Crafting marketing and sales materials that convert at high rates is a big part of what I do here at RiseFuel. We can drive all of the traffic that we want, but if we are unable to actually convert those visitors into customers then we wouldn’t be doing much for our clients.
Messaging is so critical. It's embedded in everything we create for our business — content, advertisements, email conversations — every interaction we have with a customer is a piece of that messaging strategy.
Knowing how to speak to your customers is just as important as having a product that they love.
Without proper messaging, they’ll never use your product to gain an understanding of whether or not it was a good fit for them or not. Messaging is the gear that drives the machine.
There are a few key best practices to keep in mind when you are crafting sales messages for target personas.
The key focus of all messaging should focus on building your relationship, which often requires more of a soft-sell sales process than a hard-sell.
As you set out to improve your sales messaging, take these tips into account.
They have served me well in my time here at RiseFuel:
Start with Detailed Customers Personas
Without detailed customer personas, you are blind and wandering in a forest at night (so to speak).
Customer personas are simply documents that outline your customers, demographic information about them, what is important to them, and any relevant information that will play a role in how you approach them through sales and marketing.
Detailed customer personas might seem like something that we all have in our heads, but actually spelling things out and getting them down on paper can be an eye-opening experience.
Behaviorally targeted ads are twice as effective as non-targeted ads. Personalized emails drive 18 times more revenue than non-personalized broadcast emails. Personas put you in a position to personalize your marketing.
Leverage Existing Marketing Accounts
Your existing marketing accounts are a treasure trove of information about marketing and sales messaging.
You should already be running split tests on a variety of different marketing materials that you deliver to prospects, including landing pages and emails. If you aren’t now is a good time to start.
Split tests provide you with so much information about how to word your messages and speak directly to the biggest concerns of your audience.
You should save all data from every split test to ensure that you are taking as much information from each test as you possibly can. The more tests you run the more data you will have to work with.
Use your existing accounts for research too. Sending them surveys for data collection can be a great way to learn what is important to your customers and use that to inform your marketing and sales messages to their targeted persona.
Questions and Interactions Inform Your Messaging
When you’re having a sales conversation, nothing is more powerful than taking a genuine interest in their business (in B2B sales) or their life (in B2C sales).
Getting to know your prospect and being genuine in the way that you go about it does a lot more for building a relationship than using some slick sales script ever does.
Ask questions. Genuinely interact with your prospects. When you do, take notes and use that information to inform your digital marketing materials as well.
Every interaction with a customer can serve as a data point for informing your messaging and helping your team to better understand what is important to targeted personas within your system.
Write As You Talk
Have you ever received a marketing email that just came across as “salesy” and really turned you off from the product? We all have.
We all know how to spot clever copywriting that is meant to manipulate and persuade us.
While those kinds of messages do work in some situations and have their place, in account-based marketing it is much more important to work on developing a relationship.
Whenever you craft a new sales message make a point to write the way that you would in a conversation.
Your prospects will respond better when you are being genuine, rather than someone that is regurgitating a pre-written sales script.
Value The Customer’s Time
Everyone is busy. Everyone has important things that they should be doing. When a customer takes their time to engage with your marketing or sales materials, make it clear that you value their time.
Don’t ask them to sit in on an hour-long webinar when 30 minutes is more than enough time to cover the subject at hand.
Only ask your customer to donate as much time as is appropriate for whatever sales materials that you are putting together. Generally, shorter pieces of content will be more easily digestible.
Make it clear that you know they are busy and only provide information that is truly valuable to them — which also makes the case for personalization.
When you personalize your sales communications you speak directly to their concerns and won’t bombard them with content and messages that are not relevant to them.
This will help you to show that you value their time and make every interaction with your company a positive one.
Focus On Relationships, Not Quick Sales
Account-based marketing is a marketing strategy that has really taken off in the last half-decade, especially in B2B applications, in part due to the focus on relationship building.
Building relationships with prospects is easier than it used to be. While field sales used to require that salespeople set up face-to-face meetings to connect with their customers, today the same can be achieved using video conferencing technology.
Placing your focus on building relationships will not just result in more conversions, but it will result in better customers.
Being able to develop a connection with prospects not only informs your messaging but helps you to better understand their biggest concerns and needs.
Sales Messaging is Critical for Sustainability
Having the right sales messaging is absolutely critical for sustainable sales and marketing processes.
Placing your focus on building relationships will not only help you to develop a more personal connection with prospects, but it will allow you to learn more about them and their needs and inject that data into your sales and marketing campaigns.
