Getting a lead is about much more than shoving your ad in your target’s face, says Stephanie Walters, head of marketing operations at Dot Network.
The music’s pumping, you catch the stranger’s eye across the room. After a few flirtatious smiles, you head over. Your game is strong. You ask them their name, get their number and then smoothly ask if they’d like to move in together and get a joint bank account.
Wait. What?! Exactly.
Building a long-term relationship takes more than an introduction. It takes time together, getting to know each other and building trust. These are the keys to a sustainable relationship. And in many ways, business needs to have the same core values.
It can be hard work but building rapport with current and potential clients and communicating with them regularly, even when you’re not just advertising a specific product or service, goes a long way in developing that relationship.
During the course of a great relationship, memories are built, information is shared and common ground is found. In the same way, businesses have large amounts of data about people that equips them to build profiles and understanding about their audiences, and to subsequently develop relationships with key potential customers.
Companies are now better equipped than ever with useful data about their audiences that they can use to help build trust and improve their brand awareness, particularly with potential big-ticket clients.
The art of good brand relationships begins with a significant shift in making brand awareness campaigns more effective for priming big leads by using a subtler form of targeted online adverts, rather than bombarding already communication-weary leads with SMSs or emails. It’s about being far more sophisticated than just sending SMSs. It’s about ensuring you have the right technology stack that can find similarities between the data you already have and additional data brought into the campaign from third parties, and overlaying this with high-level algorithms to find the right time, place, medium and platform to make your message known. In this way, data about potential leads is used to strategically place online adverts that encourage brand awareness, education and recall in online locations and at times that big leads are most likely to see them.
A case in point
In a recent campaign for a leading financial services client, Amorphous, with Dot Network, were tasked with helping to find 250 of the right, high-value clients based in six key countries, for the firm’s investment products. Because the brand was only really known in South Africa, Amorphous and Dot Network set about first creating brand awareness and building a connection with possible leads in other regions. Rather than spending immense amounts of money on physical billboards or broadcast adverts, they used sophisticated technology and algorithms on the company’s data to find the right potential clients to target. They then looked at how these people behave online and found the right touch points to place online adverts to target institutional investors in Europe, Scandinavia and the US. They painted its targeted audience’s online world with a story that made them familiar with the financial services brand, but without any specific product information, focusing on educating the audience with potential investment opportunities.
As a result, there was a significant upturn in the brand recall percentage in the new regions and the investment company’s sales team could follow up with meetings where they positioned the investment products on offer based on an existing knowledge of the brand. The campaign was a great success and the brand exposure of the firm was equivalent to 17 900 online gross rating points.
And this is not the only example of a successful case study where targeted digital adverts have yielded good results when used for improving brand awareness and decreasing media wastage. Previous campaigns have seen an 80% increase in brand recall, which gave sales teams shorter turnaround times in the sales process, as well as giving them a higher response and engagement rate.
Data activation can go a long way in making life easier for sales people and getting better sales results. These case studies show that data is not just useful for marketers but should be seen by a whole business as a vital business tool, enabling each department to have marketing focused to their business unit needs rather than simply focusing on the retail aspect, which has been the main emphasis for marketers in the past.
Disseminating brand values and improving a brand’s exposure through targeted adverts wins trust that ultimately results in a higher level of acceptance from potential clients when the time comes to pitch a specific product to them, because they are already aware of your brand and have formed an opinion of it. Just like the way a relationship between two people is cultivated through time together and sharing information with one another, targeted advertising is one of the best modern technology tools to help companies effectively court new clients.
Stephanie Walters is head of marketing operations at Dot Network. Contact her.
This article originally appeared on Ramify.