Taking it one step at a time
For the past couple of months, during the volatile and uncertain circumstances all businesses have found themselves in, we’ve been working on acting ‘Just Right for Right Now’. With both new and already-existing clients, the goal has been to sit down together and identify the most important marketing challenge they’re facing – be that branding, content production, SEO, paid advertising or something entirely different – then breaking the big challenge down into small, well defined micro action plans.
We need a good heart-to-heart with the client to fully decide upon the ‘one step’ of ‘one step marketing’, but what we’ve discovered so far with this approach is that the big challenge for most businesses is pretty common. Triggered by the “I’m not generating as many leads as before!” fear factor, they want their marketing to pivot and support a sales process where closing deals, for the foreseeable future, is essentially dependent on digital.
‘I’m not generating as many leads as before lockdown!’
That’s probably what we’ve heard most from the companies we’re working with, particularly from small- and medium-sized businesses. We’ve spoken about this before, but what it boils down to is this: with all trade shows and other events cancelled, the main source of lead generation for a lot of companies is now totally gone for the foreseeable future.
You can no longer guide prospects down the marketing and sales funnel if your funnel process is heavily dependent on face-to-face networking opportunities. Sales is following marketing into the digital age, and, now more than ever, crucial sales touchpoints are online. So our ‘one step’ here is obvious: help our clients to become companies that can social sell online, rather than through meetings or trade shows.
And that’s exactly what we’ve done. With well thought out messaging campaigns aimed at a properly defined target audience, our clients have been able to share the great things they do with prospects socially, and start building new relationships with prospects online instead of in person.
Great results, quickly. But don’t take your foot off the pedal
So far, this has worked fantastically: conversion rates usually sit at around 25% for these social messenger campaigns, but they’ve even reached 46%! In the space of a week, we help clients get several hundred leads they wouldn’t have without taking that ‘one step’ – it’s a pretty good method isn’t it? (If we do say so ourselves)
Once we mark that step off as a success, however, we’re left with another question: what next? It’s too soon to ease off the gas – ‘one step marketing’ is geared at tackling one issue at a time, not solving every issue in one fell swoop.
For companies that needed social selling, their biggest concern at the start of lockdown was, “How do we generate new leads without face to face opportunities?” Now, having taken their first step towards digitising the sales funnel the problem is, “We have 300 new leads in the sales funnel, but they’re not ready to buy. How do we nurture them?”
If step one is finding a new way to introduce new prospects into the sales pipeline, what’s step two?
We haven’t started this step with every client (so we may have to write again in a few weeks to confirm if this is right!), but so far the second step for clients looking to move prospects down the sales funnel has been to set up marketing automation for the new lists of leads.
With marketing automation, clients can start a more formal nurturing process compared to the social campaign, and we can use that to deliver all the great features of our clients direct to relevant people’s inboxes. With lead scoring bolted onto that, we can keep track of who’s taking an interest in what we’re offering by seeing which pages they visit, and how often.
With this done, we can start to really pick out the valuable prospects in the mix. People who take interest in your brand socially and through your website, in both your human and more formal sides, are very likely to be happy to talk sales. Over time, that list of a few hundred prospects can be narrowed down to the leads who really mean business.
And after that? You may have started to notice the pattern here: truthfully, we don’t know yet. Depending on each client’s most pressing tasks, we might try and refine that list of prospects even more, or launch another social campaign to get more people into the marketing and sales funnel. We might do something else entirely.
However, what we do know is that we’ll be fully committed to acting Just Right for Right Now. Because that’s what everyone needs to be doing at the moment. If you’re in business today, and you plan to stay in business tomorrow and beyond, our ‘one step marketing’ might be for you too. You can get in touch with us here to explore what you need most right now.