Manage your marketing funnel strategically, and it will flow more smoothly…and faster. Faster conversion is what enables your company to take on new markets, engage more leads and sell more products.
Here are some strategies guaranteed to boost the velocity of your marketing and sales funnel:
Assemble deeper market intelligence for better targeting.
Finding the proper contacts within each market means your messages get to the right people. You need data to do that. Use every means at your disposal — the internet, social media, third-party databases, etc. – to discover additional contacts for your pool of prospects. Learn as much as you can about them, by studying their interests and their social and buying behaviors.
A more holistic understanding of each marketing persona and, for that matter, each individual prospect, leads to more accurate targeting. And that means attracting top quality leads. Creating customer profiles and target personas also helps you craft messages that are timely and relevant for those targets. They’re more likely to pay attention and respond.
Mine your marketing data to improve lead nurturing.
What’s your average time-in-funnel now? Where are the sticking points? Where are you losing prospects? Finding ways for marketing to address these issues is like opening the valve wider – leads will flow faster through your pipeline.
Study trends and patterns in your analytics, to gain insight and continuously refine your marketing. Better tracking builds stronger engagement, and that supports faster conversion, too.
Build momentum with content and offers.
Engagement simply plays on the time-honored sales technique of getting prospects to say “yes.” But you have to produce the right content, and present in the right way — format, channel, timing — to the right target to get that positive response. The more worthwhile you make it, the faster they’ll flow through your funnel.
But you have to build relationships before you can close sales. Those in the top and middle of your funnel aren’t sales-ready, and not everyone enters your funnel at the top. Customizing content for each persona and each buying stage influences how prospects respond, and how fast. That’s why segmentation is so important.
Get automated.
Automating your marketing streamlines processes and helps pinpoint the strongest leads, to make the most of your sales team’s time.
Predictive lead scoring identifies the most likely buyers and those most likely to buy soonest. Focusing on the highest quality leads improves conversion rates as well as speed-through-funnel. Automated segmentation enables you to better match content and products to each target, ensuring relevance. Combined, lead scoring and segmentation allow you to precisely target broad campaigns and also to target each persona with specifically-tailored campaigns.
B2B funnels can be notoriously slow-paced, but automation helps you break through to the next level, effectively increasing that velocity. You can focus human effort on the most valuable, sales-ready leads. You can close more deals, sooner. Your marketing will be more productive, and more cost-effective, and you’ll experience faster growth.
Automation also helps build strong, trusting collaboration between marketing and sales teams, who all too often seem to be working at cross-purposes.
Follow up quickly.
How fast you respond to requests, etc. can cement a budding relationship or kill it. It’s an indication of your company’s commitment to customer service at every step, including after the sale.
Growth is every company’s goal. For that, you need effective marketing. But profitability depends on cost-effective marketing, too. The faster you can move prospects through your sales funnel – to a successful conclusion – the faster your company can grow.
This article was syndicated from Business 2 Community: How to Increase the Velocity of Your Marketing Funnel
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