strategically planned out system can help your sales communication build momentum.
The total, you see, is more than the sum of its parts.
That first step – building awareness – is critically important to the success of your subsequent tactics. In fact, research shows that on average someone needs to see your brand 5 to 7 times before they’ll remember it!* Not convinced? What about 71% of people saying that it is important they recognize a brand before they make a purchase?**
If you don’t have a trade show to geotarget, LinkedIn advertising is another powerful way of building your B2B brand awareness. This tactic has you upload your contact email list (up to 300,000 emails) so that LinkedIn can match them to usernames. Once at least 300 LinkedIn users are identified, the service starts serving digital ads to those prospects via their LinkedIn feed. LinkedIn even allows you to connect your CRM platform so you can advertise to prospects based on where they are in your sales funnel.
By strategically combining your tactics into a process, they all become more effective thanks to the cumulative equity you are building in your brand. Just be sure that everyone on your team uses it the same way, with every prospect, every time.
Don’t know where to start? Contact Anchor Marketing today.
*https://www.pammarketingnut.com/2014/05/personal-branding-strategy-social-media-marketing-white-paper/ (Pam Moore)
**https://www.globalbankingandfinance.com/71-of-consumers-more-likely-to-buy-a-product-or-service-from-a-name-they-recognise/