Lead generation is the lifeblood of business growth. By implementing an effective strategy, your business can better attract, nurture, and convert high-quality leads into loyal customers.
That said, these outcomes require careful consideration and planning to be realised. Campaign content should be carefully crafted to resonate with archetypes common among your current customers, and technology should be applied thoughtfully to grow initiatives at scale.
So, before even considering sending an email, channel businesses need to take a step back and agree a proposition that elevates the products and services offered, understand the target audience it will resonate with, and speak to them personally to stand the best chance of turning prospects into leads.
Elevating propositions
Your proposition should communicate how the prospect will benefit from your services and solve their business challenges… easy right?
Before you start letting the world know about your proposition though, it’s worth taking the time to list out all those benefits to determine which ones are most applicable given current market trends and the challenges that are most apparent in everyday life.
From there, you can start developing your proposition to focus on those key benefits, possibly even creating an elevator pitch. And, given that service levels provided to your customers is such an integral part of the decision-making process for your leads, it’s also worth integrating product and service into a single proposition.
That should be one that succinctly summarises why leads should buy from you, rather than your competitors, helping to differentiate you from the rest.
For example, environmentally-friendly solutions are high on the agenda for many businesses at the moment. By weaving in those factors – especially if you can include quantitative metrics such as the average impact on carbon footprint, or the equivalent number of cars taken off the road – you’ll make it far easier for leads to buy-in to your offerings!
It’s also worth considering how different aspects of your proposition may appeal to different roles in your lead’s business. This is where buyer personas can help delineate your customer base into multiple archetypal cohorts.
Understanding your target audience
Whether you’re considering your leads as single entities, or groups of decision-makers with their own goals and challenges, buyer personas will help you match prospects to a particular persona that characterises the business challenge. Challenges could include digital transformation, improving security or reliability, or maximising operational agility.
Once those personas have been agreed upon, campaign content can better focus on those challenges. This helps prospects align their challenges with the value proposition of the solutions promoted. In turn, this approach maximises conversion.
It’s important to note that lead nurturing is highly dependent on the frequency and personalisation of the content delivered through the campaign. Keeping your brand in the prospect’s mind, and speaking to them as people, rather than leads, cannot be understated!
Engaging prospects personally
No one wants to be considered as a walking wallet, so make sure recipients are addressed individually and that content speaks to their specific challenges. Again, accurate and detailed buyer personas can really help to delineate content that should go to a CFO versus a CTO, for example.
But teams don’t have the time to keep on top of every prospect’s stage of the sales journey, or rewrite every email to specific people and challenges, and send out timely content! Thankfully, automation powered by your CRM can significantly reduce the resources needed to deliver engaging, proactive messaging to maximise brand and product awareness.
Campaign content could also leverage engaging, challenge-specific calls to action (CTAs) to instil a fear of missing out if readers don’t click through an email, or book a demo!
Turning prospects into qualified leads
At this stage in the sales journey, lead scoring within a business’ CRM can create an overall score. Various actions such as liking social media posts, reading blogs, or engaging with emails are all linked together. The more positive actions a prospect shows, the higher their score becomes. This can really make the difference.
Once your prospect’s core hits a specific threshold that you decide (based on previous prospect behaviour), you’ll be confident that the prospect is far enough down the sales funnel to be considered a genuine lead, and more sales-focused conversations can be initiated.
All considered, this approach ensures minimal lead drop-off, maximising conversion rates while optimising the entire journey. The sales journey can become more low touch through automation, helping your team focus on more nuanced aspects of lead generation and sales such as relationship building.
By reducing the amount of resource required to promote your products and generate leads, you can grow your channel business to market at scale. If you get this right, you will be handing qualified leads from marketing to sales, without losing the personal touch that maximises brand loyalty and future upsell opportunities!
This article appeared in our September 2023 print issue. You can read the magazine in full here.