How Digital Marketing Amplifies Sales Lead Generation

Do you feel like marketing isn’t the best way to increase your sales? Or that your door-to-door knocking efforts are sufficient enough? If so, you should consider what digital marketing can do for you. The world of outside sales and digital marketing seem completely different, but when understood and used together, marketing and sales make a great team. You might think digital marketing isn’t worth it because you're an outside sales team, or your budget is tight, possibly it's too complicated without already having resources, but it’s important to understand that digital marketing can be used to increase your ability to find and contact the best leads for your industry. To understand how inbound marketing can boost lead closing and prospect outreach, you need to understand the process of the marketing funnel. Breaking down the aspects of digital marketing will lead to an increased understanding of how your leads are drawn in, what they engage with most, and what invites them to stay with your company and service.

Better lead generation is what digital marketing does for your sales process. Lets do a little math here: If you have 15 reps at $15/hour with 10% of their conversations not going anywhere, how much money are you losing? Or, if you pay purely commission, imagine how much time your reps spend in unproductive conversations and how detrimental that is to their morale. That leads to higher turn-over and, you guessed it, more costs. Lots of them.

But if you instead put that money into a more precise form of lead generation like with homeowner insights, geofenced marketing, google ads, facebook ads, etc. (all forms of digital marketing): how much more effective would you be? Lead generation is clumsy without digital marketing. There are two main parts of digital marketing to consider: inbound and outbound. Each side of digital marketing is a great form of intelligent lead generation.

What is Inbound Marketing?

If you’re not familiar with inbound marketing, it focuses on 3 basic steps that develop strong leads:

Attract

Drawing in your target audience with valuable content and conversations that establish you and your company as a trusted advisor and someone they want to engage with

Engage

Presenting useful insights and solutions that align with your target audience’s pain points and goals, making them more likely to buy from you

Delight and Invite

Providing help and support to empower your customers so they can find success with this purchase

Each of these steps is not only crucial to inbound marketing, but outside sales teams as well. When following them, strangers become prospects and prospects become established customers who promote you and your business.

Why Should You Care?

Marketing spreads word faster and more efficiently

It gives you more ways to engage customers

It’s the most natural way to engage the modern buyer

It brings in new, more-qualified customers

#1 Attract Strangers

Finding and contacting the right leads has never been easy, and sales teams dedicate a lot of time and resources knocking on the doors of prospects they know nothing about. There’s a newer, smarter way to find the right people to sell to. Outside sales teams have a particularly strong need for lead lists if they want to be successful. But too often companies overspend on lead lists that don’t fit their needs.

Create relevant content anyone can find. It’s no secret that if a customer has a question about your company, they’re more likely to google their pain point instead of waiting to talk to a sales rep. Because of this behavior, having a blog, articles, reviews, or anything that can answer the customers’ pain points will bring in more customers organically. On the other hand, if a customer can’t find anything about your company online, they automatically distrust you.

Use social media and digital advertising. It’s vital for your company to have social media accounts on Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, Twitter, etc. Having consistent professionalism on these platforms will show the prospect they can trust you. Nothing turns away a prospect faster than a 404 page or a sketchy website. Invest in an online presence to provide value and establish your brand in a helpful and relatable way.

Have a good presence on review sites: Google, Yelp, Angie’s List, etc. Having a high review score is proven to show the credibility and reliability of your company. People trust the opinions and experiences of other consumers. Focusing on a strong customer experience will earn repeat and referral business.

#2 Engage Prospects

Engagement for outside sales reps means connecting with your progressing prospects. Without a method of engaging prospects, they’ll easily fall out of your sales funnel and you’ll lose what could’ve been a closed deal. But connecting with a prospect doesn’t always mean knocking on their door or seeing them face-to-face. To successfully engage with modern customers, you should:

Have an accessible online presence. 71% of consumers who have had a positive experience with a brand on social media are likely to recommend the brand to their friends and family.

Use email campaigns. 8 out of 10 prospects actually prefer talking with reps over email. If you don’t already have a method for reaching out to prospects you’ve previously pitched to, you need one. Emails are a friendly way to remind prospects that they haven’t closed a deal with you yet and that they can chat with you anytime. Phone calls can be daunting for customers, making email a more universally-liked method of contact.

Lob Direct Mail: Direct mail campaigns are another reliable form of lead generation that is made easier through our integration with Lob. You can create various campaign types for different lead groups and send postcards to specific addresses, helping spread your brand and services.

These are methods that you can add to your playbook and current door-to-door efforts. There is always more than one way to engage with a customer and build a stronger lead list. Once you’ve found the best way to engage your customers, inviting them to commit to your service is the next goal.

#3 Delight and Invite Customers

Providing help and support to empower your customers to success is the final step in completing the inbound marketing campaign. People love purchasing when it’s a choice, and people hate purchasing things out of necessity. One of the great privileges of monetary exchange is being paid for your hard work. As consumers we are buying to solve our pain points—creating delight in the process. The classic example here is “you don’t buy a drill to own a drill, you buy a drill to own a hole.”

As such, consumers tend to purchase from individuals and companies that make the purchasing process enjoyable. Companies who consciously generate delight for their prospect or customer will have continual success. When consumers are having their pain points solved, they are emotionally and mentally open with your company, and you as a seller can invite them to do a variety of things beyond simply buying your service:

Commit them to more products and more purchasing of products or services, upgrades or enhancements aka “up selling.”

Provide plans for products or services that’ll deepen their commitment to use it over time.

Commit your prospect to participate in content generation such as case studies, referrals, reviews and recommendations about your company.

If they’re reluctant to buy, try to commit them to the next step in the buyer journey so you have another opportunity to continue selling to them.

What is
Outbound Marketing?

Door to door marketing is effective but, anyone that engages with inbound marketing has a level of interest. With outbound marketing, it’s all about initiating the conversation with your potential leads that already show some interest in your company or service. If you haven’t figured out the best methods of outbound marketing for your company, you’re in luck. We’ve built an entire class of products on our outside sales platform to help you find the perfect leads for your company and speed up your sales process:

Methods of Outbound Marketing

Here are just some of the ways of outbound marketing that we have developed and other methods that we recommend to make sure you create and continue to have a better lead generation process:

Sell Faster and Smarter with Digital Marketing

Everything you need to start having the right conversations with qualified, interested buyers follows the steps of the digital marketing process. Want to build a lead generation strategy that perfectly fits your company’s needs? Talk to one of our experts today for a free demo to get started using any of our awesome features or for more information on how to improve your sales process.