Practical Tips to Pursue Relationships

Published: October 6, 2020

Author
Mariah Raner

Categories:

A business without leads is bound to fail. If you play your cards right, you can transform these qualified prospects into regular clients. However, leads should not be the only consideration for your company. You also need to understand your buyers’ journey and couple it with your company’s marketing funnel while establishing the best customer relationships in the process.

So how do you convert your prospects into loyal customers who contribute to your business success? Let us explore.

Coupling the Buyer’s Journey with Your Marketing Funnel

Marketing and sales are both crucial components of running your business. Savvy entrepreneurs leverage the buyer’s journey concept as their preferred strategy to grow their sales volumes. In essence, this concept highlights stages that prospects go through – from learning about your brand to completing the transaction. 

You can use several strategies to influence the buyer journey of your product or service. Among the most reliable and practical approaches is by coupling it with the marketing funnel. This refers to the sales and marketing perspective of the entire process of converting leads into clients.

The marketing funnel comprises these key sections:

Awareness

This uppermost level of your marketing funnel involves drawing potential customers through research and marketing campaigns. Certainly, it forms the lead generation component of your marketing funnel.

Interest

After generating the leads, they’ll now move to the interest level. Thus, learning more about your brand. You can begin developing your relationship and introduce your positioning through emails, industry or brand-specific content, or newsletters.

Consideration

By now, the leads will have become marketing qualified. These are your prospective customers. With this in mind, ensure you provide helpful information on your offers and products. Continue nurturing those in your lead database with free trials, case studies, and targeted content. For example, you can use an automated email campaign  for this.

Intent

This stage is for prospects who’ve demonstrated their interest in purchasing. You can identify them through surveys, after they’ve viewed the product demo, or when they place your product or service on the shopping cart. Here, you can only influence them by making a strong case for what makes your solution the best.

Evaluation

Here, the prospect will review your case and decide whether they’ll make the purchase. This stage requires a marketing-sales joint effort to convince the buyer.

Purchase

In this final stage, the prospect will have decided to shop, and thus they become a customer.

As you may have noticed, all these stages involve continuous nurturing of customer relationships. Successful business executives emphasize on building customer relationships to acquire and retain customers. Above all, organizations that focus on enhancing their relationships with clients enjoy a broad base of loyal clients, positive reviews, and higher sales volumes.

While robust customer relationships may be crucial, you can’t establish them overnight. Just like any other personal relationship, you must do everything to cultivate and nurture them. The rule of thumb is to make your clients feel important. By doing this regularly would significantly increase your success chances.

Tips to Generate Leads and Enhance Relationships

Here are the practical approaches for increased leads and enhanced customer relationships:

Leverage Buyer Personas

It will help if you maintain insight into the varying nature of your typical customers and their needs. Ensure you establish buyer personas and keep analyzing them frequently. This way, your communications will stay fresh, and you’ll always send the appropriate message to your audience for better relationships.

Map Up Your Buyer Journey

You must understand the particular stages in which your different prospects are to recognize their needs and know the right content to send to them. Furthermore, you’ll be able to tell between the dormant members in the database to remove from your mailing list and those that need more information for their needs or on your product or service.

Go Beyond Lead Generation

This is among the most crucial approaches to marketing and lead generation. Don’t only add leads to your database – proceed to focus on engaging each of them. Unengaged leads will never convert, and enhanced engagement translates to more leads. You can leverage email automation solutions and other reliable tools to find and classify your subscribers based on their marketing funnel level.

Outdo Customer Service Expectations

Clients are usually positive whenever they get proactive service, and one key attribute to memorable client experiences is real-time support. The approach is a win-win: you’ll outdo the expectations and build your brand image as well. Besides offering real-time support, ensure you connect with your customer needs and make each of them feel special.

Offer Solutions

As you focus on nurturing relationships with customers, ensure you include solving problems in your strategy. Put yourself in their shoes, understand their daily struggle, and begin drafting marketing content that provides practical solutions. Above all, the content should focus on educating your audience, not selling your brand. The solutions you offer will place you as an industry expert, and with time, they’ll soon be coming to you for more answers.

Establish Your Client Advisory Board

Your customers need to be heard, as well. This board gives your clients a voice, and they can share their insights into your quality of service and suggest any enhancements to the solutions you offer. This tells your prospects and clients that you are a listener and require their feedback to implement both the product and organizational changes. This will nurture your relationship, and they’ll always know that they’ve genuinely invested in the company’s success.

Leverage Social Media

Social platforms are among the cheapest and most effective lead generation tools. It is the best opportunity if you’re ready to surpass brand awareness and customer engagement and should be part of your marketing strategy already. Begin with creating an optimized profile, then generate compelling content. Also, ensure your landing pages are updated and user friendly, and leverage lead ads

Increase Your Customers with Industry Experts

Nurturing leads and building lasting relationships with your clients and prospects isn’t a simple process. Therefore, you’ll need to invest lots of effort over time to achieve your business goals. Furthermore, you need an in-depth knowledge of the buyers’ journey and how you can couple this with your marketing funnel for the best results.

Need expert guidance pursuing more leads? We at BrandCraft have your back. The agency is home to a dedicated team of knowledgeable lead generation experts to help you grow your client base.

Schedule a consultation with us today for professional guidance.

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