How Will You Hit Your New Business Goals in 2020? Align Your Marketing and Business Development Touchpoints
As we embark on a new year (and a new decade), many of us take the opportunity to hit “reset” or improve personally. Some may whip up New Year’s resolutions last-minute, while others set intentions or one-word-themed mantras for the year.
But, what about your business resolutions? Do you set goals each year, but consistently find you struggle to hit them? For our example, let’s say this year, you want to grow your revenue by adding 10 new clients. How will you make that happen?
We recommend a solid marketing plan, one that defines the steps that will help you reach your goal. Let’s walk through the marketing journey and review different ways you can secure those new clients, starting with this graphic — a sample roadmap:
We all know the rule of thumb that it takes 7 to 13 touches to convert a prospect. How will you achieve this frequency to hit your goal of 10 new clients?
No single tactic will make the sale because there is no silver bullet. You need to think through the buying cycle. Forty-seven percent of buyers look at 3-5 pieces of content before engaging with a sales rep. Consider:
1) You need touchpoints “in the field” to make your firm top-of-mind. Examples include:
Advertising
Website
Social media
Blogs
Guest columns
Guides and e-books
2) You need follow-up content. These touchpoints pull double duty for the consideration and loyalty aspects of the cycle. They include:
Events, plus pre- and post- event touches
Webinars, plus pre- and post- event touches
Newsletters and targeted email
3) All of these marketing touchpoints support what you’re doing for business development. Your portion of the touchpoint map should include:
Networking with clients and prospects
Meeting with referral sources
Speaking at events and conferences
Pitch meetings
Follow-ups to pitches
Take a step back and look at how many touchpoints there are once marketing and business development work together. Now you’re on the right track for building something scalable and repeatable that you can use to convert 10 new clients.
Now let’s take a deeper dive into each aspect of the sales cycle, and how marketing can support it:
Brand Awareness
How are you meeting new people — in person and online? Are you speaking at local industry events? Are you paying for print and/or digital advertisements? Are you optimizing blogs for your firm’s website?
Per dollar spent, content marketing generates around 3x as many leads and costs 62% less than traditional marketing. Blogs, for example, are just one way to educate and attract potential new clients who are looking for subject matter experts and solutions to issues.
Ask yourself, do you want to simply build a voice for your brand, or drive more traffic to your website? How often you should blog will differ based on your goal. If you’re seeking more traffic, you’ll need to blog more often. For small businesses with limited resources, Hubspot recommends you post an article 1-2x a week, and that you diversify your content, which could include an infographic. Once the blog is complete, have a plan on how you will promote that content across your communication channels.
Consideration
You can’t rely on blog content or word-of-mouth referral alone for a potential client to hire you, with no additional effort. You’ve captured their attention, but how can you convert those prospects into 10 leads over time? This is the most critical step where prospects are comparing you to other firms. You need to establish trust and show how your solutions are the best fit. On average, a Marketo study found that lead nurturing can help generate over 50% more sales-ready leads.
In your blog post, you can introduce a “learn more” link that syncs up to a landing page where you offer up a new informative piece of content, like an in-depth, how-to guide, in exchange for their contact information. To create that, ask yourself what categories of solutions your potential clients investigate? How do they usually educate themselves on these subjects?
A direct mail approach or targeted LinkedIn Account-Based Marketing (ABM) ads could complement your multi-channel approach by sending potential clients to your landing page incentive.
Purchase
Consider that 80% of prospects say "no" four times before they say "yes,” which is usually due to a lack of lead nurturing. So how do you close? Follow up. After your prospect requests a piece of content, send a follow-up email. Keep in mind, you don’t want your follow-up “ask” email to be a hard sales pitch.
And don’t forget, analytics are important to 1) monitor how many touch points you’ll need before converting your clients, and 2) to find out what strategy brings the most engagement.
Customer Engagement
Once you start converting leads, you’ll want to establish a cadence by sending out client communication, such as an email newsletter. Whether that’s weekly or once a month, send it at the same time so clients know when to expect it. This creates a consistent touchpoint with your current and prospective clients.
When you continue to nourish working relationships, your existing clients are more likely to refer you to friends or family. In fact, boosting your retention rate by a mere 5% can increase your profits anywhere from 25% to 95%. Don’t miss out on this gold mine of profitability which requires minimal effort.
Loyalty
Your work isn’t done once you’ve landed your 10 new leads. Your objective at this point in the journey is to encourage existing clients to recommend you to other COIs. Set up an automated email asking for a review or develop a referral program. Use your network of current clients as a recommendation tool in obtaining the next 10 new clients. And don’t forget to stay current and relevant with your emails and social posts—happy clients will share your materials with other potential prospects.
Remember, Rome wasn’t built in a day. It could take up to a year to see significant revenue increases, but these essential touchpoints will reap results. Once you find what works best for your audience, you’ll be able to switch over to maintenance mode.
Don’t feel like you’re in this alone either. Demand Metric finds that 62% of companies outsource their content marketing. As always, the KSG team would be happy to review your current strategy and assist you in driving results from point A to B. Contact us to set up a consultation and let us know how we can help.