Almost all your prospects have a smartphone, but are you reaching out to them with phone marketing?
Phone marketing has the potential to amplify your marketing campaign and a lot of industries have been using it to make a difference in the way that they do things.
In this article, we take a look at how phone marketing will be used in this decade and how to leverage it to grow your business.
Phone Marketing 2010-2019
When we think about phone marketing what usually comes into mind is annoying telemarketers that can’t seem to take “no” for an answer, but during the last decade, we saw the prevalence of sales discovery calls instead of telemarketing.
It is also in this time period that we saw the rise in people using their mobile devices as their primary source of internet communication. With the rapid growth of mobile and cloud-based communication, the role of phone in sales and marketing also evolved over recent years. Gone are old ways of using cold calling to generate leads but this doesn’t mean that call marketing is dead. One-to-one phone conversations still remain as impactful as they were before, especially in B2B multi-channel sales. Let’s take a look at the ways you can leverage phone calls to generate more leads, nurture prospects, and convert opportunities into customers.
Phone Marketing This Decade
Reinforce Touches Made on Other Channels
Phone marketing is a separate platform on its own, just like LinkedIn, for example, and as such you can use it as a remarketing platform.
What we like about phone marketing is that it involves an actual person on the other end of the line talking to a prospect. This automatically adds a personal touch to your remarketing efforts.
Think about it this way, say you’ve already made initial contact through an email or an ad campaign on Facebook, a phone call will further reinforce the message that you are trying to get through.
Qualify Your Website Leads
Lead qualification is a vital part of your lead generation campaign because bad leads waste both time and resources. You need high-quality leads to keep the sales momentum going and grow consistently.
You can prequalify leads with a questionnaire, you could do research about them via the internet, or better yet why not just talk to them?
Using phone marketing to qualify leads that come in through your website is the best way to filter out less-than-ideal customers.
Phone calls allow you to ask additional questions, pick up content clues, and judge a prospect’s propensity to buy.
Furthermore, it’s a great way to upsell your services and nurture colder leads on your pipeline.
Call-to-Invite
Event marketing is pretty powerful. There’s nothing better than getting all your prospects under one roof so that you can connect with them and find out what their real needs are.
However, it’s pretty costly to plan out and you’ve got to have a minimum number of people to be present to deem it to be a success.
One way to make invitations more personal – and to increase the likelihood of them attending – is to call people up to RSVP for an event.
This way you’ll know for sure if people are coming over and you make the invitation more personal.
Nurture Leads
As much as we all love lead generation hacks and the like, it’s lead nurturing that pushes the leads down our pipelines.
Now there are a lot of dynamic ways to go about lead nurturing using different platforms, but adding phone marketing to the mix this 2020 should be one of your goals.
Phone marketing is a great way to touch base with your prospect without being too pushy. Methods such as sales discovery calls are often employed in these circumstances and they’ve been useful for a lot of industries.
It doesn’t have to be a telemarketing type call, it could just be a simple one that aims to touch base.
So, the next time you take a look at your lead generation flowchart, skip the email and aim for a phone call.
Don’t Forget Text Messages
In the world of marketing automation and social media, who needs text messages right?
Well, a lot of people still do.
When you do phone marketing, don’t forget about using text messages as well. A lot can be done with a phone call, but one can also leverage text messaging to get the leads nurtured or to inform a prospect about a new development in the package that they are interested in.
If you’re looking to expand your use of phone marketing, don’t forget that you also have the option to send your prospects a text message.
