Cold Calls or Warm Leads?

We’re moving to a world (if not already there) where cold calling is not the order of the day. Nowadays, it is far more productive to ensure you rank high on search engines, the most popular being Google. With such cluttered lives, most of us have tunnel vision, only focusing on the things that we actively want to engage. If you’re anything like me, you never even see the commercials on TV because you DVR the things you want to see on TV (except live sporting events, ofcourse!)

 

As a software company we, Efficience, pride ourselves on technical excellence, and staying ahead of the curve. We have survived on strong relationships with clients, and word of mouth. So when it comes to marketing ourselves on the web, we have fallen behind. For this reason, we have recently engaged a company called Hubspot. Their team of experts and their software tools will undoubtedly increase our findability on the web, and put us back on the front page of web searches.

Just as important, they are helping us to engage the potential clients that visit our website. They do this by helping you provide the most valuable information you can that will encourage visitors to want to provide you contact information, and want to engage in communication with you. In short, you can’t chase them. You have to allow them to find you easily, and then entice them with valuable content to want to communicate with you when they do find you.

This method is referred to as Inbound Marketing, and is the name of a book that I’ve been reading on and off since I heard the author, Brian Halligan, speak at the Fortune Growth Summit last April. Halligan and David Meerman Scott (whom I’ve referenced several times, and inspired me to begin a blog) have a joint book out called Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead.

Last week’s blog was on giving, and it is in this sprit that giving away knowledge such as ebooks, white papers and even free services, will help a lot of people, but also attract a few serious clients.

The social networking media’s like Facebook and Twitter are very valuable to this way of marketing. Check out this example of a way to use FB to help you target your customers. I researched ads for our company page on FB and did a search for Knoxville, radius of 50 miles, ages 25 and up, with the target word “software”. It rendered 180 matches that I could place an ad on their page. If they click the ad, I’m charged a small fee, but it allows me to put my valuable information in front of people that are most likely to be interested in what I have to offer….warm leads.

If I wanted to share my information with only IT Directors or CTO’s, this would be an easy way for me to find them, and sit my information right in front of hundreds of IT Directors and CTO’s every time they log into Facebook. In our business, it only takes a few clients to make a huge difference.

Is your marketing strategy making cold calls or is it engaging warm leads?                                                                                              

                   …..to be continued as we execute this new strategy.