2021 raised many hopes for the possible end of the health crisis. It is clear, at the beginning of January, that the commercial upheavals due to COVID-19 are not yet behind us. This does not mean, however, that our prospecting techniques and tools must be confined to habits, for fear of the unknown.
2020 has taught us that our resilience also depends on our creativity. A new horizon is emerging for companies, inevitable. It remains to be interested in new prospecting tools to stay in the race. Innovative methods, which take us out of our comfort zones, but which are also adapted to our current commercial reality.
A market-ready for novelty
We insisted on the need to maintain prospecting efforts despite the crisis. Months have passed and this conviction has set in, stronger than ever. Pursuing its commercial actions means staying in the running. It is also the only way to take the vacant places on the market.
It remains to define the most relevant path to continue prospecting. The recent upheaval can make you want to take refuge behind recipes that have already worked. However, this ostrich policy neglects the reality that is ours in 2021. Face-to-face meetings with prospects are now anecdotal, trade shows are impossible. Salespeople no longer have the luxury of the land.
The prolongation of the health crisis therefore irreparably pushes us to change. More than a constraint, it embodies an opportunity to reinvent the acquisition process, and to blend – perhaps more quickly than usual – with the expectations of prospects.
The markets are ready to hear new rhetoric and to see the emergence of innovative prospecting tools. Companies capable of adapting to the crisis will also be the first to make themselves visible to prospects. Agility should thus embody the watchword of 2021, as the merchants who survived 2020 thanks to the implementation of Click and Collect solutions have proven to us.
Renew your prospecting tools to succeed in 2021
Here are some business approaches or tools that we think are relevant to tackle this new year. These methods are innovative, quickly deployable, and adapted to the health situation. It remains to choose which one best suits your market, your offers, your target, and your sales cycle.
A data sourcing specific for prospecting finesse
A pillar of an effective marketing strategy, data remains the forgotten thing in many prospecting projects. This negligence – which very often stems more from ignorance than fault – is sometimes found among our new customers.
Many companies launch major marketing campaigns aimed at their customer/prospect databases from their CRM. Often, it is when the results of these steps are disappointing that we realize that these databases are unusable. Too small, poorly qualified, dated, or off-target.
For successful prospecting campaigns, data sourcing is more relevant than ever. The process amounts, in concrete terms, to precisely identifying the quality data, which has real added value for your commercial actions. This is often data relating to your targets.
To define your targets effectively, at Seventic we use either the buyer personas method or an analysis of the customer base. Our experience also regularly leads us to propose new audiences, relevant to broaden the campaigns.
Then comes the time to source the data in the right place. You may not know it – like 30% of our clients – but analyzing your CRM data can be the source of your most successful marketing campaigns. There is a multitude of free and royalty-free data sources:
- your CRM software, whose leads must be carefully qualified;
- your subscriptions;
- social networks ;
- customer journeys on your website;
- feedback from your marketing campaigns.
The sources selected must always take into account the nature of the expected data (telephone, email addresses, etc.), but also their periods, their geographical areas, and their languages.
Depending on the data that you identify as sound, the next step is to select the most suitable acquisition method:
- a basic purchase;
- the provision of a qualified database by your marketing agency. we thus offer our clients our base of 480,000 qualified contacts, segmented and updated regularly;
- scraping operations via prospecting plugins ;
- data enrichment by social networks.
Data-driven marketing adapted to the crisis context
If data is the 2021 prospecting tool par excellence, it is also because the health crisis has created a new need for personalization among customers. Relying on quality data via data sourcing is, therefore, the basis of a broader data-driven marketing strategy. This consists of developing hyper-personalized prospecting campaigns.
Of course, this type of process overlaps with a series of challenges that this definition article of data-driven marketing from Big Data magazine summarizes. However, knowing the targets often turns out to be at the heart of the most successful prospecting missions.
With the health crisis, however, data-driven marketing will no longer be limited to properly exploiting its existing prospect data. The market has changed, and we will have to adapt our prospecting tools to new expectations, but also new consumers’ brakes.
According to a Kantar study conducted in April 2020, 68% of them are in demand for information on the measures taken by companies to adapt to the health crisis. By collecting new data on the developments that your customers expect from you, you, therefore, make sure to adopt the most relevant prospecting tools.
A well-thought-out and engaging content marketing
The vast majority of commercial relationships are born in digital territory. Whether it is an email, an exchange on social networks, an online advertisement. or a Google request, the web is, therefore, the medium for 80% of BtoB acquisition processes. It is therefore essential to provide Internet users with content capable of convincing them of the added value of your offer compared to that of your competitor.
At first, the objective is always the same. It is a question of reassuring as to the solidity of your brand, and of proving that your offer meets the needs of the consumer. From this perspective, expert words embody the perfect content.
For content marketing to generate leads, you also need to provide the right information at the right time. To find the theme that hits the mark at the moment T, nothing better than email campaigns in A / B testing. They allow you to test the subjects, but also the periods which generate in your target the highest rates of openings, clicks, and therefore the most traffic on your website.
So much for the theory, but in fact, what trends will mark content marketing in 2021? The confinements of 2020 were marked by the massive dissemination of the content of all kinds, sometimes not very successful. It’s a safe bet that Internet users are now more attentive to the quality of web content.
To aim correctly, it will therefore be necessary to provide value, with rich content, which goes straight to the point. A strategy is consistent with the new Google algorithms, which favor Mobile-First formats.
Adopt hyper-personalization with ABM strategies
Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is to mobilize the bulk of its sales forces around some strategic prospect accounts. These B2B Insurance marketing campaigns are characterized by precise targeting of each content, thought out from A to Z to address the target audience. If we think that ABM’s strategies will prevail in 2021.
it is therefore also because they are based on a logic of hyper-personalization of marketing already in operation.
we deploy many such campaigns for our clients. These hyper-targeted campaigns also involve developing tools for monitoring the activity of targets, to be able to respond effectively to their news.
Chatbot or chat: which prospecting tool for my website?
With the 2020 lockdowns, consumers have resorted more to social media chat and chatbots to reach brands.
The customer expects the company to support him in real-time where he is evolving, that is to say, from now on, on his website and social networks.
Going through an email, a form, or by phone would on the contrary take him out of his immediate purchasing environment.
It remains to be seen whether the perfect prospecting tool falls within the “human” cat or the chatbot, closer to Artificial Intelligence. The answer often depends on the type of deals you offer. At insurance noon, we have opted for a humanized cat, thanks to the solution. The questions of our prospects are indeed diverse, and difficult to predict.
And tomorrow, Artificial Intelligence …
You may have understood by reading this article, 2021 will not happen without Artificial Intelligence. Whether it is using big data for your marketing campaigns, or machine learning to identify the most precise characteristics of each of your targets, AI is no longer a futuristic utopia. The hyper-personalization already underway on the market requires recourse to it. It remains to dose it intelligently so that its presence does not encroach on the necessary human contact for which consumers are more than ever in demand.