Meta: Empathetic selling, personalized messaging and value-driven solutions are key to boosting lead generation in a post-covid world. Here are 5 tactics to consider.

We know all too well the tectonic disruptions the Covid-19 pandemic has inflicted on the business world. Some companies experienced unprecedented growth, while most barely weathered the ensuing economic repercussions.

However, you have to love the human resilience, as the teams were busy exploring innovative ways to stay afloat and attract new customers amid the disruption.

They understood that buyers’ priorities and motivations had changed and adopted approaches that managed the short term and prepared for a post-crisis future.

These teams combine person-to-person communication with analytics and empathetic selling to deliver value-driven solutions to potential customers. Let’s explore several innovative lead generation strategies who will probably take center stage.

1. Account Based Marketing (ABM)

With ABM, brands target selected accounts that data shows represent significant growth opportunities if given personalized support.

Even if lead generation is your goal, ABM provides a holistic view of key accounts, allowing you to target both existing and potential customers.

For existing customers, cross-selling or up-selling will allow you to offer more value while increasing your revenue. And with new accounts, you will close deals.

When crafting your ABM strategy, you’ll need to consider the specific attributes of these accounts to ensure that every campaign, every touchpoint is perfectly personalized.

This is the best way to generate interest and encourage engagement.

Best practices include:

• Formalize the selection process. Strategic selection of large accounts will require a thorough understanding of these accounts and their conversion/growth potential. You go beyond demographics to uncover their business goals, key pre-purchase stages, and lifecycle.
• Coordinate your teams. Traditionally, marketing-focused awareness campaigns stop when target accounts become sales-ready and sales teams now take over to wrap things up. With ABM, marketers and salespeople fully collaborate to ensure successful, non-fragmented account engagement.
• Consider an account-based sales force approach. Each team member is assigned an account and drives campaigns, interactions, and progress through the funnel. Only the representative in charge of an account can update their details in the system, thus minimizing tampering or unwarranted communication with prospects.
• Work on your tech stack. With the right software stack, you can evaluate the account selection process and engagement and make adjustments as needed. Since most teams already have a martech stack, you can add other tools along the way to address individual steps in the process. Alternatively, you can opt for the end-to-end ABM platform as it encompasses all functions of the ABM strategy.

1. Consider marketing analytics

Determining the ROI of marketing efforts, identifying campaigns that worked, uncovering potential improvements, and forecasting are key factors in lead generation.

The best way to measure them to find out what works, what doesn’t and why is to analyze the data. With tools like Google Analytics, BuzzSumo, Buffer, Cyfe, HubSpot, Klipfolio, and SendPulse, you can quantify your marketing efforts.

Some tools assess all marketing data while others focus on specific channels such as social media, email marketing, or ads. It depends on your needs.

Key benefits include:

• Learn what happened. It has been difficult to navigate the murky waters of post-COVID 19 and marketers have resorted to all sorts of tactics to revive business. Through analytics, you can examine these efforts and their impact to assess their value.
• Understand what is happening now. Assessing marketing efforts in real time allows you to spot errors and quickly pivot or make adjustments. You will also select high value leads or those with a higher propensity to buy and focus on them.
• Predict what might happen. Predictive analytics allows you to anticipate and prepare for consumer behavior. You can use the information to adjust offers or come up with new solutions to help you access new customers and access new markets.

1. Telephone canvassing

Lockdown has humanized us in many ways. Today, we appreciate being able to move freely, interact freely and have real conversations with real humans all the more.

If you want to initiate relationships with potential customers away from search engine advertising and other remote tactics, cold calling is what you need. It’s an exclusive opportunity to engage real people with your tone of voice and pitch your offers to them.

Best practices include:

• Define aims. watch your cold calling metrics. How many calls do you need to make daily, weekly, and monthly to reach your quota? What approach will you use to make your calls productive?
• To prepare. Thorough knowledge of your offerings and industry is a must, lest the prospect confuse you with counter questions. Gather information about your prospect and their industry that you can leverage (not manipulate) in negotiations.
• Be smart about scripting. Write down the purpose of the call, how to get around the keeper, and introduce yourself to the decision maker. Use open-ended questions to discern their needs, share your value proposition, work with their objections, and aim for your goal.
• Respect the prospect. However the call goes, avoid getting aggressive or cursing the prospect. No matter how great your solutions are, don’t drag conversations, keep your pitch concise, and be nice.

1. Infographics

Today’s audience will hardly part with their contact information unless they think the information you are sharing is valuable. Communicating your knowledge of consumer needs and solutions through infographics is a non-aggressive way to reach prospects.

Compared to long-form content, they are easy to munch on and visually appealing, which means people can skim through them quickly and derive value from them.

As your audience consumes the infographic, they perceive your technical expertise, which builds trust and encourages them to engage with your brand. These audiences will be comfortable sharing their contact because they think you have more to offer.

Key considerations include:

• Address pain points. Use surveys, original research, information from relevant online forums, and feedback from customer-facing teams to determine consumer pain points. Create truthful infographics that address these issues and provide helpful solutions for them.
• Use infographics to supplement your long-form content. Do you have an ebook? Maybe an industry study? An infographic that attractively summarizes the content can help drive traffic to your ebook or study and generate leads.
• Create compelling titles. Negative superlatives like errors or warnings and titles that include data or numbers are popular with audiences. Keep your titles concise and very specific so the audience knows what to expect from the infographic.
• Use a simple design. A clean design with a proper layout that allows your information to flow easily is best. You want to capture attention and keep the audience engaged, not lose them through poor navigation.

1. Q&A forums and online communities

We are naturally social and gravitate towards those who share our values, beliefs, passions and interests.

It’s no wonder, then, that many people join online communities to follow critical issues or stay in touch with thought leaders. Here they feel empowered to raise issues, ask questions, and answer questions.

For the marketer, industry-relevant online communities and forums are a great opportunity to observe conversations about issues and provide expert advice.

You can control industry authority by constantly sharing detailed and accurate information. Not to mention access to a pool of user-inspired content for your content marketing strategy.

Unwritten rules of conduct include:

• Be useful. Respond to queries with relevant, instant knowledge that audiences can appreciate and without expecting recognition or praise. People can smell an egoist a mile away and you don’t want to be that person.
• Read pinned messages before starting conversations or sharing replies. Permanently pinned posts provide engagement guidelines you’ll want to follow lest you get kicked. Avoid redundancy by analyzing existing conversations to make sure you’re not touching on topics that have already been covered.
• Be professional. Adopt a polite and professional tone even when your audience posts sarcastic comments. Your posts say a lot about your brand and you never know who is following your comments. A condescending tone can turn off potential customers.

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