Can Your Business Handle a Mixed-Marketing Approach?

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Can Your Business Handle a Mixed-Marketing Approach?

Marketing is an ever-changing entity. At different times, different approaches will be more relevant than others.

One thing marketers are beginning to realize, however, is that the integration of varied approaches is the key to any successful marketing campaign. While a mix of social media marketing, direct mail and telemarketing might work for a particular target audience, email marketing might be the best option for another.

The question every marketer must always ask is what approach works best in a particular situation. In order to answer that question it is vital to remember that no matter what the type—digital, email, inbound, outbound—it is all marketing.

Some prospects or leads will respond best to the human touch while others are active on social media. The biggest mistake marketers can make is to always be looking to jump on the latest marketing craze, regardless if it is relevant to their target audience. That’s not to say new marketing techniques don’t have their place, but sometimes the tried-and-true marketing techniques are the most effective.

What most marketers will tell you is that a mix of the old and the new is often the best way to go. If you are focusing on lead generation, consider approaching a lead through direct mail piece. Follow that piece up with a phone call from a professional telemarketer experienced in lead generation. The next step will be dictated by that conversation. Maybe a prospect would like to check out your website or connect with you on Facebook. Maybe that prospect would like a call back in a few weeks.

This approach is the best way to go because customers and prospects today want to be in charge of how they are approached. After all, their only real interest in your marketing campaign is how it relates to them. In light of this fact, offline and online approaches usually work best.

Marketers must also have the ability to assess the success of every marketing touch to see which one works best for each particular customer or prospect. If a customer never responds to offers on your website but when he or she is called, always reorders, you now know what to do. This illustrates the importance of having a flexible marketing approach that changes to meet each and every customer’s particular preference.

If your marketing department is not up to the challenge of marrying the old with the new and pinpointing exactly which marketing technique works best for a particular customer, prospect or target audience, your bottom line will suffer. That’s because you will be losing sales to businesses that have marketing departments that are up to the challenge.

How Telemarketing Can Improve Your Bottom Line

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How Telemarketing Can Improve Your Bottom Line

Many business owners are surprised to learn what using the right telemarketing firm can do for their business. In fact, the tasks telemarketers perform on behalf of a business can significantly improve the bottom line of that business.

It is a well-known fact that telemarketing allows for a personal touch that helps to foster relationships between businesses and prospects. These types of relationships cannot be underestimated when you consider that personal interaction is becoming increasingly uncommon—but no less important—in today’s digital marketplace.

While this alone would be enough to invest in a telemarketing firm to help propel your business forward, telemarketing offers other significant benefits, as well.

  1. Setting Appointments. Appointments offer businesses their best chance to make sales. Telemarketing allows a business to be more proactive because a business is not waiting for customers to contact them to set up a meeting. Instead, they are taking the lead.
  2. Creating and Expanding Databases. Telemarketing is an extremely effective way to build and maintain the most complete and up-to-date databases. No matter why you are calling a customer or prospect, you can always ask relevant questions to help pad your database with important information. The more accurate your database, the easier it will be to notice customer purchasing trends which can help to improve your sales conversion rates.
  3. Gathering Feedback. Finding out how people feel about your product or service will help to ensure that you are offering the types of products and services that people need. When your products and services are exactly what sales leads and customers are looking for, they will look to you when it comes time to buy.
  4. Collaborating. When you integrate telemarketing with your sales team, the results will far exceed the efforts of your sales team on its own. When your sales team is kept apprised of conversations your telemarketing firm has had with new or previously generated leads, they will be able to have more effective conversations with those leads when they are far enough down the sales funnel. The more effective these conversations, the higher your rate of sales conversions.
  5. Following Up. Quality telemarketers are experts in lead nurturing. Prospects and leads who have an ongoing relationship with a business will be much more receptive to hearing about their new products and services.

One of the best decisions a business can make is to collaborate with a professional telemarketing firm. The key is to find the caliber of firm that is experienced in business development and relationship building.

