You have optimized your site for search and used your blogs, tweets, and contacts across LinkedIn and Facebook to drive traffic to your site – how are you set up to capture data so you can identify qualified buyers?
Congratulations – now the real work begins. How are you going to identify qualified buyers so you can focus your resources on building trust that leads to sales?
Step 1: Realize there are different levels of engagement
Not everyone that expresses an interest in your content is a qualified buyer – so don’t force the issue. Remember that you are building a foundation that starts with awareness so focus your content on clearly identifying the problems that exist in the market, the challenges in not taking any action or in taking the wrong action, and the opportunities that exist when the right action is taken. (And the right action is your solution – but, again, don’t rush to that place and focus initially on creating content that educates and positions your business as a solution. You already have built in opportunities on the site for those with a pressing need or interest to call you, submit a form for more information or (perhaps) chat online with your staff.)
You are going to attract ‘information gatherers’ – buyers that are early in the process and not ready to make themselves know to you or engage with a salesperson. And remember, your more proactive lead generation efforts – advertising, direct mail, events, and even public relations – are going to be your primary drivers for inquiries and lead generation.
Step 2: Make it fast and easy to engage
Invite site visitors to register to receive new information, or use surveys to better understand their needs, wants, perceptions, motivations and buying process. Let them tell you when they are ready to talk with you – but until then, use the opportunity to learn from them and share your expertise with them.
For example, do you include a survey option with your white papers so that once they have finished reading the paper, they can offer you feedback.
Was the paper valuable? Do they have unanswered questions? If so, what are they? Recommend other papers or webinars or videos based on what other visitors have viewed – you know, “Others that downloaded this paper viewed this other content…”
The more helpful you are, the more you can learn and the more you learn, the better your content becomes – use the visitor’s insight to create new copy, update messaging and offers so that the relationship develops and you build trust.
Step 3: Have a data plan for capturing what you need to qualify, score and prioritize
Always know what to ask for so you can do a better job at anticipating their needs. Getting name and contact information is important – but so is title, industry, company size (revenue, employees), reasons for interest in the specific topic, role in the buying process (info gathering, influencer, decision maker).
For example, let’s say you work for software company that offers CRM solutions to large corporations with revenue of $500 million or more. And you offer an anonymous survey for those that downloaded a white paper entitled “The 5 developing trends is successful CRM” that provides you with my title (CIO), industry (telecommunications), that is ‘gathering information’ and is a ‘decision maker’ for CRM purchases. Perhaps you also learn that the reason why the person is interested in the paper (Better understanding new opportunities to increase productivity with CRM).
Now you can recommend content that is suited to my needs. You might want to create and recommend a case study on another telcom firms of similar size that were looking to increase productivity and used your products – and the focus would be to share the challenges and benefits faced in the project and how your firm was able to identify and overcome the challenges as well as deliver specific improvements to key productivity issues.
Now, you have learned important information – they are your target, this is a decision maker, and this person has specific needs that your products solve.
Or if you notice that you have several CIOs from larger corporations in your target, you might want to create a webinar and invite them to register for upcoming events.
On the other hand, if the person tells you they are a marketing consultant that works for a sole proprietorship with revenue of less than $1 million, you can focus on other more appropriate site visitors.
What is your strategy for engaging with your site visitors? How do you gather information? Are there other ways beyond “Name” and “email” to get critical information that you can use to build trust and a stronger relationship so that you focus on the right visitors?
