From Stranger To Customer By Jonathan Pavoni, Creatrix Marketing
Introduction As B2B marketers, our job is to be building a remarkable brand that our customers connect and engage with. Simultaneously, we must be delivering a perpetual stream of high quality leads to sales. This is a tall order for any marketing executive. So the question becomes, how do you accomplish both these goals and consistently move prospects from a complete stranger to a delighted customer? The ebook From Stranger to Customer will explore your prospect s road to becoming a client. It will unpack how to attract visitors to your company, how to build credibility and trust with them, and finally, how to convert them to delighted customer. So sit back and enjoy a fun, informational read that will help you better understand your buyer s journey. Praise for Stranger to Customer
The World Changed Almost every prospect starts out as a complete stranger to your business. As marketers, we need to find a way to communicate with these prospects on their terms, their time line, and about topics that are of interest to them. For these three items to be accomplished effectively, we need to shift our marketing mindset from focusing on our companies to focusing on our prospect s problems, needs and concerns. This might sound like a subtle variation in thinking. However, the implications for our marketing strategies and tactics are monumental. From a practical standpoint, the world has changed. Society is getting smarter, and the old tactics of paying for attention through cold calls, direct mail, television commercials and telemarketing are now over. The companies that are still operating under this mindset are losing. These methods are highly expensive, are company centric, and are being tuned out by consumers. I think about the way that I consume media these days. Instead of watching TV, I watch Netflix with no commercials; instead of listening to the radio, I listen to Pandora One (again, no commercials). These new technologies are forcing marketers to shift the way they present their products and services to the marketplace. The paradoxical part of this story is that consumers are simultaneously searching and consuming more information than ever before. They are constantly searching Google for information, they are browsing Facebook to connect with friends and family, and they are reading their favorite blogs to keep up on industry news. This new world dictates a new marketing mindset, which we will explore in chapter two.
Marketing 2.0 With the changing consumer behavior brought on by rapid technology advances, marketers must adjust their strategies and tactics. The new marketing holy grail is educational content, promoted through well thought out digital distribution channels, such as select social media networks, search engines and targeted industry blogs. Marketing is more about teaching than it is about promoting. This is probably most self-evident by watching videos go viral on YouTube. A company or an individual may post a video, and within 24 hours, it has been seen by over one million people. This example should exemplify the fact that if we can get the story right, our audience will promote our content for us. So thematically, what does this mean for marketers working in today s business to business environment? As a B2B marketing executive, you need to be shifting resources away from these old world marketing tactics. Instead, reallocate your staff s time, your company s money and your effort to building out educational resources that will add value to your prospects. Additionally, it is tempting to write content with your company s product pitch weaved through every chapter and verse of the document. Don t write content like this; savvy consumers will see this for what it is an elaborate product pitch masquerading as an industry resource. This inauthentic content will actually do more harm than good for your company. So if you do decide to write industry resources for your prospects, make sure that it is just that, without any ulterior motive.
Build A Profile So with the deep understanding of the environment that we are now working in, how do we go about attracting prospects to our business and enticing them with our new products? The first and most important part of attracting new prospects to your business is getting a foundational understanding of who they are, both as business people and as individuals outside of work. The more thorough understanding that you have of your buyer, the better you are going to be able to market to them. Start by understanding their basic demographic information: age, gender, education, geographic area, income and marital status. Then move on to researching how they consume information: newspapers, magazines, search engines, blogs, or social media platforms. From there, try to understand the problems that they are trying to address and fix in their work roles. Once you have gathered this information, build a buyer profile and make it as realistic as possible. Here s a short example of how this works: Ed is an IT manager at a cloud-based software company serving the manufacturing industry. Ed manages six team members that work in areas such as desktop support and application engineering. Ed s main professional concerns are application security and uptime and employee satisfaction with his team s hardware and software maintenance. Ed is 47 years old, he is married with two children, and he lives in the suburbs. Ed uses social media, specifically Facebook, to keep up with friends and family, and Linkedin for professional networking and industry updates. Finally, Ed consumes industry news from IT blogs and magazines like Wired and Smart Computing.
Target Keywords Once you have the buyer profile completely developed, you should develop keywords and key-phrases around topics that your buyer would be interested in. These keywords will help guide the premium content that you create, the blogs you write, and the way you optimize your website and landing pages. Holistically, putting together a robust buyer profile will help guide every marketing decision that you make, such as what social networks on which you maintain an active presence, what messages resonate with your prospect, and finally, what problems need to be addressed in your content.
