Digital prospecting:
how to find new customers on the web?
Digital prospecting: how to find new customers on the web?
How can we prospect when traditional techniques no longer deliver the expected results?
Digital prospecting is adapting to new buyer habits. Faced with the overwhelming number of messages sent to decision-makers, it relies on less intrusive techniques to generate new business opportunities. What are the techniques of online prospecting? How can you succeed in your online prospecting?
What is digital prospecting?
Digital prospecting refers to all marketing and sales activities carried out online by a company to find new customers. Generally speaking, sales prospecting is a strategy that aims to generate a continuous flow of potential customers (or prospects) to fuel sales momentum.
With traditional prospecting methods, the company took the initiative in making the first contact. Conversely, digital prospecting consists of attracting prospects to the company.
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Why prospect online?
Online prospecting is a strategy that responds to the changing behavior of prospects and buyers. While initial sales contact by telephone was the norm, the development of the web has changed the game.
Buyers are now independent in their online research. The sheer volume of information available on the web allows them to research their own issues. They can even learn about existing solutions and compare them online.
As a result, prospects are no longer dependent on companies for the initial stages of the buying journey. It is estimated that 50 to 60% of the B2B buying journey takes place digitally and without commercial contact.
In this context, inbound marketing has emerged as the ideal prospecting method for capturing a prospect in the pre-purchase phase online. No longer is it a matter of imposing an unsolicited and intrusive digital sales contact. Companies attract their prospects by providing them with useful and high-quality information.
Furthermore, B2B buying cycles are longer and more complex than in the past. In an effort to optimize spending, each purchase is carefully considered, monitored, and often involves multiple decision-makers. With buyers being better informed about available solutions, competition is fiercer. Consequently, more sales cycles are not completed. Therefore, it is essential to improve lead generation to achieve business objectives.
Finally, in a context of over-solicitation of B2B buyers, the ROI of traditional marketing methods is declining. Digital methods are often less expensive for convincing results.
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Web prospecting methods
Several methods exist for finding potential customers online. Email marketing is one such method.
However, mass emailing is losing momentum and is becoming more like traditional methods. Now, the success of email campaigns depends on the quality of the contact database and the relevance of the segmentation.
Therefore, email marketing is more effective when it is part of a comprehensive inbound marketing strategy.
Prospecting through inbound marketing
What is inbound marketing?
Inbound marketing is a strategy that involves attracting prospects to your website through quality content and then converting them into customers.
Since traditional methods encounter resistance from buyers, companies must optimize the initiation of the first commercial contact.
If this contact occurs too early in the buying process, the buyer may feel pressured. Conversely, if it comes too late, the company risks losing opportunities to a competitor.
To trigger commercial contact at the right time, when the prospect is ready, the company must first create a pipeline of sales opportunities.
How to do inbound prospecting?
First, the company aims to generate qualified web traffic. Once it has identified its target customers and their challenges, it implements a content strategy. Content marketing involves creating and distributing relevant content to attract qualified visitors.
When a company generates qualified traffic through SEO (search engine optimization) and social media, the second step is to maintain a conversation with some of those visitors. Indeed, most web visitors aren't yet ready to buy. They need to be encouraged to share their contact information, for example, by offering valuable content in exchange for a form.
Now that the connection is established, the company aims to nurture its leads. To do this, it interacts with its contacts through personalized email sequences. This lead nurturing phase allows it to score prospects based on their behavior and automatically pass on qualified leads to the sales teams.
Social selling
Social selling is an online prospecting approach that relies on social media. In fact, it's primarily on the professional social network LinkedIn that salespeople can prospect effectively.
Social selling involves identifying new business opportunities on LinkedIn, connecting with prospects, and interacting with them to secure a business meeting.
It can be used to complement an inbound marketing strategy. Indeed, in B2B, professional social networks are essential for distributing inbound content. By sharing high-quality content, salespeople can expand their subscriber base and therefore their pool of potential prospects. Content also provides a gateway to creating interactions with pre-defined target audiences.
Digital conversational marketing
In a broad sense, conversational marketing refers to any form of marketing based on conversation with the prospect.
In a stricter sense, it corresponds to all marketing actions based on direct conversation such as chatbots or instant messaging.
This is a trend that businesses can no longer ignore. Indeed, buyers demand instant communication. Moreover, chat is an excellent way to generate leads using an inbound marketing strategy.
If a visitor struggles to find the information they need on a website, they will leave without providing contact details. Unless, of course, they can easily access a chatbot that will redirect them to the correct information while collecting additional data.
