Define your targets and prospects
To reach their objectives, online prospecting actions must be based on an excellent knowledge of their target customers on the Internet. Indeed, the actions must be specifically aimed at potential buyers.
It is therefore necessary to determine the profile of its ideal customers.
The buyer personas method allows you to define the typical profile of your target customers, the main issues they face and their preferred communication channels.
More broadly, defining your personas helps you to know precisely the buying path of your prospects. Then, personas are used as a guideline for all marketing and sales actions.
Set your digital prospecting objectives
One of the advantages of digital prospecting is that it allows you to finely divide the buying process into several stages. At each stage, intermediate goals can be set and results measured.
Upstream, the company will therefore set prospecting objectives that are directly connected to its business objectives. On the basis of the projected turnover, you can for example define a target for the number of new customers.
Then, based on past or industry conversion rates, the reel can be unwound and intermediate goals set over a period of time.
Optimize your website for prospecting
Online prospecting requires making your website a digital tool to serve the commercial dynamics of the company.
From a prospecting point of view, we cannot be satisfied with a window site. The website must be designed to convert visitors.
If the purpose is to purchase a product directly online, then the site must facilitate the creation of an online account. If the purchase cycle is more complex, the site will integrate online forms, for example for downloading premium content.
In all cases, it will be essential to create call-to-actions, landing pages and online forms to achieve your goals. The site’s ergonomics, the mesh and the navigation path must also correspond to the buyer’s journey defined during the personas stage.
Deploying your content strategy
Content marketing addresses two issues:
- Generate qualified traffic on the company’s website
- Provide the prospect with content throughout their journey
To generate traffic, we will design a content strategy based on our personas. Indeed, the best way to attract qualified visitors to your site is not to boast about your offer. What prospects are interested in is finding answers to their problems.
Once these issues are identified, we will produce content accordingly and optimize it for SEO to generate organic traffic. In a logic of diffusion, we will also share the contents on the favorite social networks of the target customers to attract them.
But the role of content is not limited to this attraction phase. When the visitor becomes a lead, he is rarely mature enough to buy immediately. Therefore, it is necessary to continue the conversation before initiating a sales contact. With this in mind, digital content is used to fuel the marketing conversation to connect with prospects.
Therefore, it is not enough to create content to attract visitors. You need to produce relevant content for all stages of the customer journey.
Generate online leads
Generating leads requires equipping your site with conversion tools: call-to-action, landing pages, forms. Above all, it requires having something to offer the visitor in exchange for their contact information.
Very often, we will propose content with high added value (white paper, e-book, practical kit, template,…) to capture leads.
Nurture your leads
When you get the contact information of a visitor, nothing is won yet. You still need to qualify the lead, i.e. assess its level of maturity and gather additional information.
At this stage, we will provide the lead with content that corresponds to his profile and behaviors. The goal is to move them through the conversion tunnel. To do this, we send them personalized email sequences and observe how they react.
For each interaction, a score will be assigned. This is called lead scoring. For example, +20 for downloading a white paper or -5 for an unopened email.
This score corresponds to the maturity level of the lead. If you use a marketing automation solution, you can score your contacts automatically and trigger the transmission of the lead to the sales team when a given score is reached.
Triggering commercial contact
Marketing considers that the prospect is hot for a sales contact. The sales teams take over.
The sales representative will make an initial contact to qualify the prospect once again. This is called « commercial qualification ».
Traditionally, the BANT method is used to ensure that the prospect has a budget, is the decision-maker, has a real need and is already planned in time. If this is the case, then the business dynamics are set in motion. Otherwise, the prospect is either disqualified or reintegrated into a nurturing cycle.