The Inbound sales methodology of Attract, Convert, Close and Delight is a brilliant methodology to help you keep those best-fit customers coming to your business for help. But it is missing something key in its titular phases – because if you’re just targeting businesses without understanding who they are, what drives them and where your market is currently, you could be concentrating your efforts in the wrong place.
Fully understanding your ideal target audience is the most important part of any marketing activity and stops you from missing out on your best-fit customers. Sometimes the smaller, more granular details can have the biggest impact, so it’s worth spending time to concentrate on each individual phase of this buyer journey — including truly understanding your ideal customers’ unique concerns and needs.
So what small actions can you take today to improve your overall lead generation?
1. Understand
‘Understand’ is the research stage of lead generation. Because in order to effectively market to your ideal customers, you need to do some research to understand who they are, what their current pain points are, and how best to help them.
This is perhaps more important than ever given the unusual and rapid shifts in the market we’ve been seeing over the course of the pandemic. What was important to your target customers and market three months ago may no longer be relevant.
To keep up with what’s going on in your market, you need to dedicate time to get this all figured out and avoid potential misses. However, time may not be something you have a lot of right now, so you may need a helping hand.
Here are some examples of smaller services you can outsource to understand your target market and identify unique drivers:
- Delving deep into your buyer persona(s) to find out what keywords they are currently looking for and what messaging they respond to.
- Learning about the current state of your target market – who is buying right now? What businesses are experiencing growth?
- Auditing your current target data
- Interview your ex-prospects and current customers to gain more knowledge about why they did or didn’t buy from you and possibly uncover re-engagement opportunities
- A SWOT analysis document for your top competitor(s) to identify improvements and gaps in the market to see what can set you apart from the rest.
2. Engage
‘Engage’ is the Inbound Marketing stage of lead generation. Inbound marketing helps you attract highly targeted customers with valuable content and experiences tailored to them. After all, why go chasing when you can encourage them to come to you?
Imagine if you could be a part of a buyer’s decision-making stage while they’re searching for answers to their problems. It’s all about sharing educational content in the right place at the right time through blog posts, social media, search engines and webinars to make your business credible and easier for them to find.
‘Engage’ services are designed to help you attract qualified prospects with the right topics, convert your prospects into leads, nurture them into loyal customers, and grow your business.
Some examples of services you can outsource to attract your ideal customers:
- Writing blog articles tailored to a recommended industry/service topic to increase website traffic, give your site an SEO boost, convert traffic into leads and establish your thought-leadership and authority in your target industry.
- Creating pillar content such as an e-book or template offer tailored to a recommended industry/service topic to help you gain the emails of legitimately-interested prospects to market to.
- Social posting and social profile management. For example, connecting to your ideal customers through LinkedIn and posting helpful, relevant content for them.
- Retargeting ads to nudge visitors who have been on your website previously but haven’t yet made a purchase.
- SEO optimisation so you get found in search engines better.
- Enticing landing page templates to help you increase the conversion rate of your website.
- Workflows to automate your sales and marketing, both for internal processes and external lead nurturing.
- Webinar support
- PPC for google ads
- Chatbox setup and managing website enquiries that come through it to increase conversions and provide excellent customer service to those in a hurry.
- Highly relevant marketing emails.
3. Convert
Convert’ is where you (yep, you guessed it) convert your prospects into qualified leads and turn them into loyal customers. Converting isn’t just about closing every conversation but building up a solid pipeline through practical questioning and intelligent sales conversations.
These ‘convert’ services not only uncover immediate opportunities for you but will also make sure you have a healthy pipeline with a steady stream of high-quality sales opportunities.
Here are some examples of services you can outsource to convert more leads into high-quality sales:
- Carefully selected telephone follow-ups and qualifications to set appointments
- One-to-one emails and templates
- Sales funnel implementation
- Pipeline management, both manual and automated
- Social selling by using LinkedIn as a tool to warm up leads for your business.
Conclusion
Sometimes lead generation isn’t about tackling everything at once, but honing in on the granular details that make up the bigger picture; the small improvements with a big impact. Maybe you just need to understand your target audience better, or just need help attracting your target audience. Or perhaps you just need a hand identifying truly qualified leads and closing sales.
Whether you need just one of these services or a combination of each, Shortlist can help you smash your lead generation goals through our methodology of Understand, Engage, and Convert.
Our goal is to help tech b2bs smash their targets through market and persona research, data auditing and building, inbound content, HubSpot implementation, email marketing, and lead generation services.
Take a look at our pricing guide below to see some examples of typical services we do for our clients.
