As a marketer one of your top priorities is getting new leads for your marketing efforts. This is time-consuming work and the longer you’re at it the more difficult it becomes. Simply because, as time goes on, you have already identified the easiest prospects and it becomes more and more difficult to find new ones.
What if There Was a Way . . .
. . . you didn’t have to go through this process as frequently and still be able to find hot buyers ready to buy the product or service you offer?
There is.
It is Using An Approach Very Few of Your Competitors Are Taking – One with the Potential to Pay Major Dividends to You
What is this approach?
Doing new Content Marketing campaigns to prospects you have already in your campaigns but who have not purchased from you.
If you’re like most marketers, you immediately forgot about all of the prospects you had in your sales funnel at the time you ended your last Content Marketing campaign.
Most probably you never followed up with any of these and never will again unless you have a new product or service they may be interested in. If you were a little more aggressive, you may have put some of these into a drip campaign and may be contacting them every several months to let them know your company still exists.
Starting a new Content Marketing campaign focused on them never crossed your mind. Yet, it has the potential to be a great move on your part.
Look at This Funnel From a Prior Post
Marketing Campaign 1
At the start, there were 300 prospects in the campaign. At the end, only 15 were ready to buy. 285 fell by the wayside.
If all were selected according to the ideal Buyer persona, each one was a good candidate to purchase the product or service being offered. For some reason 285 were not ready to buy. Looking more closely, they fell out at different points along the way.
Now look at the same funnel with the figures added on the left.
180 never moved from prospects to Leads. 60 never moved from Leads to Great Leads. 45 never moved from Great Leads to Ready to Buy.
Some of these may have ended up buying the product or service from a competitor. Others have never purchased at all. So what does that mean? There are companies in your campaign who need what you offer but have not pulled the trigger. Eventually they are going to buy. Most probably it will be from the company in the forefront of their minds at the time.
Can You Risk This Not Being Your Company?
Isn’t it to your advantage to see if you can turn them into a customer?
What steps should you take? What’s the best way to do this?
I am going to suggest you create a new Content Marketing campaign for these people and companies.
- First, have your sales department and your sales reps review all 285 prospects. Find out from them which ones they consider to be companies that will want to purchase the product or service you offer.
Your sales reps should weed out those which may have purchased the product or service from a competitor?
- Then develop new marketing pieces for them and do this slightly differently.
The New Content Marketing Campaign
You start with the group who were great leads but never moved to the ready to buy stage.
There may have been several reasons for this. Here’s some:
- The timing may not have been right. There were other products or services they needed to purchase and everything could not be purchased at once.
- While the people who needed your product or service would have purchased it, one of their company’s executives vetoed the purchase.
- They didn’t know enough about your company and they were just not comfortable moving forward.
Ask your sale reps to do some research and see what the reason may have been. This is a fairly small group. It won’t take them long to find out and get back to you.
When you have the information they have obtained, come up with marketing pieces to deal with each objection they heard. If they find a company didn’t buy because the timing was off, still send the new marketing pieces to them. Once you get past one hurdle, another one may pop up.
You then move on to those who were leads and did not become great leads.
Assume the marketing pieces they received promoting your company and the service you provide made a positive connection with them. Send one or two marketing pieces reinforcing this.
The main reason they didn’t become great leads was the marketing you were sending them about the product or service you were offering didn’t connect with them. They didn’t see the value of replacing what they already had with what you offer. So there was no reason to go forward.
Here you will have to revamp the marketing pieces about your product or service. If the people getting your marketing are analytical, you marketing may have to have far more details about your product or service. If your marketing had too many details and specifics, come up with new pieces that have less.
The last group to focus on is those who never went from prospects to Leads.
At this stage, your marketing was very general focused on letting the person know about your company and the service you provide. You also gave them some general information about the product or service you provide.
For some reason it did not connect with them.
- Perhaps they had too many things on their plate at the time and never paid attention to what they received from you.
- They may have not heard of your company and didn’t have the time to want to learn more about it.
- They didn’t think they needed the product or service you were offering. The other products or services they needed to buy were a higher priority and they focused on those.
Create new marketing pieces to show them why your company is the one to provide this product or service to them. Also add marketing that gives them more information about the product or service, why they need it and what it will do for their company.
The Reason to Build This Content Marketing Campaign in Reverse is Simple
You work on those most likely to buy first. Then you work backwards from there. By the time you get to the prospects who never became leads, your entire marketing campaign is in place. As you move people from Prospects to Leads, to Great leads and to those Ready to Buy you have all of the marketing pieces in place. You won’t have to create any new ones.
