What are you doing differently this year than you did in 2016? It’s a more important question than you might think. Companies that faced challenges last year already know they need a change, but even those with marketing strategies that helped them thrive last year may find that their competition has caught up with them. Your best lead gen strategy for 2017 is to look at where you can change, not just where you want to stay the same.
Explore Paid Search
Organic search results are golden, but smart marketers also make the most of paid search opportunities. SEO’s cousin SEM is just as important for B2B businesses that want to make a deeper impression on their audiences. While Google ads are the first place to look, the search engine giant is far from the whole story. Amazon is also ramping up its advertising network, so Google isn’t the only powerhouse option available. Third-party sites such as product review pages, industry journals, and educational sites that rely on advertising income may also be useful channels for paid search.
Improve Customer Experience from the Start
A great customer experience begins long before a lead becomes a customer. With marketing automation technology, you provide a customized experience even before you know who your prospect is; anonymous browser cookies give you general geographical information and other details that let you start building a tailored, personalized experience for leads right away. When you get the right content on your leads’ screens at the beginning, they’re considerably likelier to take the next steps on their buying journey.
Nurture Leads at Their Own Pace
It’s no longer enough to be present for your leads. To stay ahead of the curve, you want to anticipate their needs by just the right amount, staying far enough ahead to act as a guide but never getting ahead of where they need you to be. A well-designed lead nurture program sends your leads the right information in the right format at the right time for them. Behavioral data is an indicator of what your leads want to know, a sort of digital body language that triggers the next step in a nurture campaign flow.
Implement Account-Based Marketing
Account-based marketing, or ABM, looks at marketing and lead gen from a wider perspective. With ABM, you’re placing individual leads in the larger context of the organization they’re with and the industry they’re a part of, allowing you to develop a marketing approach that’s customized for each account. Essentially, your goal with ABM is to reach a marketing segment of one. This strategy directly affects how effectively leads become sales-qualified and transfer to your sales team. The more seamlessly your leads flow from one team to the other, the better their customer experience is and the more efficiently you’re able to convert.
Prioritize Attribution
Where do your leads come from? What convinces them to convert? What causes leads to bounce out of your sales funnel? Attribution gives you answers. Lead volume alone is only one measure of a successful lead gen strategy; you also need to know more about the activities that turn those leads into customers and make new customers into long-term brand loyalists. Attribution helps you see why leads make the decisions they do so you can invest in marketing that has the greatest impact while eliminating wasted effort.
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