Develop Cornerstone Content Now that you have a deep understanding of your target buyer and his/her concerns, you are in a great position to start developing campaigns that your prospect will find valuable and shareable. Think of your campaign as a collection of content that is shared across your blog, your social profiles, and with your email database. All of this content is pointing back to a cornerstone content offer. So at this point, you might be asking yourself: what is cornerstone content? It is a piece of original content that your company develops that is focused in on a specific pain point that your prospect is trying to overcome. By starting with cornerstone content, you ensure that all your marketing campaign efforts are focused around one specific piece of content. You can then build ancillary resources around your cornerstone content to promote and accessorize it. For example, if your cornerstone content offer was a Five Checklist Items Every B2B Marketer Should Know About Facebook Marketing ebook, you could promote it by blogging about Facebook marketing with an offer at the end of the blog post to promote the ebook. You could post the ebook to Facebook and other social networks. Finally, you could email it out to the appropriate contacts in your email database.
Cornerstone Content Ideas Finally, if you are having a hard time thinking about how to develop cornerstone content, a great treasure trove of content ideas are your customer support team and your sales team. Sit down with your customer support team and ask questions about customer issues that are arising. Then speak with your sales folks to mine information around prospect concerns. This real-time industry information should give you plenty of content production ideas for your next e-book.
Promote Your Content Once you have developed a library of cornerstone content such as case studies, videos, ebooks, and white papers, you are ready to start promoting your content. The holy trinity of inbound marketing promotion is comprised of blogging, social media promotion, and search engine marketing. These three content distribution channels are vital because they are inexpensive, prospect focused, and highly relevant. In addition to the above mentioned benefits, by providing excellent content, you are building thought leadership, credibility and trust with your prospect base. This activity, while not directly correlated to lead generation, will help you establish mind share with the prospect. Now let s jump into each promotional strategy to better understand the value that it brings to your marketing tool set:
Social Media Promotion The most important item to keep in mind with social promotion is to be where your audience is. With the explosion of social media sites, it can be very overwhelming to try and post unique, relevant, timely and engaging content to every single network. So research where you prospects are spending their time and be on those and only those networks. Once you determine the networks that your audience is using, make sure that you are posting original content to each network. You don t want to post the same content to Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter and Pinterest. Tailor your content to each specific network; this will give your prospects an incentive to follow you on each social platform. Additionally, keep in mind the general purposes of each network. For example, Facebook is more personal, a place where individuals go to keep up with family and friends, look at pictures, and watch funny videos. Linkedin is where people are going to network, look for new jobs, connect with colleagues and read up on industry news and updates. Let these overarching themes influence the content that you publish to these networks.
Blog Daily Blogging is where you will build your audience, enhance your search engine optimization rank, and deliver educational value to your prospects. By consistently blogging around industry topics and issues, you will solidify your position as a thought leader in your industry. Furthermore, you should also be constantly looking for areas in which you can guest blog on well read industry websites. For example, I blog three times a week on my own website. However, once a month, I make it a priority to blog for an industry leader in the marketing space. This has been a great source of lead generation for my company, as well as a great way for me to build credibility and thought leadership within my space. Seek out the well read blogs in your industry and request an opportunity to guest blog for them. Finally, guest blogging will also help you build valuable inbound links to your website. These links will help you boost your SEO rank, resulting in an increase in visitor traffic to your site.
Search Engine Optimization Search engine marketing is one of the most effective ways to promote your products and services online. Studies have shown that 90 percent of all Internet browsing sessions begin with a popular search engine like Google, Yahoo, or Bing. This provides a very unique opportunity for marketers who understand how to optimize and structure their website so that it is easy for visitors to understand and easy for browsers to crawl. It is essential for B2B marketers to build website pages and landing pages that are optimized for these searches. This means putting keywords in the page title, the header tags, the website URL, the image alt tags, and most importantly, in naturally occurring spaces throughout the body copy of the page. This tactic will make sure that your page clearly articulates to both the user and the search engine the goal and purpose of the page. Finally, make sure that each website page is optimized for one keyword or key phrase. If your page covers too many topics, it will be unclear to the search engine what the purpose of the page is, which will result in a lower rank.
