Mauricio Romero
Creating demand for your company needs a lot of work. Most business owners might think that just with an advertising message, your funnel is going to get qualified leads. You need to help your leads take some steps forward to advance at the end of the funnel (Sales). Discover the steps.
1 Demand generation B2B or B2C
It has always been a good conversation if the business to business strategies are different from the business to consumer strategies. If they are different, you need to understand the similitud and differences before you choose a strategies or the other. This is the first step. Are they really different?
From the tactics point of view they might seem quite different, but at the end, the needs of a buyer are the same whether they are B2B, B2C or B2G (business to government). Why they are the same? Well... At the end they are people buying from people. This is the real principle. So we need to ask, how does people take buying decisions? What information they need to take a step forward?
Some investigations have found that all buyers need to have three main questions answered to take a decision:
- What does it solves and why do i need your solution/service/product?
- What is the result?
- Why should i buy from you?
This three questions have all other questions inside of them. How much they cost? What are your guarantees etc...
These are the questions that every sales conversation have. Before this conversation was between a sales rep and the buyer. They didn’t have another option because the sales people had all the information about this questions. But people don’t want to interact with sales people as before. They have a new space where they can have this conversation in an anonymous way, at their peace and with no need to interact with a sales person. This space is the internet.
All buyers have this questions and they need to solve them before they buy from you or anybody else. So your company have to address all this questions through digital content. That is why content is a crucial for a demand generation strategy.
2 Demand generation and content marketing
Content is king, in fact content is information, and information is power. So the second step is to understand how and why it works to attract people.
Why does content attract people into my sales funnel?
When people detect they have a problem that needs to be solved is when they start to ask the questions we talked before. How do they get answers? The fastest way to solve this in the era of information is internet. Just ask Google, or any other search engine.
Are the search engines responsible to have all the information you are searching? NO. Their responsibilities are only to have where you can find it and give you a recommendation on what are the best results for your questions. If they don’t give you the a good answer they will go out of business. That is why Google took over other search engines, because it gives you better results.
So who is responsible to give the best answers? YOU AND YOUR DIGITAL CONTENT. This simple principle is the one that is getting tons of people into businesses sales funnels. Just content about clients questions.
How does content help people advance in their buying decision?
If you have been close to sales you know you need to answer a lot of questions. How much time it takes? In a regular sales process it takes from 15 minutes to 3 or 4 hours. Thin about how much time does a sales meeting takes to sell your service. They regularly are about an hour. How many meetings you have before you close the sale? Regularly 3 or 4.
So content is not only for attract people when they use search engines at the beginning of their buying decision. It is information they are going to need through all the sales process. So you need to make content for all the buyers journey.
This content around your buyers journey not only helps the buyer take a decision, it helps to start a relation based on trust and makes you an expert in the field that is willing to help them solve their problem.
3 Demand generation and lead capture
Remember people want to do their research anonymously? Well is really true at the beginning of their journey. They don’t know you, so they don’t trust you. That is why they don’t contact you immediately after they get to your content. How many times have you contact or buy only by watching one advertising message, from a product or vendor you have never seen before? Or getting into a unknown website?
This is why you need a lead capture strategy. How do you do it? To people give you their name and email? How do you help them give that step forward from being anonymous and risk to give you information of who they are?
Guess what? The answer is again CONTENT. You should offer them a way to understand much better how they can solve their problem. So you trade this special content in exchange of their name and email. This is the only way you can start a conversation with them and a good start point where they show a little bit of interest in your solution. This content can be an ebook, video, webinar, free demo, free consultation etc...
This is the first step to start a conversation with them, remember they are not ready to buy. You haven’t build enough trust. If you try to call them after this first step they are going to tell you they don’t know you and they have never filled up a form in your website.
What you want is them to give you at least 15 minutes in person to see if you can help them. Not all people are ready to talk to sales reps right away. This is why you need to nurture them.
4 Lead nurturing
Lead nurture is what you really did in a traditional sales process in your second and third meeting with a lead or potential client. In a digital strategy is almost the same. The only difference is that you are going to give them small pieces of information, or answer one question at a time.
You do this because people have so many things in their heads that they might postpone solving the problem they were trying to address when they got into your website. Remember we are in the multitask era. We do so many activities at the same time that our attention is intermittent between activities.
Your nurturing content should remember them you can help them, build trust, give them value that will start a relationship. This trust will make them accept a call from you, because you wont be a complete stranger. They have interact with you (Your content), enough time to see you are a good fit for help them solve their issue.
Only after that trust is made you’ll be able to close a deal with them.
5 Close
Close the sale is the last step. Even when closing we need a lot of content. A final proposal with a presentation, a contract or agreement, policy and guarantees, etc...
This is why content is a core part of any buying decision process, or demand generation strategy.
We can help you understand more about what content you should be including in your marketing and sales messages that will affect the buying decision of your potential customers.
We can help you understand more about how to generate leads for your marketing funnel through our experience making great strategies. Visit the next page to learn more.
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