The beauty of inbound marketing is that you’re essentially playing on your home turf. You control what you put out, you can lay out everything to your liking, and you can showcase whatever bits of content show your best side. One major limitation, however, is that inbound marketing lacks the personalization offered by, say, sending out an email to one specific person on your lead list.
While it doesn’t seem like there’s any leeway beyond maybe clipping their name off their browser cookies and adding a ‘Hello’ at the top of your pages, there are techniques that help you approach the personalization you enjoy with other marketing methods.
1 – Use your data to see people.
Data is critical to any sales and marketing efforts. The problem with data is that it often reduces people to mere numbers and statistics. Be that as it may, when you use analytics correctly, you can get a more in-depth view of your leads and prospects as people. Firstly, you can customize your website’s homepage/landing page to show a personalized greeting.
Secondly, you can use data to figure out common traits and behavioral trends that your leads and prospects share. This invaluable data will then allow you to customize the tone and content of whatever messages you choose to showcase to match what the data tells you. In this way, you might not be talking to each one individually, but you’re appealing to key commonalities.
2 – Create and deliver engaging content.
Now, the best way to use the data points you have is to create content that effectively resonates what traits and behavioral trends they reveal. For instance, if the data reveals that your prospects prefer a more visual medium, you could focus on creating engaging videos. If the data reveals that your prospects go for hard data and numbers, a more serious research-centered piece is order.
The idea is to make each prospect feel like what content you have was made just for them—to answer their questions, address their concerns, and pique their interests. Another factor to consider is engagement. If you’re posting interesting content on social media, asking follow-up questions starts conversations that gives you an ‘in’ to move them further along your sales funnel.
3 – Incorporate visuals – into everything.
It is said that we retain 80% of what we see, 20% of what we read, and 10% of what we hear. That’s why it’s critical that you incorporate visuals in every piece of content you put out. Infographics are a great option as they fit any bit of written content pretty well—especially if there’s a lot of numbers and data being presented. Not only do these catch the eye, but they also make data more easily digestible.
The best visuals you can go for, however, are videos. If these are well-produced then you’ll be presenting your data in a manner that’s easiest to understand. The trick is to make them long enough to be jam-packed with data, but short enough to hold someone’s attention span. The great thing about visuals is you can incorporate them in just about every other content type.
4 – Evaluate and adapt.
Ultimately, if you want to really get personal, you have to listen. To whom, you ask? Well, your prospects, of course. Often, the best way to find out what people want is to ask them directly. This you can do through surveys, questionnaires, and telemarketing campaigns. Failing that, you can go back to the data to see which among your content is getting a lot of traction.
When one particular content format or topic is getting a lot of reads, views, and shares, it’s a fair assumption that these are what your prospects are looking for. If that’s the case, keep doing what works—and change up what doesn’t. This way, you’ll always be delivering what your prospects really need—increasing your chances to convert them into paying customers.
Get quality leads from the get-go.
Of course, any sort of marketing and sales approach benefits from having high-quality, verified leads from the start. At Internal Results, we provide you with first-party leads from our database of over 60M+ contacts in different industries across the globe. These are segmented and organized along demographic, firmographic, and even technographic lines to ensure that you get the people you need.
We even aid your marketing and sales efforts with multi-channel content syndication which places your best material in front of the people who want and need them. Add in buyer intent data that tells you who’s primed to buy and you have recipe for success. So say goodbye to poor-quality leads. All you need to do is tell us how we can help you.
