The Direct Line between Compelling Content and Short-Term Growth

I recently talked with execs at a company that had just received a healthy dose of financing. These good people now face aggressive goals for customer growth, and they need to begin demonstrating measurable progress by the end of this year.

Growth in such a short term is challenging, but doable. What’s needed is fast-track execution of short-term tactics that diverge from traditional marketing and public relations strategy. This young company still needs to build lasting, broad awareness with ongoing media and analyst outreach, but that won’t move the needle by yearend. What this company also needs is immediate, direct outreach to capture and nurture leads into conversions.

Fortunately, social media presents excellent short-term opportunities for prospect engagement when an organization already has a list of qualified prospects in hand, which is the case with the newly funded company.

If that’s also the case with your company, you can accelerate the sales cycle when you’re under revenue pressure by immediately connecting with potential customers. I mentioned a few options in a recent blog post. Here’s a bit more detail on communication tools that are useful for closing nurturing gaps with sales leads and optimizing the lead flow:

– Explainer videos are effective tools for conveying information in a creative, entertaining and visual form. In addition to covering important topics in a short time, videos can be instructive, actionable and highly shareable across multiple channels – websites, emails, blogs, LinkedIn, YouTube, Google+ and Twitter.

Explainer videos with incentives and compelling calls to action motivate customers to reach out when they’re ready to proceed with discussions, and are much more reliable than traditional textual information. An infographic from simplified.tv notes that 60 percent of website visitors watch videos before reading text on the same topic, and videos in search results get 40 percent more clicks than text listings.

Ultimately, explainer videos make it possible to more quickly warm those cold leads. Even video advertisers are leveraging the interactivity of video ads more and more often, as revealed in this article from eMarketer.

– Webinars can also serve as a valuable method of bringing useful content and solutions to the issues faced by your potential customers. Since prospects choose to attend these webinars, their interest level in your solutions is already high. A webinar can boost that interest level by explaining how your solution is what they need to overcome the obstacles they face.

– Online surveys, when properly prepared, both engage prospects and deliver intelligence that can help you move them through the sales funnel. When asked for opinions, most people are happy to share them. With proper planning, you can create surveys that are inviting, quick to complete and give you the ammo you need to move your best prospects into the sales funnel.

Again, these tactics aren’t a replacement for traditional marketing and public relations strategies, but are instead handy jump-start tactics that leverage new channels for quick results. Having said that, let’s face it – with the pace of contemporary business, when do we not have a need for quick results?

If you’d like to talk more about lead nurturing programs along these lines, just give us a call.