Shifting your business online is fantastic. You get the opportunity to promote your solutions to wider audiences and make more sales.
The bad news is that you, your competitors, and just about everyone else are using the same tactics to reach customers and prospects.
That extra edge that piques curiosity, encourages engagement, and promotes sales is missing from most plans.
If you’re looking for creative digital marketing strategies to reach potential customers, here are options worth considering:
1. Participate in Question-Based Social Forums
From researchers to professionals, marketers, industry analysts, and business people, question-based forums are incredible sources of information.
Quora, in particular, boasts 300 million active users every month.
For B2B marketers, these numbers present excellent platforms to grow their business by answering relevant questions and keeping up with industry trends.
Through your answers, you’ll be letting potential customers know that your company exists, potentially increasing chances of further engagement.
The key thing is to answer questions in your field of expertise, provide value and offer freebies (lead magnets) where the audience can learn more. This way, you’re encouraging engagement without taking an overly salesy approach.
Here are tips to help you promote growth through question-based social forums:
- Answer questions like a thought leader. Answer main questions directly and concisely. Where possible, provide evidence to back up your answers and remember to take on a rounded approach by acknowledging alternative solutions
- Respect other users, particularly those with differing viewpoints. Self-promotion and insults will not impress prospective customers.
- Join discussions and offer responses that relate to the discussion. Avoid derailing topics by introducing unrelated points that promote your business.
- Demonstrate knowledge about your industry by covering subjects comprehensively. If you’re a digital marketing expert, don’t focus on one strategy alone, but be knowledgeable in most of them.
- Take a long-term approach. Aim to answer 1-2 questions daily and build your base. Over time, potential customers will identify you as an expert and engage you directly.
2. Host Virtual Events
Virtual events are integral to digital marketing. They deliver higher engagement because of their wider reach, provide instantaneous feedback, and can be measured for success.
Events that incorporate the chat function encourage deeper engagement since attendees can ask questions they may feel shy about, in person.
Here’s how you can craft a successful virtual event:
- Know your audience. How tech-savvy are they? What subjects are they most interested in? Which platforms do they prefer?
- Visual appeal. Provide captions to ensure the audience fully understands the speaker and test user experience to ensure easy navigation for both organizers and visitors.
- Choose a platform. Depending on the event you’re hosting, there are multiple video streaming services you can use. Use the free trials offered to test technical functionalities.
- The event speaker. Will you be using an in-house staff member, knowledge expert, or influencer? Will it be a solo act or a round table discussion? The speaker should have great command on the subject, express themselves clearly, and be comfortable around a camera.
- Encourage audience participation by asking them to send their questions and comments through chat boxes or participate in polls or quizzes
- Promote the event across suitable platforms such as your website, paid ads, email campaigns, and social media sites. Create short videos about the speakers to generate interest in the event.
3. Cold Calling
One of the best ways of fostering human connections with prospects is through cold calling.
As a business, it’s vital that you call up prospective B2B buyers to tell them about your brand and offerings.
Today’s sales teams make that initial call to create awareness, pique curiosity, and hopefully secure a meeting or second call to discuss the possibilities available.
But how do you measure the progress or the success of your cold calling campaign?
Here are three metrics you can look at:
- Activity: keep track of the number of cold calls made daily.
- Quality: it’s easy to go through the motions of cold calling without paying attention to their effectiveness. Look at the number of decision-makers your team is reaching and how many qualify for your solutions.
- Conversion: How many decision-makers have moved to the next stage (meeting, demos, trials, etc).
Data is a truth-teller and these metrics will help you pinpoint strengths and weaknesses in your cold calling pitch strategy.
If the team is struggling to reach or close deals, then you may need to make some changes to your technique.
4. Guest Post
Are you looking for ways to build your reputation, showcase your expertise, build relationships, or improve search results ranking through backlinks?
Why not take up guest posting?
Sounds easy enough. But you’ll need to put in some work if you want to accomplish your goals. Your success will be pegged to your ability to produce remarkable and targeted content that builds credibility and trusting relationships.
How do you get there?
- Know who you’re writing for. What topics concern them? What problems do they want to solve? Which blogs do they read? This information will help expose challenges and opportunities you can leverage to promote your solutions.
- Decide your guest posting goals. Goals may include raising brand and solutions awareness, building solid backlinks to your site, driving traffic, and increase followers and subscribers, etc.
- Identify guest posting opportunities. Choose sites based on their relevance to your niche, authority, potential reach, and engagement rate.
- Once you’ve identified a worthy site, look at their pitching and writing guidelines to ensure you can comply.
- Craft a guest bio that includes your full names and one or two links to your site (if allowed). Make it brief, straight to the point, and interesting enough to attract audiences at first glance.
5. Build Thought Leadership
This often underutilized tactic is ideal for building credibility and establishing trust among audiences.
The “why” behind thought leadership is to create go-to content resources people can turn to for answers to their problems.
Executed well, this strategy may help increase awareness, leading to higher-quality interactions that may turn into sales.
Here are tips to develop a successful thought leadership strategy:
- Identify the questions your audience is asking. Conduct surveys with existing customers or analyze social media to get a pulse on pain points and questions. The information you gather may inspire topics to cover.
- Be present on social media. Social platforms provide opportunities to establish your brand as a thought leader. Promoting thought leadership content there allows you to speak directly to the needs and challenges you uncovered and interact with audiences.
- Encourage knowledgeable members (other than the CEO) of your team to create thought leadership content for your brand.
- Head over to the competition. Check if they are creating thought leadership content, how many pieces they have, the platforms they publish on, and how often they do it. Look for loopholes in their content and see how you can capitalize on that.
- Be ready to adapt your thought leadership content to suit evolving audiences, changes in your products/services, industry trends, and emerging topics of importance.
