B2B Marketing - Online Tactics to Nurture Prospects into Sales

By Brian Carroll

Most marketers today realize how important long-term relationships are to their lead generation process. However, they struggle to find ways to engage their most viable leads. If companies can learn how to leverage tools like blogging, social media, webinars and e-mail campaigns, they can easily demonstrate “thought leadership” while enhancing the company’s unique value proposition to its prospects and target audience.

In order to achieve this, marketers must commit to creating content in conjunction with clearly-defined objectives that are part of a long-term plan. These consistent content marketing programs must be relevant to their prospects and customers while giving them valuable information that helps them build their knowledge or helps them solve their issues.

This communication can be calibrated to the level of “sales readiness” of prospective customer bases by leveraging existing investments already made in other marketing tactics such as content from events, white papers or contributed articles. Third-party resources and content can also be effectively utilized to bring an aspect of credibility through the halo effect. Once marketers learn how to use this valuable information, they can set themselves up as trusted advisors, and create relevant, long-term fruitful relationships.

To learn more about how to use content for cultivating relationships, register for MN AMA’s “B2B Marketing - Online Tactics to Nurture Prospects into Sales.” During this event, I will discuss how to use content to develop a lead-nurturing process that really works while recapturing lost leads and opportunities. Meet me Tuesday, October 13 from 7:30 a.m. – 9 a.m. at the Minneapolis campus of the University of St.Thomas. The meeting costs $25 for AMA members and $50 for non-members. Hope to see you there.

Brian Carroll is CEO of InTouch and author of Lead Generation for the Complex Sale (McGraw-Hill) and the B2B Lead Generation Blog with expertise related to B2B marketing, lead generation and complex sales.