Streamline your business comms activity

In the first part of this article we looked at the questions you can ask yourself to inform what you need to do to achieve the best impact from your outbound communications activity.

Now is the time for action – but fear not, we’re not talking about increasing your workload.

For example, well targeted emails to 20 of your high value prospects are more likely to get a positive reaction than 100 spammed emails.

Here’s what you need to do to generate better inbound responses from your outbound activity:

1. Put yourself in your clients’ shoes

What common challenges do they face? If you’re not sure make a point of asking at your next face to face meeting or update call. This is not extra work, it should be part of your ongoing client relationship building. It will provide you with vital insight which you can then use to shape your marketing.

2. Find some ‘me-too’ prospects

The days of mass marketing and playing the numbers game (i.e. remember the adage: throw enough mud at the wall and some will stick) are gone.

Are you leveraging feedback from your sales team on how to increase your new business pipeline? Use the insight gained from point one and combine this with your sales data and target vertical lists to define a small, highly targeted list of prospects. Quality not quantity is the key to today’s marketing and communications.

3. Say something interesting

Shape your outbound email campaigns with information that is worth reading. Do not ever just push out sales messages (it’s surprising how this is still the go-to strategy for many businesses).

Give an interesting viewpoint on an industry issue; share data that you have in your business which your prospects may not know; highlight future trends.  Offer compelling content and your open and response rates will start to increase.

4. Monitor, measure and adapt

Review your impact and see what is sticking. In today’s commercial world we have access to analytics which, if interrogated, will tell us what we need to do. Make sure your web team or agency is reporting back to you with useful information that you can use. Get your CRM system working for you not the other way around. Then assess the response rates from email campaigns.

5. Share the load – get other people involved

This is the most important point. Who in your team or external resource can provide you with data and feedback that will feed into your strategic output? Review what you need from the list above then look at who your resources are. Re-calibrate your reporting requirements and delegate to experts – it will save you time and increase your overall impact.

Got a question on any of this? Tell us what works for you, we value your opinion. Get in touch.