By Ashish Dwivedi Attracting more customers to your business and hopefully doing so at a steady rate is the bare-bones strategy of growing a company that every business owner needs to adhere to.
Whether it’s running a fruit stand in front of your building, a bodega on the corner of your neighborhood, or Tesla + SpaceX + Twitter – having a clear idea of how to attract new people to your products or services is an art form.
Some companies prefer to invest heavily in marketing.
Others, like Tesla, prefer to invest little to nothing in marketing and concentrate their funds and energy on innovation.
One of the ways of increasing sales that has been proving fairly successful in recent years would be using CRMs. CRM (customer relationship management) software, in particular, has shown to work wonders for some businesses.
In this article, we’re going to talk about how CRM can help you optimize your inbound marketing channels.
As you will see, understanding your target market and customer base is more than half the job done.
What is Inbound Marketing?
Before we go deeper into determining how CRM software can help your business, let’s first take a look at what inbound marketing is in the first place.
Novel marketing tactics and channels are being explored at an unprecedented level in the US as well as globally, and inbound marketing is at the forefront of this new digital age of discovery.
As opposed to outbound marketing, where businesses attempt to make or reinforce their brand in front of a large potential audience, inbound marketing concentrates on already existing leads, as well as attracting new ones.
The way this is done varies and in itself represents a complicated process that each company approaches differently.
The one thing that every inbound marketing effort has in common, though, is personalization.
If a customer feels that a brand has its back, stands behind its product, and is ready to improve its service, that customer is more likely to keep buying in the future.
Also, they are considerably more likely to recommend your product to their friends and family. This, in turn, means even more leads.
On a more pragmatic level, inbound marketing operates on three important prospects:
- Analysis of your target audience
- Content creation
- Follow-ups on already-existing leads
Analyzing your target audience will give you an idea of what they want and need.
Creating content that talks about your brand, as well as about different occurrences on the market, can be a great way to engage with your audience in a non-invasive, passive, way. (They can read or not read your posts whenever they feel like it.)
Also, this represents a fantastic opportunity to include links to your online shop, other articles, or other online venues that you would like your audience to visit.
Last but not least, if you already have a paying customer, keeping them content and eager to come back to your products is business 101! Keeping a customer is as important as attracting new ones.
Using CRM to Optimize Your Inbound Marketing Channels
You can develop your CRM strategy yourself, based on your experience and willingness to learn new things.
Alternatively, you can plan to hire an SEO company to take care of the heavy lifting for you – CRM software nowadays becomes an essential part of any marketing strategy. It is inseparable from all the other forms of marketing.
Whether it’s hiring a Seattle SEO company, or getting a private Japanese SEO consultant on a freelancing platform – incorporating high-quality CRM can truly help your business reach your target audience and retain them once you’ve established a connection with them.
Here are 5 ways to get the most out of your CRM platform.
1. Use Lead Distribution to Boost Sales Agents’ Performance
Having three sales agents’ attack’ a single potential customer can not only alienate that customer but also make the agents dislike each other.
While no well-functioning business in its right mind would appoint multiple agents for a single customer, this can happen due to the system being overburdened and too fraught with inefficient task delegation systems.
This way, agents can get burdened with tasks that may have them use their skills in a less-than-optimal way, so to speak.
The lead distribution represents a significant improvement over the old way of manually delegating tasks.
Each of your sales agents will get a certain number of leads, so they can organize their time and prepare themselves to approach each of the potential customers with the air of confidence and professionalism necessary to make them interested.
Also, the lead distribution goes beyond simply delegating tasks.
Based on your business’s size, geographical location, target audience, or industry, you can make the lead delegation a more sophisticated process. You can assign tasks to agents that are more suitable for certain demographics, speak a local language, or are otherwise a better fit for a certain portion of your target audience.
2. Finding Strong Leads through Lead Scoring
The bridge between a lead and a paying customer that you can rely on is quite long.
No matter how much confidence your agent has that a lead will become a paying customer any time now until the transaction has been made, it all still hangs in the air.
This doesn’t mean that there are no leads that have a stronger likelihood of becoming customers than others. Once your agent suspects they have a strong leader, you must delegate time and space to secure this person as a customer.
Strong leads are people who are willing to buy from you in bulk, representatives of companies, or other individuals who may like your brand for other reasons.
Identifying the status of a leader is of major importance to evaluating their potential as future paying customers. For starters, learning about this person’s contact information, line of work, and how interested he is in setting up a contract with your company is a must-have list of info to move on from.
Checking your company sales log and seeing if this person was already a customer in the past can give you a clue if they might commit to a purchase or a contract again.
3. Follow Up on Leads
Once you’ve secured a lead, establishing strong and ongoing communication is essential for scoring a sale down the road.
Email marketing and feeble communication through various other channels can make the customer think you’re either not serious about your sale or that you’re not that confident in the quality of your product or service.
Professionalism represents an important part of establishing a strong relationship with your clients.
This means not only regularly updating your conversation, but also following up after you’ve secured a sale. Ensuring the customer is happy with the product they got will give them enough confidence in you to help them keep coming back for more.
This can be achieved in several different ways.
Personalized emails are probably the simplest overall way to keep in touch with a client.
Other than these, making good use of your social media presence can be a great way to engage with your clients in a more personal way.
Last but not least, it’s not unusual to see companies making entire websites dedicated to this purpose, so considering this route may be a good option.
4. Come up with Buyer Personas
[Source: Unsplash]
Building a buyer persona is a process that takes extensive research and some effort, but it pays off quite considerably later on.
A buyer persona is a faithful representation of your primary target customer. Attracting a certain type of customer requires a level of understanding of what their needs and buying practices tend to be.
For this reason, a buyer persona needs to be as detailed as possible.
Some of the crucial pieces of info you can acquire for concocting an excellent buyer persona include stats such as gender, education level, general interests, buying habits, preferred payment methods, location, age, and more.
The underlying idea is to attempt to put yourself in your potential customer’s shoes.
5. Use Content to Boost Conversions
As we mentioned above, content can be a great way to engage with your audience in a non-pushy but still engaging and informative way.
Establishing first what kind of info your customers are after and what sort of information they might need is essential for creating content that’s not merely filler but that will inform and entertain the reader.
The great thing about this way of engaging your audience is the passive value you get, so to speak.
Well-written content can stay published for weeks, months, and even years. With only a small investment in writing, you can get a lot of value.
As far as any potential adjustments are concerned, simply changing the year in the title or a passage or two can make an article as relevant as it was months ago.
Conclusion
A fantastic store that offers everything from a sewing needle to a steam engine won’t make a dime if there is no way to find the store. Or if the staff is terrible, unresponsive, and disinterested.
Understanding your customer base and what their needs and preferences are is the cornerstone of any successful business.
Author bio:
Harold Ader is a digital marketing specialist and freelance blogger from Manchester, writing exclusively for DigitalStrategyOne. In his spare time, you can find him in the garden or kitchen.
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