Any marketer worth her salt knows that there’s no magic solution to boosting prospect engagement. Getting prospective customers to care about your organization enough to bother engaging with it requires tremendous resolve.
Does that mean you need to spend an arm and a leg to move the needle? Absolutely not. In fact, these six strategies to widen and deepen your sales funnel cost little to nothing. Unless you really run with #5 and #6, you’ll barely notice the impact on your marketing budget.
1.Focus on Boosting Social Proof Organically
“Social proof” is the essence of conformity, and it’s devastatingly important for marketers. In many consumer-facing campaigns, social proof may be the single biggest determinant of success or failure — get it right, and you’ve got an all-but-captive audience.
Boosting social proof isn’t as hard as it sounds. The trick is creating an air of inevitability around your product or solution, in demonstrating that, yes, everyone really is doing it.
2.Get on Crunchbase
Take a break from your social proof campaign to turn up Crunchbase profiles for your organization and key employees. This financial professional’s Crunchbase profile is a great model; this is very much a just-the-facts platform, with plenty of rich detail. Crunchbase also happens to be one of the highest-authority business directories on the Web.
3.Run Regular Social Media Polls
The only way to find out what your followers want is to ask. And, since answering a poll is by definition engaging, it’s also a really easy way to move the prospecting needle.
4.Produce at Least One Piece of Thought Leadership Content Each Week
Take the time (read: an hour or two) to put together a first-rate piece of thought leadership content, such as a 1,000-word blog post that dives deep into a topic on which you’re a subject matter expert or a five-minute whiteboard explainer video. These pieces of content won’t attract millions of impressions, but they’ll inexorably establish your credibility as someone whose opinion matters.
5.Use PPC Campaigns to Build Awareness
Yes, there’s a cost to every successful PPC campaign, but don’t let that stop you. Keep your ad buys commensurate with your marketing budget and take the time to understand the audiences you’re targeting; well-placed keyword campaigns can be staggeringly effective on little more than a shoestring.
6.Publish Tentpole Content at Least Once Per Quarter
Complement shorter thought leadership content with more in-depth “tentpoles” that take more effort to produce: in-depth case studies measuring your solutions’ impact, detailed slide decks touting your organization’s value, ebooks explaining the problems you aim to solve. The sky’s the limit when you’re creating rocket fuel for your credibility.
Your Engagement Engine Needs Work
Don’t take this the wrong way, but your engagement engine needs work.
Not because you’re bad at this whole marketing thing. Nor because you’re failing at the marketing moves you are trying to make on a regular basis.
Rather, because you’re almost certainly not doing enough to boost prospect engagement without significantly increasing your marketing costs.
That’s okay. If you’re able to consistently deploy the six tactics described above, you’ll find yourself on a clear path to livelier prospects and higher conversion rates.
But it’s on you to make the first move. What are you waiting for?
