The global coronavirus outbreak has substantially hampered the economy and is changing the way businesses need to operate. Factory shutdowns, reduced international shipping, and less business travel is causing significant supply chain disruption. While North America has been less impacted than parts of Asia and Europe, the effect the virus has had on global trade, commerce and investment continues to become more severe.
With many companies expecting lower demand and tighter profit margins, competition for customers will continue to ramp up over the coming months. Will your business be ready to weather the storm?
Using proactive marketing and sales tactics is the only way to ensure your business can sustain itself or grow through global crises. Your business needs to diversify its customer base to ensure that if certain products/services or geographic regions become unreliable (or unprofitable), there are other growth segments to rely on. This is only possible if your marketing and sales strategies work collaboratively to support both lead generation and nurturing.
More Than Just a Virus: How to Protect Your Business with Diversification
A slowing economy impacts some industries more than others. Manufacturing has been one of the hardest hit through the recent coronavirus outbreak, with the production of many Chinese-based industrial giants slowing to a halt. Regardless if your business doesn’t recognize any slow-downs yet, it might not be far away. Even if you’re not currently impacted by the global coronavirus outbreak, will it be ready for the next economic blow?
Diversification is the only sustainable way to ensure your business can adapt to changing economic climates.
Ensuring that your business provides its products or services to a wide range of customer segments across the world can help more businesses succeed in challenging times.
To diversify your customer base and ensure that it can grow despite economic challenges, consider implementing proactive marketing and sales strategies. It’s never been more important to maintain a CRM or contact database that integrates marketing and sales data to better identify and serve customer needs. Using a data-based approach to generate and nurture leads will help make more close connections and build loyal customers.
Lead Generation Strategies to Diversify Your Customer Base
We asked MoreSALES’ team of marketing and sales experts how they would choose to diversify their customers and ensure long-term growth despite weakened economic forecasts. Here’s the eight most relevant tactics your business can use:
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Being found online and providing a positive impression of your company is critical to growth and success. Having a great web presence (including keyword-based long-form content and responsive website design) will help ensure you give the right signals to potential customers. Ensure you’re using best practices and providing a rich experience that enhances the customer journey. In turn, this will show search engines that your website is valuable and will promote it to more searchers.
- Search Engine Marketing (SEM): While SEO helps support long-term success, companies that don’t have a high-performing website may want to consider paid search tools that bring your website within reach of its target audience. Paid search tools like Google Ads combine search intent (via keywords) and location (via countries, cities or postal codes) to ensure you get views and clicks from people who will value from your products or services.
- Video Marketing: Video continues to change the way people consume content. YouTube is the second-largest search engine in the world, and social media platforms are increasingly being dominated by those who understand how to produce high-quality video. Stand out to new and existing customers by creating professional, binge-worth video content.
- Social Media Marketing: In business-to-business environments, LinkedIn remains one of the best tools available. The ability to target potential customers and serve them relevant content has never been easier, and in turn it creates memorable interactions which promote further engagement. Most social networks have a variety of advertising options that making you more visible or better able to promote a particular product, service or downloadable resource.
- Inbound and Content Marketing: Creating website content that answers a prospect’s questions and helps provide them with next steps is a great way to build trust and loyalty. It also helps to drive more traffic back to your website as fodder for email and social media marketing. With more people working from home than ever before, you need to create resources that answer people’s questions and drive value. Not only will increasing your investment into content marketing help create better customer experiences, it’ll also significantly boost your ability to be found through search engines.
- Direct Mail Marketing: While potential customers can miss or ignore your digital content fairly easily, direct mail gives you a chance to be seen and remembered by more decision-makers. Direct mail can be used in conjunction with purchased lists to get in front of your target audience more easily, and tends to be well-received in traditional B2B-relationships.
- Event Marketing: Since it may take some time for trade shows to come back and provide leads, consider virtual events. Hosting webinars and performing other video-based meetings can help ensure that your supply of leads don’t dry up. Prospects are still looking for opportunities to learn and invest intelligently; be a calm, optimistic source of information during this challenging time.
- Telemarketing and Appointment Booking: Cold-calling will always be effective if you can empathize with your customer’s pain points. Nobody wants to be called out of the blue to be sold to, but if your team has a focused list and tries to help solve the problems of your audience, it’s possible to generate a considerable volume of leads for follow-up with further calls and emails.
As you can see from this list, the best way to diversify your customer base through marketing and sales strategies is to use a combination of digital and traditional tactics. If you’d like to discuss any of these as they relate to your business, please contact MoreSALES.
[WATCH] How to Generate More High-Quality Leads
Want to learn more about these eight lead generation tactics and how your business can use them to diversify its customer base? Don’t let global economic downturns hamper your company’s success – be proactive and continue forward with smart marketing and sales strategies.
Watch our presentation, How to Generate More High-Quality Leads for a 30-minute deep-dive into these eight strategies and how your business can use them.
