For a long time we used a outbound methodology when it comes to selling our product to businesses and organizations. That means we manually prospected, reached out to, followed-up with, and provided guidance to potential customers. While effective, it came at a substantial cost. A cost that couldn't be justified as LeadServe is designed to work for businesses of all shapes and sizes, not just big enterprise accounts with tons of money to spend. We needed a better way to nurture prospects, and we figured out a way to do it using a few key vendors and a passive, "sell without selling" strategy.
Discovery - provide a prospect who has never heard of you an actionable and beneficial reason for them to receive more information about your service. LeadServe is a great discovery platform as you can target by geo-location and business category on our expansive site network.
When interested new leads take you up on your offer, LeadServe captures their email address and sends it automatically to your ESP or CRM.
Provide Value - send a weekly newsletter and inform your email subscribers of new success methods, tips, and product features. There are a ton of great email marketing platforms that make it easy to create and schedule newsletters, and there is a growing list of companies that can help you write great content as well.
Be sure to include a link to your site where leads can continue on with their reading. By sending subscribers to your website, you can later display banner ads to them through the use of retargeting, explained in more detail next paragraph.
Entice and Convert - use retargeting banners to entice leads with your most compelling value propositions. We use AdRoll for this. By pasting their tracking code to all your landing pages and blog articles, you can display banner ads all over the web, to people who have previously visited your site. This is important as the banner ad space is an incredibly competitive one. You want to be sure that you are spending money on potential new customers who have displayed multiple levels of interest in your product. Retargeting ensures that!
When in this stage, be aggressive with your banner ad creative and test many different versions. Address various pain points that your product can help with in your copy. After a month's worth of data, analyze which copy is generating the most clicks. Voila, you've just learned which pain points resonate with your most active and engaged leads. Take this information and apply it to your other two phases. Pause creatives that are not working as well, and repeat the process.