Did you know that in the B2B market, a small deal can take around 3 months, and a larger deal can take between 6 to 9 months?
That’s because, unlike in the B2C world where consumers are impulsive and buy for themselves, the B2B sector purchases are often dependent on business budgets, the business needs, and involve multiple decision-makers.
As a result, the sales and marketing teams need to map out leads in advance and nurture these relationships to convert them into sales in the future.
In the most recent CopyHouse TechTalks episode, Kathryn Strachan, Managing Director of CopyHouse, joined Stephen Harlow, Chief Sales Officer at Sopro, Katie Street, the Street Agency Founder and Ben Potter, a Business Development Adviser and Non-Exec, to discuss how you can capture leads at every stage of the sales funnel.
If you missed this event or need a refresher, you can now watch it on-demand here or read the highlights from the event below.
Before diving into your content marketing strategy, you first need to establish who your audience is. By creating a customer avatar, you can figure out what your customer’s pain points are, what’s keeping them up at night, why they need a particular product or service and most importantly, how you can help solve their challenges and ease their burden.
By creating this customer avatar, you can then design a marketing strategy that reaches your ideal customers and speaks directly to them.
“As a thought leader, I would look at my target audience, see who they are and what they want to learn as well as what they need from me. I can then develop content based on these insights.”
- Kathryn Strachan, Managing Director and Owner of CopyHouse.
In addition to discovering who your target audience is, Katie recommends looking at three key things to position yourself as a thought leader:
Once you’ve done some extensive desk research on these factors, you can then line up your content with your personal vision and begin pushing your brand out there.
“Thought leadership is something which is genuinely insightful. It’s where you educate a prospect on something they either don't know about themselves, their business, or the market they're operating in.
Don’t just put random stuff out there. Instead, put thought into your content and produce something genuinely insightful”.
- Ben Potter, Business Development Adviser and Non-Exec.
Katie also suggests that instead of creating all types of content or focusing on a single type, you need to first figure out who your target audience is and how they prefer to consume content.
For example, some customer’s will prefer to read blogs or books, whilst others prefer to listen to a podcast or a YouTube video. It’s good to keep your target audience’s lifestyle in mind and tailor the content directly to them.
“For me, email marketing is the best way to get consumers engaged. Once you’ve figured out who you are and what you’re talking about, email marketing is a great tool!”
- Katie Street, Founder and Managing Director of Street Agency.
During this episode of TechTalks, our panellists discussed numerous tools they use to start conversations with potential leads and business prospects.
From recommendations such as Apollo and Sopro to more familiar and everyday platforms like LinkedIn, Our experts discussed the benefits of them all.
For example, Kathryn uses both Sopro and LinkedIn to build relationships with potential leads.
First Sopro filters through the data of potential valuable prospects and makes the initial introduction by sending out “authentic” emails on behalf of Kathryn, through Kathryn’s inbox.
After that, Kathryn’s able to connect with those who engaged with the emails, through LinkedIn. Here they can interact with her day to day content, whether it’s personal or professional. This allows Kathryn to be at the top of their mind, even if they’re not ready to buy yet.
“In the past, we’ve used Sopro emails to connect with potential prospects and then followed up by connecting with them on LinkedIn. Often, these prospects come back to me a year later saying: ”we've seen your stuff on LinkedIn, good job with that, we’re ready to work with you.”
Email and LinkedIn campaigns are a great way to remain connected to potential customers and in-directly nurture these leads through the funnel. By staying connected, when a potential prospect is ready to purchase, your brand is first in mind.
Despite 81% of B2B marketers saying email marketing is the most used tool, 16% of emails end up in spam. So how do marketers avoid their emails being sent directly to spam or remain unopened?
One way is by writing the right subject line. Usually, spam filters work when they see an email that seems highly promotional or unauthentic. Spam filters can also push your email into spam if your IP address has been flagged as spam.
So to avoid generating a bad reputation, writing the right subject line can help engage your audience and increase your open rates.
You can do this by taking the following into consideration:
“Subject lines are massively important. In my experience, they've got to be fairly short and to the point. You can create a subject line that intrigues your audience and makes them want to open it, but the absolute number one rule about subject lines is that you should not be tricking somebody into opening an email.”
- Ben Potter, Business Development Adviser and Non-Exec.
“I agree with Ben, there are a few anomalies where a long tail subject line provides a good open rate, but as a general rule, shorter is better.
You also want to avoid anything that looks like a promotional email. So capitalization or emojis. You can ask a question, but it's generally not advised.”
- Stephen Harlow, Chief Sales Officer at Sopro.
.svg){kind=small}
