“Sales want’s more and better-qualified leads” is often the core problem marketing teams face. This challenge is typically the result of bad positioning, lacking creative or misdirected spend. Solving these problems requires rethinking your funnel and identifying the people, process and technology breakdowns. Before attempting to solve this mammoth task here are some quick fundamental fixes –
1) Leverage Your Teams Networking Power
Likely you have a couple staff that really work the web for what it is worth socially. The remaining portion of your team does not see what is in it for them. Shortcut this problem by having your staff spend 20 minutes every morning on sharing and engaging with others on their professional accounts. The more you can leverage your staff to talk about your brand the more reach it will have. This is beneficial for SEO, brand awareness and perhaps most importantly for your staff to create connections with future clients.
2) Comment and Participate in Forums
There is literally no cheaper and more efficient way to build your brand than to make it public. Talking about issues you are facing and helping out others is a great way to build your brands name digitally. It also has massive benefits if you care about your brand showing up in search results.
3) Pay for Publication
When you have something worth celebrating make sure to share it with the world. Either have a profession content marketing organization or a member of your team regularly do a write up about updates in offerings, new hires, new directions and the overall all experience of your team. These articles, typically 300 words and under, can be published on PR sites across the web for low rates and are a great way to share your brand while building backlinks and buzz.
4) Write Shareable Content
Not much one can say about educational content and the importance of it in marketing. Writing in-depth content on topics is a great way to build buzz and get more traffic. Content-rich branding is a must. How you do it is up to you -whether you choose to create a free download that entices people to share their email address or simply show off your brands authority on a topic.
5) Close The Loop
Perhaps the most important way to get more leads is to stop wasting the ones you have. Whether you close a deal or not a
6) Develop Your List
Prior to the internet a company was only as good as it’s calling list. Today a company is only as good as the customers who are actually willing to hear from them. Everyone has access to any number of customer lists. Just because you can talk to a customer doesn’t mean they want to hear from you. Winning companies slowly build their list and consistently deliver value so that their customers stay onboard over time. This means delivering the perfect mix of value and requests. This means giving as much as you take. This means respecting that you are not the center of the customers world. This means treating a customer the way you would treat a friend.
7) Reduce your response time by creating automated replies
Automation obviously has it’s up and downsides. Make sure to use it to help not hinder customers. For instance if a customer asks for pricing automatically send it to them. Now that you have given them what they want follow up and have a conversation. It obviously has, and can, be argued that you should hold back key information until you are in rapport with customers. While I agree I really believe that walled gardens are only as good as their facade. That is to say if you hold back information customer are likely to suspect the worst unless your marketing can really paint a picture without giving details.
8) Create a Content Calendar and Strategy
Nothing is worse than waking up every day and trying to figure out what you should write or how you should go about creating your next post or tweet. Wouldn’t it be great if you could hop into a word document and grab a ready-made template for an
