B2B and B2C selling in today’s market requires more than just traditional sales and marketing methods to be truly successful. Some folks may make the case that they haven’t invested in areas like social media, content marketing, SEO, digital marketing and are doing fine. They have the – “Don’t fix it if it ain’t broke” attitude, but don’t be fooled. Your business should be embracing social & digital marketing.
By not embracing new digital technologies and the online world in general, how much additional revenue are you leaving on the table? If I told you as an example that you could garner 30% more revenue by adding a digital and online component to your marketing and sales efforts? would that entice you even more if the cost was less than 5% of those new revenues would you be more interested? What if you could improve customer engagement, repeat visits, repeat purchases and improve referrals all by utilizing digital and online engagement models? Interested?
We have a client in the automotive sales space. Not an environment I would say that has embraced social and digital marketing and sales much. Historically they spent the majority of their marketing dollars on traditional marketing such as newspaper and print ads. They were finding that although these allowed them to hit specific geographies they were really expensive and did not allow for any real differentiation. One of the main challenges they felt was that after they ran an ad, their competition the week later would run a very similar ad offering the same thing but at an even lower price. In addition, they were finding it difficult to gauge success of these ads.
When we began working with them, the first thing we did was redo their website, make it more visually appealing, add in large call to action buttons and integrate social media and content marketing to the mix. We also implemented an automotive CRM to assist with the lead tracking and list building process.
Given our client’s focus on consumer selling our efforts have revolved around:
Leveraging Facebook to help push and share information as well as provide customer feedback to our client. A few days ago, some negative feedback was posted from a customer pertaining to a service experience. The capture and quick sharing of this information allowed the service department to respond almost in less than a few hours. The fact that the customer was willing to share their challenging experience online gave our customer the opportunity to connect, discuss and resolve their challenge. Social media is a great way to stay in contact with your audience.
Content Marketing
Our goal here is to keep the content on the website fresh, relevant and interesting for our clients’ customers and prospects. By creating organic content and sharing relevant third party content on the website and social media properties, we can keep stakeholders engaged at a low cost point. By focusing on content on keywords, we are able to improve SEO rankings and drive more web traffic and ultimately leads to and from the site. As a caveat here, web traffic over the last three months has increased over 30% and the site is generating 30 plus leads per month and another 40 to 50 service interactions.
Newsletter
Another plank in the content plan was the creation of an electronic newsletter to share content with customers and prospects proactively. Leveraging the customer and prospect information stored in the sales CRM system, we have been able to build up a solid list of recipients who have a direct interest in our clients’ content. Our e-newsletter allows for us to analyze what content recipients are interacting with most and also allows recipients to easily unsubscribe should they feel it necessary.
As we continue to build their online, social media and digital presence we are confident the numbers will continue to grow over time. To be effective at this, you need long-term commitment. If you do not have the appetite to keep this rolling as part of your marketing and sales spend then it is best not to do it in the first place.
If you are interested in discussing how you can better utilize content marketing to drive more traffic to your website and get more leads, feel free to contact me. You can also sign-up for our monthly newsletter to receive great marketing tips.
