Wouldn’t it be great if our salespeople had enough quality, qualified marketing leads so they did not have to cold call anymore? What if there was a lead generation system that generated inbound inquiries ready to learn and engage with your brand? Sounds great, but is it possible?
Yes! The way to end cold calling as we know it is to design a lead generation approach that draws potential prospects to your website through blogs, podcasts, video, eBooks, enewsletters, whitepapers, SEO, social media, and other forms of content marketing. This approach has been called a way for potential prospects to “earn there way in” by providing informative content that: 1) makes your company easy to find, 2) draws customers to your website, and 3) provides interesting content on the website that keeps them there.
This lead generation system design is especially effective for the business-to-business cycle that deals with longer sales cycles, higher per-unit sales, and more education-based purchases.
You can design a lead generation approach that focuses on prospects that “earn there way in” by focusing on the following 5 principles:
1. Get Attention : Use search engine optimization (SEO), micro-targeted e-mail, social media, and other digital tactics to attract traffic to your website so prospects can more easily find your company.
2. Activate Visitors: Once prospects have found you, keep them engaged by offering interesting content.
3. Acquire Prospects: Segment leads by the way they interact with your website pages and content. Capture their contact information by linking content to landing pages that require the prospect to provide you with their name, telephone number, e-mail address, etc.
4. Convert to Sales: Integrate and automate your lead generation system to your CRM. Use outbound sales to qualify your leads and, if necessary, use drip e-mail campaigns to further engage each prospect.
5. Use Analytics: Studying analytics like website page visits, time on each page, number of downloads, etc., will help you understand what your market is focusing on so you can do a better, more productive job prioritizing future content creation and marketing campaigns that will generate new leads.
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