January 8th, 2021
Start off strong this year and apply your marketing strategies with the latest trends!
2020 has been a long year for everyone but this year is a chance for an optimistic recovery. Stay one step ahead--not just of your competitors, but your customers, too. We've picked some of the best marketing strategies and trends for the year 2021 to help you generate more leads and sales!
Termed to be the 4th generation of the industrial revolution, AI empowers data-driven analysis, processes, and operations. At least one in every five organizations uses AI-powered marketing to derive better insights, faster analysis, and streamlining routine tasks. Algorithms brought by AI can harness any information to predict the best leads, helping marketers and sales representatives prioritize the most promising accounts and identify hot prospects not yet in the pipeline. Another benefit is predictive lead scoring which helps sales reps hit their numbers and close more deals, particularly on teams that focus on account-based marketing.
With data-driven B2B companies are awashed in terabytes of information about their customers from CRM systems and third-party sources, AI tools can distill that data into insights that help marketers form a complete picture of the prospects that they should engage with. These insights are the foundation of automating the customer journey. For instance, if a prospect clicked on an ad from social media, has a particular role at his or her company, and has consumed certain content previously, that intelligence can be used to automatically serve up content the lead is likely to engage with, such a demo offer or a webinar. As more automized data flows in, the process gets smarter and more efficient over time. This kind of automation frees marketers to be able to concentrate on other tasks like creative campaigns that take so much time.
Video is allowing storytelling to penetrate into every section of the sales funnel, allowing for clever and compelling narratives to reach more audiences than ever before. Through providing a certain audience with bite-sized pieces of information that answer their pain-points, videos continue to be an effective method for lead generation. In fact, studies show that when a reader is presented with a video and text on the same page, 72% of people actually prefer to learn about a service or product by watching the video. As today’s consumer demands for more video content, more and more marketing teams will have to work on adding videos to their digital and email marketing strategies this 2021.
With the current events surrounding the world today, customers are more vulnerable than ever. They want consistency, reliability, and swift response amidst the changes they've encountered throughout last year. Brands need to make sure that their customers and potential leads feel that. This year, don’t limit your lead generation strategy to just blog posts and subscriber boxes. Use your entire customer service arsenal to generate leads, but also nurture them to increase your annual recurring revenue while decreasing your churn rate. At the end of the day, collecting visitor information is not enough. To increase your ROI, you must establish and maintain a relationship with your customers and convince them to stick around.
What are some other trends you've noticed this year? What other lead and sales strategies are you planning to apply?