Can you say that you’re selling your products/services efficiently?
You may have developed fantastic products/services, but unless you’re selling them efficiently, the revenues coming in will remain limited.
You’ll need a plan to generate buzz around your brand and solutions. The kind of buzz that pulls in high-quality leads with the capacity to buy. Once these leads are in, your team can nurture them into paying customers.
To that end, let’s explore five lead gen tactics that may help improve your conversions.
1. Start with Market Segmentation
Marketers that target all their audiences with the same messages show how out of touch they are with customers’ needs.
With market segmentation, you focus on identifying common characteristics among your audience—needs and behaviors to help you connect with them at a granular level.
There are different ways to segment audiences, including:
There are various ways you can segment your audience depending on your budget, the data available, and your capability.
The most common segmentation types include:
- Firmographics segmentation. Industry, size, and location are some of the firmographic data you can collect. The data rarely changes, and you can combine it with your ideal customer profiles for a better understanding of the customers you can serve.
- Needs-based segmentation. Here, you focus on buying motivations. Are the prospects budget-conscious? Productivity-focused, perhaps? This segmentation type allows you to develop campaigns that address their specific motivations rather than lumping them into just SMEs.
- Behavior-based segmentation. The data you look at here revolves around how prospects act to learn what they want. It looks at the content they consume, interactions with your products/services, the channels they visit you through, and the tech they use.
2. Optimize Your Landing Pages
Landing pages exist to do three things.
To provide quick overviews of your solutions, showcase how the prospective customers stand to benefit should they buy, and nudge them into action.
To build conversion-optimized landing pages, consider the following:
- One campaign, one landing page. Can you imagine the confusion visitors experience when they click on an ad only to find themselves faced with multiple offers touching on different things? They will probably leave because no one wants to deal with complicated experiences.
- Keep the message clear. Visitors should understand the main message at first glance. Use persuasive copy to communicate potential benefits, instill some fear of missing out, and apply a little buying pressure to inspire action.
- Test your CTAs. Coming up with compelling CTAs is mostly easier said than accomplished. Test with different phrases, colors, positioning, size, and color to pick up those that convert.
- Add social proof. A trustworthy background can help allay doubts about your business. Reviews, testimonials, certifications, or awards show you’re reliable. They say others have tested you and found you worthy.
3. Cold Calling
You’ll find lots of barraging comments about cold calling.
But here’s the thing—Fortune 500 firms, high-growth startups, and other businesses have sales reps making cold calls a day in, day out. And they are receiving major gains from it.
Why?
Because companies are consistently seeking solutions that will help reduce overheads, boost revenues, and keep operations optimal.
If you can meet these concerns, there’s no reason you shouldn’t hire a sales rep to make this cold outreach.
Here are tips to help nail cold calling:
- Prepare. What do you know about the company you’re about to call? Are there trigger events you can leverage? How well do you know the solutions and options you can avail to the prospect? Do you believe in your solutions’ capabilities?
- Avoid pitching prematurely. Many reps start conversations with questions and then launch their pitch without paying mind to what the prospect actually wants or its relevance. You’re throwing darts aimlessly and will likely get shut down or hung up on.
- Work with a script. Winging it may not be the best use of your time or the prospect. Developing a script allows you to organize your message, from your opener to the value proposition and close. It also shortens the conversation time, showing respect for the listener’s time.
- Learn to recover from bad sales calls. Rejections and nasty prospects can deflate your enthusiasm. While there are no guarantees that you won’t encounter them, take a minute to do or listen to something uplifting, then get back to calling.
4. Influencer Marketing
Many B2B buyers often times seek suggestions and expert opinions from industry colleagues and influencers before settling for a vendor or business solutions.
These industry influencers are people of great repute that share expert and unbiased opinions with their audience.
It tells you that if you’re the only one pushing your brand forward, you’ll need to expend a lot of effort to get noticed. Partnering with an influencer may help enhance your credibility and broaden your reach.
Best practices include:
- Find good-fit influencers. Rather than a clout-chasing influencer, go for one who understands your industry and whom your staff and target customers admire. They are more likely to resonate with your brand, offerings, and customers.
- Know your buyers. Are they younger clientele or older and more conservative types? What sites do they frequent? How do they consume content? What are their primary concerns? Figuring this out will enable you to identify an ideal influencer.
- Collaborate with your influencer. Avoid persuading the influencer to say exactly what you want because that only makes them stooges for your brand. Industry influencers are professionals. Discuss your objectives with them and give them the space to approach the subject their way.
- Measure outcomes and adjust as needed. Set benchmarks that allow you to track tangible and non-tangible outcomes. The information can fine-tune future campaigns.
5. Use Live Chat
Unlike conventional meetings that you arrange in advance, people jump on the internet any time of day or night, and they expect support 24/7.
Adopting live chat backs up your efforts by ensuring your business is available round the clock to assist visitors and encourage them to act.
How do you make this rich media tool work for you?
- Don’t skimp on security. People are increasingly concerned about data protection. You’ll need to reassure site visitors that their data is safe and private in your care. Then ensure that it stays that way.
- Train your staff. Product knowledge and software navigation training is crucial for all support staff because people using live chat want answers immediately. If your staff appears unsure, the visitor will leave.
- Mine data to improve performance. Integrating live chat with CRMs ensures visitor data and interactions are transferred automatically for analysis. You can also ask the visitor about their experience, content relevance, and whether their pain points were handled adequately before the session ends.
- Monitor your live chat often. Test its functionality and whether integration is running smoothly to determine if changes or improvements are needed.
