Millennials aren’t just entering the workforce—they are also stepping into senior managerial positions, leadership, and entrepreneurial roles. They dislike rigid corporate structures and have an immense affinity for emerging technology and the digital world.
Interesting this crowd in the overly lengthy presentations and other dry tactics we’ve used with the baby boomer generation is tough.
If you’re having trouble capturing the attention of the new generation of decision-makers, here are some digital tactics to help revamp your campaigns.
1. Discover Your Differentiators
Most brands believe developing and promoting superior or unique products/services is enough for a differentiator, except they are half right.
Your differentiator isn’t limited to your offerings, it’s also about what staff across the organization do, every day. And how they do it. Creating a sustainably distinctive enterprise is what will sum up your differentiating factors.
Consider the following:
- Map your internal processes. You may need an independent party to analyze and point out overly complex processes and hiccups. Address all departments since they are all interdependent—if one fails, the others will slow down too.
- Map your customers’ path. Cover all the steps, right from brand awareness to engagement, conversion, usage, and discontinuation of use. How do potential customers find you? What considerations go into decision-making? How do they pay? How do you deliver/install the solution? What support do you provide?
- Find out what matters to your customers. Analyze consumer responses (your own and the competition’s) to get a feel of their expectations. What motivates them to choose you or a competitor? What ranks highest for them? Pricing? Quality? Convenience and reliability? Customer service?
Once you’ve listed these factors, you can now brainstorm ways to smoothen issues, promote internal collaboration and employ systems to support and facilitate customer experiences.
2. Incorporate Video Marketing
For many years now, video has been considered part of the greater content strategy. This strategy has since evolved into a fully-fledged strategy capable of attracting, holding audience attention, and driving conversions.
Top practices include:
- Knowing the stage your buyers are at aka identification, intent, or purchase, and putting together videos that address each to drive prospects forward.
- Leveraging customer reviews to pick up obscure customer needs you can meet and create videos around these needs.
- Creating explainer videos. Dig into your expertise and make helpful recommendation videos. These may help attract new customers, rekindle the attention of cold leads, and inspire engagement.
- Assembling short videos for social media to ensure audiences watch them to the end.
- Embed videos on your site for audiences that dislike text-heavy pages. Keep an eye on page load speed or you might put off impatient users.
Examples of useful video types include educational video blogs, case studies, product overview videos, use cases, free demos, and video integration tutorials.
3. Make Cold Calls
Phone calls are part of everyday business—we connect with customers, negotiate deals, answer queries, make follow-ups, and just about everything else.
If you’re trying to secure new customers, making cold calls works faster than other tactics. You can gauge voice nuances to know their interest in your solutions and serve up your value proposition clearly.
Best practices include:
- Preparing yourself. Know what you’re selling in-depth and how your solutions compare to competitors. The more you know, the more confidently you’ll convey it to potential customers.
- Identifying and compiling a target list and looking up information that may help you understand their pain points, motivations, and values. See if you can learn the contact person’s personality and try to mirror it.
- Preparing your script. Ideally, you’ll want to have three handy—one for the gatekeeper, another for the prospect, and one more for voicemail. Each should encourage the listener to take action; whether that’s putting your call through, agreeing to a meeting/scheduling a demo, or calling you back.
- Remembering you’ll win some and lose some too. Cold calling takes plenty of enthusiasm, positivity, persistence, and follow-ups. You’ll lose several but win some and that makes it worthwhile.
You can opt to work with a lead generation agency to help with this strategy.
4. Account-Based Marketing
This strategy brings together the expertise of your customer-facing personnel to engage a select group of high-value accounts requiring tailored marketing.
Through marketing and social intelligence, you can monitor trigger events at a target account and then brainstorm the fundamentals needed, like mapping, offers, and metrics.
Consider this:
- Come up with prospect-specific offers. For our campaigns and offers to deliver high conversions, they need to be personalized to the specific account’s needs and interests. A personalized report is more compelling since it promises more value.
- Test with direct mail. A senior executive may be wary of online ads and unsolicited emails but open to a vendor who rouses their curiosity through direct mail. Determine how much you’re willing to spend on the items you are sending out and inject some creativity into them.
- Limit reporting tools. Departmental silos are real and can impede ABM efforts since each department has its targets, roles, and metrics. By limiting data reporting tools, all departments look at the same information, keeping all parties in the loop.
- Start small. It’s easy to get excited and target just about every high-value client you can think of but we encourage you to start small. With a few customers to target, you’ll learn effective campaign and engagement methods to prepare you for the bigger fish.
5. Improve Customer Experiences
Customers comprise people, and these people have friends in other organizations. If they are happy with your brand, they will talk about it.
If they are unhappy, they will talk about it. Making customer interactions pleasant may help increase brand loyalty and positive word of mouth.
Practical tips include:
- Promote customer feedback. Create a short online feedback form where customers can share what they think of your brand and the solutions you provide. Analyze what your customers say and implement processes that help improve areas where you’ve fallen short.
- Make working with your brand easy. Identify the top channels potential customers use to find vendors like yourselves and create a presence there. Offer multiple ways for customers to reach you and set a reasonable time to respond.
- Be sure to articulate your offerings in layperson’s terms. It helps them understand you better. Go on and preempt customer questions by addressing what happens at all the stages of their journey.
When consumers know what to expect and their expectations are met, their loyalty to you increases and makes it easier for them to refer you.