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The stages of digital prospecting
Define your targets and prospects
To achieve their objectives, online prospecting efforts must be based on an excellent understanding of their target customers on the internet. Indeed, these efforts must be specifically targeted at potential buyers.
It is therefore necessary to determine the profile of one's ideal customers.
The buyer persona method allows you to define the typical profile of your target customers, the main problems they encounter and their preferred communication channels.
More broadly, defining your personas helps you understand precisely the buyer's journey of your prospects. Then, these personas serve as a guide for all marketing and sales actions.
Set your digital prospecting goals
One of the advantages of digital prospecting is that it allows you to break down the buyer's journey into several stages. At each stage, you can set intermediate objectives and measure your results.
Upstream, the company will therefore set prospecting objectives directly linked to its business objectives. Based on projected revenue, for example, a target for the number of new customers can be defined.
Then, based on past or sector-specific conversion rates, we can unwind the reel and set intermediate objectives over a given period.
Optimizing your website for lead generation
Prospecting online requires turning your website into a digital tool that serves the company's commercial dynamics.
From a prospecting perspective, a simple showcase website is not enough. The website must be designed to convert visitors into customers.
If the goal is to purchase a product directly online, then the website should facilitate the creation of an online account. If the purchase process is more complex, the website will integrate online forms, for example, for downloading premium content.
In all cases, it will be essential to create calls to action, landing pages, and online forms to achieve your objectives. The website's usability, internal linking, and navigation flow must also align with the buyer's journey defined during the persona development phase.
Deploying your content strategy
Content marketing addresses two key issues:
- Generate qualified traffic to the company website
- Provide the prospect with content throughout their journey
To generate traffic, we'll design a content strategy based on our target audience. Indeed, the best way to attract qualified visitors to your site isn't to boast about the merits of your offer. What interests potential customers is finding solutions to their problems.
Once these issues are identified, we will produce content accordingly and optimize it for search engines to generate organic traffic. As part of our distribution strategy, we will also share the content on the target audience's preferred social media platforms to attract them.
But the role of content isn't limited to this initial attraction phase. When a visitor becomes a lead, they're rarely ready to buy immediately. Therefore, it's essential to continue the conversation before initiating a sales contact. In this context, digital content serves to fuel the marketing conversation and maintain contact with prospects.
Therefore, simply creating content is not enough to attract visitors. Relevant content must be produced for every stage of the customer journey.
Generate leads online
Lead generation requires equipping your website with conversion tools: calls to action, landing pages, and forms. Above all, it requires offering something in return to visitors for their contact information.
Very often, we will offer high value content (white paper, e-book, practical kit, template, etc.) to capture leads.
Nurturing your leads
Obtaining a visitor's contact information is not yet a done deal. The lead still needs to be qualified, meaning its level of maturity needs to be assessed and additional information gathered.
At this stage, we'll provide the lead with content tailored to their profile and behavior. The goal is to move them further down the conversion funnel. To do this, we send them personalized email sequences and observe their response.
Each interaction is assigned a score. This is called lead scoring. For example, +20 for downloading a white paper or -5 for an unopened email.
This score corresponds to the lead's maturity level. If you use a marketing automation solution, you can automatically score your contacts and trigger the transfer of the lead to sales representatives once a certain score is reached.
Initiate commercial contact
Marketing considers the prospect ready for a sales contact. The sales teams then take over.
The salesperson will make initial contact aimed at further qualifying the prospect. This is referred to as "sales qualification".
Traditionally, the BANT method is used to ensure that the prospect has a budget, is indeed the decision-maker, that their need is genuine, and that it is already planned in advance. If this is the case, then the sales process begins. Otherwise, the prospect is either disqualified or reintegrated into a nurturing cycle.
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Online prospecting tools
Digital prospecting presents a major difficulty: knowing when the prospect is hot enough to be called by a salesperson.
Nurturing a lead takes time, and at the same time, additional information must be gathered to qualify it. At scale, these tasks cannot be performed manually.
A marketing automation solution allows you to create personalized email sequences for lead nurturing. It also allows you to score your leads to prioritize sales follow-up. Today, this type of solution is a must-have for digital prospecting.
Furthermore, marketing automation becomes even more valuable when the information gathered by marketing is automatically transferred to the sales team's CRM software. The MagiLeads solution offers seamless information synchronization for optimal alignment between marketing and sales.
Digital prospecting is emerging as the solution to the decline of traditional techniques. To be effective, however, it must be based on a solid understanding of the customer buying journey and on automation tools that support conversation and conversion.
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