Strengthening Your Social Pull

Subtle ways to strengthen your social media marketing pull:

As opposed to the old-school approach of outbound “push” marketing, the art and science of inbound “pull” marketing is all about finding ways to attract and nurture the most appropriate prospects. The idea is to keep them engaged while they move at their own pace toward a buying decision.

Here are some unobtrusive techniques you can use to enrich the education and discovery process for visitors and prospects — while subtlety shaping their perspective to position your product or service as the logical solution.

Leverage multichannel synergy to shorten the sales cycle:

When you study the customer journey path your prospects take, you’ll probably find there is a period of about one to two weeks when the buying decision is really taking shape. Build a strategy that uses multiple channels to offer helpful relevant content during this crucial incubation period. Then refine this strategy by tracking trends for views, downloads and direct inquiries as a result of your efforts.

Tap into the power of third-party endorsements:

People expect marketers to say good things about their companies. So while your internally-generated content can impart genuine information in a credible way, bringing a customer testimonial into the equation can boost your credibility quotient even more.

Find ways to solicit positive online reviews. Interview customers to get natural “in their own words” types of statements. You can also curate and share your customers’ social media content, adding introductory comments to connect your products and services with their demonstrations and success stories. These are just some of the ways to inject some extra web-cred into your overall content marketing effort.

Use a subtle but strategic approach to avoid prospect burnout:

Particularly for sales scenarios that have longer lead times, you want to be readily accessible when prospects reach the moment of truth — without burning them out with heavy-handed calls-to-action at every turn.

Employ a robust system of analytics to identify the information that engaged visitors are really looking for, then provide focused content to meet those needs. If your content is timely and relevant, the most interested customers will make themselves known when they’re getting closer to a buying decision. And you’ll have compiled a valuable prospect profile you can use to help close the sale.