As marketing professionals we all know that our job is to generate leads and nurture opportunities for business growth.
In today’s market place the difference is there are now additional challenges and barriers to overcome as well as the pressure to succeed. With digital marketing and the technology supporting it advancing at a faster rate than marketers can develop their skills it’s becoming increasingly difficult to keep up.
A recent survey conducted by Smart Insights found that 60% of a marketer’s time is spent on digital marketing. And, marketers are finding that converting leads into customers is a big challenge, along with delivering effective lead nurturing campaigns.
Our 4 Tips for marketers are:
Create High Quality Content
Good, relevant content delivered to the right people at the right time is a key factor in lead generation and customer nurturing. Content marketing has grown in popularity in recent years so it’s worth spending the time to overhaul your web content and write blog posts that are informative and increase awareness, rather than sell.
Build a High Quality Database
Use a CRM or bespoke database to capture accurate information about your prospects and customers – include all individuals in the decision making unit (DMU). Buyers in the DMU may not have much involvement in the initial research phase but will need to be marketed to, to create awareness. Having an accurate database and contact details of decision makers and influencers is essential to support effective marketing delivery.
Apply Personalisation
Get to know your market segments, talk to them as individuals. Personalisation is about understanding the buying persona of your customers. It’s important to segment your data and apply a persona to a group of people that display similar buying patterns of behaviour.
Utilise Technology
The good news is there is lots of marketing technology out there to help you develop more effective marketing campaigns. Marketing automation technology is helping businesses deliver personalised, multi-channel lead nurturing campaigns. Essentially it tracks prospect interactions across multi-channel marketing campaigns and scores prospects based on their profile and behaviour.
By using behaviour based scoring sales teams can follow up on the highest quality leads, which are more likely to convert.
This article was written by Karen Harding, the Marketing Manager at Objective IT. Objective creates web portals, cross-platform websites and mobile apps for businesses in and around Essex.