Outsourcing Market Research is a Smart Investment

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Outsourcing Market Research is a Smart Investment

Hiring a telemarketing firm to conduct your market research can be one of the best investments you make. While it is tempting to use internal staff to conduct market research calls, this is almost never a good idea.

First of all, unless you have staff working evenings and weekends, you are going to have to pay overtime, or even hire additional staff, to make calls. Why? Because a majority of market research is aimed at working adults who are easiest to reach in the evenings or on weekends. Unless your business is completely focused on B2B customers, stay-at-home parents, or seniors, daytime calls will not garner the information you require.

Conducting market research on the phone can be difficult. Many people are reluctant to take time out of their busy lives to answer questions. Even if you explain to them that it will only take a few minutes, they may still resist. Professional telemarketers are well-trained on how to deal with, and overcome, such objections.

Further, when an individual picks up a call from an unknown company, they usually jump to the conclusion that they are going to be asked to buy something. These people often believe that survey, marketing research, and sales calls are all the same thing. Again, it takes an experienced and professional telemarketer to dispel this belief before it is too late. In other words, they need to make people comfortable in the knowledge that they are not a solicitor, but only want information. Such telemarketers know how to make individuals feel as if they are doing an important service by answering these questions, as well.

Now that you know why you need a professional telemarketing firm to conduct market research, here are the many benefits of doing your marketing research via telemarketing. Telemarketing research specialists can glean the following information—in the most convenient and least time consuming manner possible—from your target audience:

  1. What features do people most desire in your brand’s particular product or service?
  2. Where is your target audience currently purchasing this product or service?
  3. What would lure prospects away from their current vendor?
  4. Does your target audience understand how your offerings differ from the competition? How important are those differences to your target audience?

Market research is a great way to obtain information as you launch a new product or service, prepare a new advertising campaign, or seek to find out why there is low interest in a particular product or service. If you want market research that gets the most accurate information from the greatest number of people, it is important to hire professionals who will do just that.

How to Make B2B Telemarketing Even More Effective

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How to Make B2B Telemarketing Even More Effective

If you work in the B2B industry, it will come as no surprise that telemarketing is one of-if not the most-effective methods of lead generation. In fact, when surveyed, B2B companies said that they plan to spend even more of their marketing budgets on telemarketing in 2016.

However, when it comes to B2B or B2C marketing, if you are not moving forward, you are falling behind. Therefore, it is vital that your telemarketing methods keep evolving over time. What follows are some tips on how to make sure your telemarketing efforts continue to make a significant impact on prospects:

  1. Never overlook the human element. No matter how you run your telemarketing campaign, at its root, it has to be about talking one-on-one to another person. This has always been the strength of telemarketing and it must remain its number one focus.
  2. Use your website. Your website is a great resource for your telemarketing efforts. Make sure you use it to its fullest potential. When a particular business has revisited your website, for example, use that information to better tell when you need to contact that business again.
  3. Show prospects the light. Surveys repeatedly show that how a person is treated by telemarketers has a great deal to do with buying decisions. In other words, the more knowledgeable and personable a telemarketer, the better light their particular product or service is seen in.
  4. Slow and steady win the lead generation race. B2B buyers want to know that their concerns are understood and appreciated. Therefore, making a quick sale isn’t always the best route to go. Instead, take more time with lead nurturing. It may longer to convert leads by going slower, but in the end, the number of conversions is likely to be much higher when prospects are not rushed.
  5. Use a multi-touch approach. Just because you are calling a prospect on the phone, that doesn’t mean you can’t use other marketing methods to create an interest in your product or service. While on the phone, invite prospects to check out your website, like you on Facebook, or attend a trade show. The key is to always make your brand as accessible as possible.

Telemarketing is a crucial lead generation technique for B2B marketers. Make sure you are using it to its fullest potential so that you are able to capitalize on its many strengths.