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When it comes to acquiring new leads, many businesses tend to put their faith in telemarketing. However, with more options available than ever before for getting in touch with customers, those organizations that branch out with their marketing strategy find that they’re able to reach better prospects than they ever could through cold-calling.
These days—with the sum-total of collected human knowledge never further than a WiFi connection away—prospective leads prefer to do their own research, rather than trust the potentially biased (or even downright fraudulent) sales pitch of a telemarketer. Likewise, as technology has progressed, people have invested in ever-more advanced defences against cold-call intrusions.
Answering machines and telephone services, caller ID, unlisted mobile phone numbers, and apps designed specifically to deter unwanted calls have all played a part in segregating telemarketers from their customers. As a result, only 2% of cold calls result in scheduling an appointment. Hey, it makes sense; after all, telemarketing is—at its heart—an intrusive form of marketing, and thus is often unwanted.
Still, you can’t argue with results. Telemarketing is a $500 billion-a-year industry, and even if the Federal Trade Commission receives close to 18,000 complaints about telemarketers annually, the fact remains that telemarketing is a viable and profitable form of advertising. The good news is that for B2B businesses, telemarketing doesn’t retain quite the stigma that its B2C cousin has to endure.
In fact, while receiving telemarketing calls at home tends to rank as the most annoying form of advertising (according to a 2012 survey by SCi Sales Group), those same calls when received at work are actually considered one of the least annoying forms of advertising. But that doesn’t mean that your company should put all of its eggs in one basket.
By branching out and embracing different marketing techniques, you’ll be able to cover more ground and generate more and better leads. Here are five alternatives to telemarketing that you might consider for your B2B business.
If the telephone feels like an outdated advertising medium, then direct mail must seem downright primitive, but that’s not to say that it doesn’t have its place. It is estimated that 90% of households bring in their mail on a daily basis, and 77% sort through it immediately.
This provides an exposure for your advertising that you might not otherwise achieve. It also allows you to target your customers specifically and accurately, instead of having to cast a wide net and hope that it falls onto the right people. Perhaps most attractive of all is the fact that direct mail marketing allows you to physically place something into the hands of your prospects, such as a coupon or a sample product.
Of course, a direct mail campaign may prove to be prohibitively costly, so there are those who rely instead on email. Email marketing is cheaper to send, quicker to produce (which is nice, seeing as though 50% of sales go to the first salesperson to contact a prospect), and allow for more personalized messages. Email also makes it possible for real-time messages to be sent on special occasions, or for extremely limited-time offers.
Email can also be used in conjunction with telemarketing. By first contacting a prospect via email and then agreeing upon a future time to get in touch over the phone, you eliminate the threat of disrupting your prospective client’s schedule. Of course, the downside is that email is far easier to ignore than conventional mail, with certain sent messages ending up in “spam” folders or being deleted before they can ever be read.
Social media is probably the most impactful digital advancement of last decade which makes it a natural telemarketing alternative.
What began as a fun new way to keep in touch with friends and share entertaining bits of internet minutiae has evolved into a $4 billion advertising juggernaut. Unfortunately, many businesses tend to treat social media as though it were just another place to offer a sales pitch or help in their sales process.
Yes, Twitter, Facebook, and the rest of the various platforms can all be used like message boards on which to post your ad, but doing so won’t earn you any points from your customers. Instead, use social media for what it was intended: being social.
Allow yourself to be drawn into conversations with others in your industry, and establish your brand’s credibility by sharing your expertise. At the same time, you’ll be able to drive more traffic to your site by sharing relevant content from it on your various social networks.
Social media allows for very natural interactions between you and your customers away from the forced formality of telephone conversations.
Going hand-in-hand with social media advertising is content marketing. Content marketing relies on relevant, useful, timely, and/or entertaining content to attract an audience of potential future customers. This form of inbound marketing is quickly becoming the favorite of successful businesses.
In fact, 93% of B2B marketing professionals rely on content marketing as part of their overall strategy, and 60% of those marketers have plans to increase their content marketing budget within the next several months. Content marketing has many advantages over traditional outbound marketing efforts, perhaps the most relevant of which being that it allows customers to initiate the interaction. This solves many of the problems associated with telemarketing (such as its intrusiveness and its inaccuracy).
At the same time, content marketing allows you to endear your brand to your potential customers, by showing them that you’re willing to offer them something valuable without demanding anything in return.
This also helps them to form a personal, emotional attachment to your company. And, as an added bonus, high-quality and authoritative content will also help your company out on the SEO side of things, increasing your search ranking and making it easier for prospects to find you when searching on the web.
If you don’t already have one, creating and maintaining a company blog should be a top priority on your list. Companies that correctly use blogs in their content marketing strategies have 434 percent more indexed pages and 97 percent more indexed links on average than those that do not.
Given the fact that many trade shows consist of booths manned by dead-eyed lackeys who are more interested in playing on their mobile smart devices then in finding new clients, it’s easy to see why some might view them as a waste of time. However, when properly taken advantage of, trade shows can provide you with a flood of high-quality leads.
The most obvious reason being that those who attend trade shows do so in order to find new business opportunities. More than 80% of those who attend trade shows have buying authority, which means that if you can connect with them, you’ll be able to cut through a lot of the inefficiency that goes along with most other forms of marketing. Of course, simply attending conferences isn’t enough; you need to go into them prepared. Start by developing a show pitch, and having your staffers learn how to recite it.
Impress upon them the fact that when dealing with prospects, they should remain flexible and not simply regurgitate the pitch verbatim, but they should still learn it word-for-word so that the information will be there when they need it. Also, if you have an idea of who your targets might be, don’t be afraid to contact them prior to the show.
Through direct mail or email, you can send out a simple-yet-attractive teaser (perhaps including a special offer or promotion) that will help your potential customer remember to visit your booth. Finally, be sure to do something at the conference itself to catch the attention of attendees and set yourself apart from the other booths—eye-catching displays, demonstrations, and prizes and giveaways are all possible ideas.
With all of the digital communication methods that have become so ubiquitous in our modern culture, some of us have forgotten the value of meeting face-to-face. This is unfortunate, because there are definite benefits to communicating with your leads in person.
For one thing, human language relies on more than just the words that are spoken; it depends upon physical posturing, eye contact, and a thousand other tiny details that get lost when communicating remotely. Meetings allow for natural give and take, and facilitate quick decision making. Additionally, potential customers are far more trusting when you’re speaking to them directly, and are thus more willing to close a deal then they would be over the phone or across email (after all, no one wants their sensitive information getting into unknown hands).
Lastly, the willingness to take the time and make the effort to meet with a potential customer will show your commitment to your product and to your buyers, which can make all of the difference in a competitive market. 81% of business professionals believe that in-person meetings are better for building strong client relationships, and 41% believe that they have lost clients because they failed to develop that relationship.
Telemarketing is a tried and true method of acquiring new customers, but it isn’t the only method. By expanding your B2B marketing efforts to include a wider range of tactics, you’ll be able to generate leads that you never would have had access to otherwise.
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