Whether you are an SMB or a large IT enterprise, looking for new business opportunities, even keeping the old ones can be a bit of a challenge. Decision makers such as IT Directors, IT Managers, and CTOs or CIOs are very hard to reach. Even if you have the best product, your business will still fail if no one knows about it.
In order to flood your sales pipeline with sales-ready leads, Marketing and Sales Managers must maximize all of their efforts to increase their sales and generate more revenue for their business.
With today’s new marketing channels and the growth of digital marketing, lead generation approach has changed. Here’s an ultimate marketing plan for the technology company to increase your IT leads all throughout the year.
- 1: Online Marketing
- 2: Website Planning
- 3: Telemarketing and Appointment Setting
- 4: List Building, Management, and Cleansing
1: Online Marketing
Online marketing is a method of spreading the word about your company, your products and/or services online to reach your target audience. Most small and medium businesses in Singapore don’t have any or just starting to implement an online marketing strategy within their organization. Because of this, they are struggling to get leads and increase their sales.
Here are some tested and proven online marketing strategies to help you get started.
- Run a social media campaign
In this generation, who doesn’t have a social media account? Almost 90% of young adults use social media to communicate, search and buy products online. Utilize different social media channels to reach out a wider audience.
- Create an offer and promote it online.
Discounts, coupons and some freebies can help provide value to your prospects. Create a simple post on Facebook and Twitter but don’t bore prospects to death with your social media posts. Start promoting it to your audience. This will help bring them closer towards converting them into customers.
Example: You can offer a free trial or give out $20 Coupon to customers who will like and share your FB page.
TIP: Who doesn’t love free stuff? You can also include some terms and conditions such as, “This free trial is only valid for a month”.
Be patient if it won’t show any results soon. Check your stats and gather sufficient data to keep track of everything. These FREE marketing tools will get your brand out there.
- Start blogging with awesome content
Great blogs play an important role in your online marketing campaign. How?
- High-quality content can help you rank well in search engine.
- Informative content can drive more traffic and social shares.
- Blogs can help your brand build authority within your niche.
Think “BIG” when creating content for your blog. Broader topics that will interest your target audience usually work. Blogging can help you create informative content that lets you showcase your expertise to your audience and make them realize that they can’t do the work by themselves and they’ll be needing your assistance and the resources you provide. Lay down the benefits.
TIP: Consider guest blogging. It is a great way to build brand awareness and authority. It can help your online marketing campaign by;
- Getting exposure and increase blog traffic to your website.
- Position yourself as an authority in your industry, and
- Building backlinks to your website.
Read these Shocking Statistics in Content Marketing Asia!
Target prominent IT decision maker, learn more about our IT lead generation services!
2: Website Planning
Success begins with planning! If you build a website without having a concrete plan means failing on your business marketing efforts. But why is planning a website important?
Having a plan means identifying potential issues and problems and preparing for possible solutions to every issue encountered along the way that might affect your budget and deadline.
Here’s a guide when building your website. Identify your goal. Ask yourself;
- What am I trying to accomplish?
- What is my main purpose in creating a website?
- Know your target audience
- Utilize SEO
- Prepare for high-quality contents that speak for your audience.
3: Telemarketing and Appointment Setting
If you wish to increase the amount of sales and generate more leads for your business, telemarketing is an effective way to do it. Whether you decided to have your own sales team or would consider outsourcing a company.
Some say that by doing telemarketing in-house, you take control of the process. Yes, there are many advantages in doing telemarketing in-house. To give you an idea, here are some advantages of having your telemarketing in-house.
- You will have taken control of the process of your telemarketing campaign
- Create and follow your own process.
- No contracts to sign and follow
- Build a good relationship with your sales and marketing team.
- Train your own team the way you want them to make calls.
On the other hand, most IT businesses nowadays choose to consider outsourcing a company to handle their telemarketing and appointment setting campaigns because it can help their sales process easy to handle. Here are some of the benefits that you can get if you wish to outsource your telemarketing and appointment setting campaigns.
- Have a team of professionals and high-quality sales reps that are expert in generating high-quality leads and appointments.
- Spend more time and effort on other important tasks that could help increase productivity such as develop a better technology and learn the latest trend within the IT industry.
- Save money on operational cost and training.
- Take advantage and make use of the latest tools used in telemarketing.
- Save time and effort in getting hold of hard to reach IT Directors and Managers.
- Have sales-ready leads to follow up to.
However, for most business owners, their only dilemma when outsourcing is not knowing what’s happening and what’s not and they’re left wondering what’s going on every day. So my advice to you is to find someone that lets you monitor your campaign even from afar but never settle with cheap telemarketing services.
For instance, Callbox provides their clients access to different tools like Smart Calling, Dialer , Lead nurture tool and Pipeline so their clients are aware of every activity happening in their campaign. Knowing what’s happening gives you peace of mind because you know where the money that you’ve invested is going.
Here’s more Why Outsourcing Telemarketing Will Give You More Singapore B2B Leads
4: List building, Management, and Cleansing
Marketing lists degrade by 22.5% every year. Why? People move from one company to another. Even companies may move from one location to another. So, the chances of them changing their emails, phone numbers and locations are higher. Not convinced yet, here are more reasons why you need an email list.
How to build and grow your marketing list?
Whether you’re building an email or a calling list, having your own marketing list and constantly growing it can help in your productivity. Here are some ways on how to grow your marketing list.
- Have an opt-in form in your website and blog posts.
- Create a useful information and high-value content in exchange of their contact information such as; name, email, job title, company and phone number. It could be an ebook, a worksheet, calendar or any downloadable content with practical tips. Here’s what we give to our loyal readers.
Download the Ultimate Lead Generation Kit here! It’s FREE.
- Create a fun and engaging contest for your readers. They can enter their email address in order to participate.
- Add a CTA button on your FB page.
For example a CTA button to a landing page where they can sign up and enter their email address for access.
- Host an event or an online webinar and collect their contact information such as name and email address upon registration.
- Send a welcome package to new subscribers.
Managing and maintaining your marketing list is a must because it can either make or break your marketing plan. So keeping it clean is important! Here’s a guide on how to update and clean your marketing list.
- Identify which data is within your target market. Factors to look at includes;
- Name
- Job title
- Phone number
- Company name
- Company address
- Industry
- Company size (number of employees and annual sales)
- Remove data outside of your target market
- Separate contacts with missing information such as name, email, company size, and industry.
- Find a way to get hold of some missing information within your list.
TIP: You can research on Google or have someone from your team call each contact and do a profiling campaign.
As you grow your marketing list with new contacts, you are also having leads to nurture and convert into sales -ready leads later on.
Related: The Secrets to Increase your Database with Qualified Contacts [VIDEO]
If you’re in the IT industry, you need the right marketing plan in order to grow your business. A good marketing plan helps you create and develop new technologies and provide better services in order to meet the needs of your target market.
