“How do I generate leads now?”
This is the overwhelming question every business is faced with in 2020.
It’s coming up to the end of the year, and you need to sustainably pull in more leads right now, but they also need to be the right leads.
You know it’s no good calling and emailing 10,000 companies if only a handful of them are actually spending money right now. You need to generate only the warmest leads through the pandemic, so you can concentrate your sales efforts where they’re most effective.
But again, you ask “how?”
Well, to answer that question, you first need to be asking yourself the following:
1. “Who am I targeting?”
Before you can initiate any relationship, you need to understand who you’re trying to connect with.
It seems like a no-brainer, and you probably at least have some idea who you’re targeting. But do you have an in-depth buyer persona profile to refer to every time you’re planning your activities?
Buyer persona profiles are fictional representations of your ideal customer. Our buyer personas put us into the shoes of our ideal customers by telling us what problems they face, where they go for information, what their goals are, and what might be stopping them from reaching those goals.
These profiles will help you empathize with your target so you can write relevant content, plan enticing marketing activities, and speak to your target customers in a way that resonates best with who they are as a person.
If you don’t currently have a comprehensive target buyer persona written down anywhere, that’s okay! Download Shortlist’s ‘Who am I targeting?’ template and get something solid written down.
The template asks questions like ‘What job title do my prospects usually hold?’ and ‘What are their main pain points?’. Write these things down and keep them in mind when you’re plotting your next lead-generation activities, and it’ll make your efforts much more targeted.
2. “What’s happening in their marketplace right now?”
Things are changing constantly in 2020 due to COVID-19 and Brexit playing havoc with our pipelines, so it’s important to keep an eye on your target’s industry news. If you’re selling to storefronts, for example, do you need to start concentrating on retail parks rather than city centre stores?
The simplest way to do this is simply by researching the industry both on Google and on social media. Are there any recent surveys and studies highlighting problems or changes within the industry due to the pandemic?
Monitoring social platforms like LinkedIn can give you some pretty great insights into what’s concerning your target market right now and what questions they’re looking for answers to.
A slightly more complex way to do this is to conduct your own survey on the target market.
3. “Who’s buying right now?”
One of the biggest questions you need to be asking right now is “who is buying in my target market?” Because it’s all well and good having a list of businesses to sell to, but if the contacts you have are on furlough or the business isn’t actually spending money at the minute, you’ll be wasting your valuable time.
That’s why it’s now so critical to use contact lists that are qualified based on this question. But it can be an incredibly difficult and lengthy process to find out who is buying without the right knowledge.
To gain this knowledge, your best bet is to speak to them, which is where a lead-generation company like Shortlist come in handy. If you don’t have the time, we’ll help by investigating your target market and creating lists of warm prospects for you, then we’ll qualify them to make sure your sales team aren’t wasting any time on cold leads that won’t result in sales. Check it out.
4. “What content should I be creating to help my target customers?”
When it comes to content, one size won’t fit all. To make sure your business’ content is generating and nurturing leads effectively, you need to deliver the right messaging, to the right people, at the right time. And that’s where content mapping comes into play.
With content mapping, the goal is to target content according to:
- The characteristics of the person who will be reading/watching it (that’s where your buyer personas come in).
- How close that person is to making a purchase (i.e. their lifecycle stage: awareness, consideration, and decision).
For example, if you’re a pet company releasing a new kind of dog food, you’d want to know that your audience actually owns a dog, rather than a parrot or a cat, before sending them an email. And that leads us nicely onto…
5. “How clean is our data?”
A strong contact database is instrumental in allowing your business to grow. Does the data reflect your target market? Do you have the data? Do you need to build or buy it?
Your marketing is only as good as the quality of your data. If your existing lists have incomplete or incorrect fields, old contact details, and contacts that haven’t engaged with you recently, it’s going to cost your company time and money in the long term.
The unfortunate truth, however, is that it is a lengthy process to do by hand, so many companies opt to purge inconsistent records and move on rather than fix issues manually. But that can also mean you miss out on lots of valuable insight.
6. “How can I reach more warm prospects?”
There are lots of thing you can do here, but they all rely on you having that persona profile really nailed before you start planning ideas, creating content, and reaching out to people.
Once you have that target persona sorted and know who you’re targeting, what they’re looking for, and how best to communicate with them, things you can try are:
- Social listening
- Publishing helpful, personalised, relevant content that attracts your ideal target (inbound marketing)
- Automating your lead nurturing with HubSpot’s workflow tool
- Teaming up with an expert lead-generation agency like Shortlist to identify best-quality prospects and contact them for you (come on, you knew it was coming, didn’t you?).
Ready to get more knowledge on your target market in 2020? Download our free ‘Who am I targeting?’ template for free right here…
