Chances are, you’ve heard about Digital Prospecting (if not – what is a prospect?) in one of your marketing meetings, but you haven’t fully understood its magnitude in your digital marketing campaign just yet.
But with consumer behavior and the consumer journey shifting a lot these days, especially because of the changes brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic, it has become imperative for marketers to know how to identify a prospect and turn that into a customer.
When you talk about prospecting, it’s basically finding out how consumers behave, do research, and take action during their buying journey.
With this, you’ll need to gather large amounts of data related to customer intent and you can find them everywhere from your own website to social media platforms.
Now, you may already have a digital prospecting strategy in place, but here are some tips to help you improve it:
- Create your ideal customer profile. The first step to successful prospecting is to know exactly who you want to please. Also called a “customer avatar,” having an ideal customer profile will help you create targeted strategies because you know exactly what direction to take in running your digital marketing campaign.
That is also why it’s crucial to create your ideal customer based on reality to ensure that this strategy will be effective when you use it. If you create a customer profile from your own expectations from a client, it will be difficult for you to use this information in creating the best strategies for your campaign.
- Learn how to prioritize. Once you start doing research and analyzing data, you’ll easily realize that you have a lot of prospects. This is when you need to prioritize prospects that have the most likelihood to be converted into a customer.
It will keep you from wasting time and focus your resources on the people who have the best chance of becoming your customer. Learn how to prioritize your marketing efforts because that will help you maximize your tools while cutting down on your costs.
- Invest in your resources. Prospecting is a lot of work because of all the data that you need to gather and analyze to come up with the best strategies for your campaign.
That is why it’s imperative that you invest in resources that will allow you to be more efficient in understanding your prospect. Automation is a smart investment because it allows you to keep track of your efficiency to ensure that you are doing the right things.
- Take notes of things that you can improve on. As you go through the prospecting process, you will commit mistakes and discover things that you still need to improve on to make your system better.
Assessment should be an essential part of your process because it will allow you to determine the things that you’re doing right and identify those steps that you still need to improve on.
Additional tips
Although these four steps are crucial to your success in identifying and understanding your prospects, you can also use these additional tips to improve what you already have in your system:
- Dig a little deeper on your prospects’ career pages. When it comes to prospecting, you need to utilize every avenue available to find information that will help you understand your prospects better.
Aside from going through the typical sources of information, you also need to look into lesser-known resources like your prospect’s career page, if you’re doing prospecting for a business.
A career page can say a lot about what a company is doing, especially its plans for growth. A job board will let you know which areas of the business a prospect is investing in, allowing you to create effective strategies based on that information.
- Categorize your prospects using ratings. You will have a lot of prospects as you go through your process, but they will not be created equally. This means that some prospects have the most probability of becoming customers while some can be quite questionable.
Categorizing using ratings like low, medium, and high suitability will help you allocate your resources properly and not waste too much time on those that have the least probability of being converted into customers.
This strategy is also a smart way to ensure that your team stays on track while running your campaigns because you don’t only know exactly who you’re marketing to, but you also know what to do exactly to please these prospects.
- Don’t dump your rejected deals just yet. Going through the prospecting process is already stressful, but rejection makes it worse.
Chances are, you can’t really please everyone no matter how good your strategies are and rejection will be inevitable at some point. But those lost deals are not the end yet, or at least if you don’t dump them right away. Prospects have their reasons for rejecting your offer.
It could have not been the right offer at the time, they might have not understood the offer properly or they were just influenced by other brands that they chose not to accept you.
But that doesn’t mean that it’s over for these prospects yet because you can always send them a follow-up email not to convince them to take your offer again but to ask what made them reject your offer in the first place.
The goal of this email is easy: you need to learn from your mistakes. Getting feedback will allow you to understand how you can improve your process, so you don’t get more rejections in the future.
With prospecting being a crucial step to improving your digital marketing strategies it only makes sense to find ways on how you can improve on your existing processes to get more efficient results and learn how to improve your system as a whole.
Finding a good prospect may be a small step in the sales journey, but it will help you a lot in convincing consumers to patronize your products and also in building that loyalty in your brand, which helps assure your longevity.
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