Inbound Marketing Methodology: Step 3, Close
Congratulations! You’ve reached the third step of The Inbound Marketing Methodology (original post found here). This is when you take the leads that you’ve developed through your marketing efforts and close the sale.
Unfortunately, this is where many companies drop the ball. Although you’ve worked diligently to attract potential customers and turn them into leads, closing the sale is often the hardest part of the process. That being said, if you follow through and learn a few nuances of the process, your success is almost guaranteed.
Nurture Your Leads Like a Loving Mother
Obviously, not every person who visits your website and searches through your various pages will immediately turn into a customer. Very often, you will need to guide them as if they’re your own children, to further press upon them that your service or product is something they need or, at the very least, something they should want. If you can do this successfully, you’ll be rewarded with brand new customers who may even tell their friends about you.
This part of the process is conducted by sending out marketing e-mails to further your connection with the leads you’ve collected. Each marketing e-mail should feature a dynamic presentation that grabs their attention and highlights what you have to offer. It is essential that you make the message clear, use well-designed visuals as needed, and shape it to match the buyer’s persona. Very few people like reading extensive sales pitches or advertisements, so you must also avoid being long-winded. Get in, give them your message, and get out of Dodge!
Lead Scoring to Success
So many people in the world are up in arms over how much we’re being tracked at all times, especially for marketing purposes. Write about something on your Facebook page and pop-up ads about that very subject will begin to appear. For savvy business owners, though, tracking what a visitor does on your website — a process called lead scoring — is essential for success. Lead scoring can be very effective, but it’s also time-consuming. If you don’t have a lot of leads, you should concentrate your efforts on gathering leads instead.
For those who have plenty of leads to work with, it’s important that you know how these visitors are using your website. You can track how they arrived at your site, which pages they visited, how much time they spent on each page, the number of links they clicked, and a whole slew of other information. All of this is used to determine if they are a good prospect for utilizing your services or products and how much time and energy you should use to lure them back to your website. When a lead is determined to be a solid prospect, you should always follow up with marketing content that relates to the person’s activity and online profile, if available.
A Little Integration for a Big Payoff
In order for your sales department to successfully close as many leads as possible, it’s imperative that you integrate everything that you’ve learned from your online marketing efforts and customer insights into your Customer Relationship Management. This will allow your sales team to have easy access to helpful items like downloads, pages viewed, e-mails opened, social media engagement, and much more. This allows them to compose marketing e-mails that have a much higher chance at closing the sale.
Closing the sale is the part of the marketing process where a business truly proves its mettle. Of course, in some ways, closing the sale is only the beginning of a much more exciting adventure, which we’ll cover in our fourth and final blog on the subject. Until then, enjoy what you’ve learned so far!
