Time to change your marketing behaviour… 5 steps to better sales leads

Let’s be clear; marketers love an acronym. And sometimes they’re great. They’re short, punchy and often help us sell an idea or concept. The danger is that they sometimes confuse the issue, or they get used so much the meaning is lost. Look at ABM. It’s gathering pace with agencies and marketing departments, and provides a different way of targeting prospects. But it begs the question, is it enough of a departure from the traditional (and seriously outdated) mass marketing? There are ways to make it better, to give you those key insights into the key accounts.

But how? Here’s another acronym; incorporate behaviour-based marketing (BBM) and buyer intent into your approach. BBM is all about delivering better ROI when it comes to finding and nurturing quality leads. By using hard data on your prospects’ buying behaviours, you can understand where they are in the buying cycle. You can study data in real time to find out who’s in active buying mode and then target them with extreme precision.

Taking this a step further, the whole point of BBM is that it allows you to get personal. It’s about more than just knowing their names or titles. It’s about being able to personalise messages based on what they’re interested in, who they are talking to about it and why. In real time.

The next question is where to start.

We’ve put together 5 steps to help you get going.

1.     Adopt a tiered approach

Don’t waste your efforts on audiences who aren’t likely to engage. Simple. Instead, take a tiered approach to help you identify your total addressable market based on the current or future value to your business and their levels of engagement. In this way you’ll dedicate most of your marketing and sales resources to the audiences that have the best chance of engaging with you.

2.     Create a framework

This leads into adopting a framework that will help you optimise and scale up your efforts. You’ll know where to cut your losses and where to focus more effort on those prospects most likely to buy. Once you crack that, you can scale and expand the model across your other campaigns.

3.     Identify your buyers

This is where you begin to research the actions, influence and behaviours of the decision-making unit for each customer, and then map that back to their needs, personas and content.

4.     Identify your active market

In reality, only about 2-5% of your market are actually ever ready to buy or giving off buying signals. By combining timing, relevance and context, you can target the right people at the right time.

5.     Build your keyword strategy

A powerful keyword strategy lies at the core of identifying buying intent. So it needs to be based on relevant topics based on each stage of the buying journey, from awareness through to decision making.