Increase Conversions By Connecting Faster With The Best Prospects
Marketing is usually responsible for creating buyer personas, and they can gain many insights from a website and social media data, research, and client interviews. Yet, it's sales that have daily conversations with prospects and customers.
Sales know which pain points and goals are most pressing right now to their prospects and clients, what they think of pricing points, and which are the quickest to close and most loyal. But marketing can see what content buyers consume, when, and by whom. With the right software, they can even see the IP addresses of those with high lead scores, meaning marketing can help identify better-fit target customers.
By combining both teams' insights, you can better understand your ideal customers and create precisely accurate personas.
Increase Conversions By Connecting Faster With The Best Prospects
How quickly sales respond to leads has a significant impact on their ability to convert them. By agreeing on which leads to focus on in order of their perceived opportunity value, sales can turn their attention to higher-quality leads and reduce the lead response time. Meanwhile, marketing can focus its efforts on generating the right leads and nurturing the best prospects.
In highly aligned organizations, both sales, and marketing work together to determine which attributes make up their ideal customer profile - the ones most likely to convert, bring in the most revenue, and become loyal, evangelical customers. They also have processes to mix manual and automatic lead scoring updates according to conversations and further online interactions.
Fuel Your Content Marketing Strategy
More than two-thirds of today’s brands say that creating or sourcing well-targeted, relevant content is their biggest optimization challenge.
That’s a key finding from an IDG Connect report, based on responses from more than 100 marketers worldwide that work at companies with a minimum of 1,000 employees.
At the same time, Segment’s Personalization Report has found that over 70% of shoppers ‘express frustration when their shopping experience is impersonal’ – while 44% will become repeat buyers after a personalized experience.
There’s a pain point here.
Your audience will engage and buy more if you provide relevant targeted content.
Customer journey mapping then underpins the success of your content marketing.
By taking a look at the customer journey, you map out the flow that each customer group takes when making a purchase and in their post-purchase behavior.
In doing this, you will unravel several pain points, barriers, and smooth areas of each customer journey, which allows you to address them as needed.
You’re probably more than familiar with the traditional marketing funnel, creating top to bottom-funnel content – but this approach is static and not flexible enough to represent the process of the buying journey.
After all, the customer journey is rarely linear.
Instead, it’s more beneficial to focus on the four main stages of the circular customer journey when mapping content to journey maps.
These are the consideration, evaluation, moment of sale, and post-purchase stages. It’s worth keeping in mind that your customers may go through more or fewer stages.
While we won’t go deep into the definitions as we’re sure you know them (if not, have a read of this), use your findings from the customer journey map to uncover what your customers are thinking, feeling, and doing, as well as the touchpoints they experience.
Then, map out the touchpoints on a scale of negative to positive feelings.
Doing this will help you pinpoint areas where you can use content to solve problems, answer questions, inspire, or otherwise make your customer journey more manageable.
As each customer’s journey is individual, you’ll need a full 360° view of your customers – that includes demographics and behaviors and attitudes, values, desires, motivations (i.e., psychographics) to create relevant, personalized content.
Once you have personalized the content opportunities you identified earlier in the process with psychographic profile data, you can then target new and returning shoppers.
Right now, the most common methods to deliver these personalized content experiences are through advertising, email, and keyword targeting.
But what about your website? The most crucial channel of them all?
While the technology hasn’t been there until recently, with a data-driven visual commerce platform, you can create personalized buying experiences by delivering precisely the right content, at the right time, to the right individual.
And you can do so through your website, email, and your app.
That’s not all, however.
Such solutions enable you to identify which content is having the most impact on sales.
So, you can prove your content’s ROI easily, cut out what’s not making a financial impact, and use real sales insights to guide your content marketing strategy.