Convert Lead Pipeline Now that you have created a library of cornerstone content and thoughtfully built out a distribution network to get it into the hands of the right prospects, you need to convert these interested visitors. This convert stage is critically important because you have just spent a lot of time, effort, energy, money and resources developing great content. Now you need to make sure that this content is doing its job of creating high quality leads for your sales team. The way to convert this group of interested prospects into leads is through forms and calls-to-action on your website and landing pages. But how do you get visitors to click through? As a business to business marketer, you must learn to merchandise your content offers. By this, I mean that you need a way to make the cornerstone content attractive and desirable to your audience. Think of creative ways to do this, like a flashy headline for your content offer or engaging images that will entice people to click through. Secondly, you need to make sure that your cornerstone content offers are gated. Gated content offers require interested visitors to submit a form to get access to the content. We have all probably been exposed to gated content offers. Think about the last time you went to download an ebook or white paper. You probably had to enter in your demographic information into a form before you could get it, right? That is gated content.
Capture Visitor Info At its core, it is a value exchange between the individual and you, the company. The prospect is trading his information for the content that your company is going to provide him. Additionally, you want to be thoughtful about the type and amount of questions that you ask on the form. If you ask too many questions, you risk the prospect abandoning the form fill. Spend some time thinking about the information that you need to move the prospect to the next step, then ask only those questions. By using marketing automation software, you can set up progressive profiling that will allow you to ask different questions if a lead reconverts. This type of functionality allows you to keep forms short and manageable while at the same time increasing your knowledge of the prospect as they download additional content offers.
Nurture Relationships Email marketing is where you can nurture leads in your sales funnel and educate your newest prospects. By building out automated email nurturing campaigns around a specific topic, a job role, or a product interest, you can ensure that you are communicating the right message to the right prospect at the right time. Fundamentally, we all know that not every prospect that comes to our website is ready to buy our products or services. However, we often respond in the same way to everyone that fills out a lead form on our website, with the same canned email response or same phone script via an inside salesperson. However, by using targeted email marketing, we can thoughtfully educate and inform these prospects on topics that are of interest to them. We can send personal but different messages to the CEO, CFO and CMO. Plus, we can help move them through the stages of the buying cycle at a pace that they are comfortable with whether very quickly or over a long period of time. Find a marketing automation system (Hubspot, Pardot, Silverpop, or Marketo) that will allow you to build out automated email marketing campaigns that can be segmented based on visitor behavior, content interest, or demographics. Then start nurturing your database of contacts.
Close Customers Now that you have built up credibility and trust through blogging and nurtured your leads through the stages of the buying cycle with targeted email marketing, you re ready to close these leads. However, there are some important key items to keep in mind to smooth the buying process for your leads. Publish your prices: Whenever possible, B2B marketers should always publish their prices online. This pricing transparency will allow customers to self select your product, or conversely opt out if your prices are not within their current budget constraints. Additionally, If you have different versions of your product for small, medium and enterprise companies, publish the feature differences along with the price differences for all prospects to see. This will result in price qualified leads that you deliver to sales. Streamline your buying process: If possible, do your best to simplify your purchase process by eliminating all extraneous barriers. An example of how this could work: have sales reps email PayPal links or Google Checkout links to prospects that would like to purchase your product. Think about your end customers purchase experiences and start simplifying it wherever you can.
Give Freely Create conversion paths that the very bottom of the funnel: One very important item that will help you close business and on-board new customers is creating conversion paths at the very bottom of the sales funnel. In other words, give away some product to ease the transition from lead to customer. A couple of practical examples are how Amazon.com offers a free 30day trial for its Prime membership and what Netflix gives to first time subscribers (a one month free trial). For a consulting company, you could provide one free consulting session. Or, for a software-as-a-service company, you could give a two week free trial. Rack your brain and think of creative ways that you can give away some product to your prospects to smooth the transition from lead to customer.
The End By giving thoughtful consideration to the journey that your leads take from stranger to a loyal customer, you can better optimize and tailor their buying experiences. Start by building credibility and trust with your prospects by establishing yourself as an industry thought leader. Then attract your strangers to your business with remarkable content, social media promotion, blogging and well optimized search engine optimization. From there, make sure that you are capturing your lead information through gated content with forms and calls-to-action. Finally, nurture your leads through the stages of the buying cycle by sending them tailored and personalized content that speak to their interests and their current job roles. These strategic and tactical items will help you develop a well honed lead management engine that will help you attract, convert and close customers on a consistent basis.
About The Author Entrepreneur Writer Marketer Jonathan Pavoni is the co-founder of Creatrix Marketing. He has spent the last eight years in digital marketing doing a variety of brand building activities. His main focus areas have been: website development, search engine marketing, video production, content creation and corporate branding. The lead generation programs and campaigns that he has instituted have led to significant increases in product and service sales. He is passionate about helping small businesses utilize technology to grow their organizations. You can contact Jonathan @JonPavoni or follow his company @GoCreatrix. www.creatrixmarketing.com info@creatrixmarketing.com 657-234-5657