Generating new leads is one of the most important ways to grow your business. Yet that’s not enough—marketers also need to nurture those leads so they can be converted into customers. Further, today’s customers are more informed, discerning, and distracted than ever before. With so much communication happening in the digital space, finding creative ways to convert leads into customers is essential. Here are six tips to help you connect with distracted leads and convert hot leads into customers.
1. Teach Your Audience
Create marketing content that focuses on solving problems. What problems can your product or service help resolve? By describing common scenarios and detailing how your product or service can help lead to better outcomes, customers can better understand your offerings, which helps move them deeper into the sales funnel. Educational marketing content can include white papers, videos, infographics, reports, and other materials to better inform your target audience.
2. Use Sales & Marketing Tools to Reach Your Audience
When customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation tools work in tandem, you can get a full picture of how leads interact with your organization, including which marketing content may be influencing purchasing decisions. These integrated tools can help you effectively manage your marketing and sales processes in one place. You can store customer data, launch marketing campaigns, connect with leads, track how leads move from the top to the bottom of the sales funnel, and create new opportunities from a single platform.
3. Identify Sources of Acquisition & Engagement
This information is essential since it helps you determine your leads’ interests, needs, and customer journey. CRM tools can add leads automatically after they perform targeted actions with a website page, chatbot, subscription form, email campaign, social media campaign, or digital advertisement. When you can attribute lead acquisition and engagement sources, you can see which content and campaigns help drive the most sales.
4. Segment Your Audience
Use CRM tools to segment your leads with lead scoring (those who are interested in your products or services) and lead grading (those who are of interest to your organization). Not every lead should be added to the sales pipeline. Implement a quality control system by allowing only high-quality leads in and nurturing the rest. See an example from Salesforce below.
With this data at hand, you can assess who your hot leads are. A hot lead is a prospective customer who’s shown interest in your product or service. A hot lead has engaged with your marketing content (which increases the lead score), likely understands the competitive advantages of your offering, and has the budget and authority to make a purchase (usually those with a decent lead grade).
5. Personalize Your Messages
Today, amid fragmented communication channels and evolving brand equity sources, organizations need to leverage an array of channels and messages to reach their audiences. You can include your hot leads in personalized marketing campaigns to help move them deeper into the sales funnel. CRM and marketing automation tools can help reinforce your organization’s personalized approach to every lead.
6. Drive Action
Part of a well-designed sales process is to help leads take the next step toward making a purchase. Especially with high-value items, the call to action on every piece of marketing content should invite leads to learn more, download a report, request a demo, or something similar.
In general, hot leads need time to warm up. Fuel your marketing efforts with technology. Integrated CRM and marketing automation tools can help you collect and store customer data, launch marketing campaigns, nurture leads, and convert more hot leads into customers. Use these tips to help strengthen your lead conversion strategy. Or, let Business Technology Solutions professionals at FORVIS assist you with technology training or outsourced marketing consulting. Get in touch with a professional at FORVIS by using the Contact Us form below.
Related reading: Tips to Help Improve Your Salesforce Sales Pipeline