Stay at the Forefront of your Prospect’s Mind with Drip Marketing
Drip marketing comes from a marketing tenant that prospects need to see or read your message many times before doing business with you. In high-tech companies, 90% of sales staff dismisses a lead after three failed contacts, yet 80% of deals are won after the seventh contact. Sales goes on to lower hanging fruit because they are easier to close.
Staying in constant communication with clients and prospects is a requirement to closing more business. Using drip marketing strategies, your company sends out customized communications over a period of time to a segmented leads list. These pieces can include, letters, webinar invitations or event announcements.
Quality Content is King
Before you launch a drip marketing campaign, it’s imperative to build a library of value-added, fresh & interesting content. One of our customers named these “SOVs” or “something of value”. These can include white papers, product reviews, industry trends, webinars, newsletters, or forums. Today video is the most exciting SOV and high-quality video cameras and affordable software make it easy to produce great videos. Check out Animoto and the Pulse SmartPen by Livescribe. Google & Tech Target released a report last year showing 72% of IT buyers watch video as part of their decision-making process.
Get a Content Generation SYSTEM
Don’t have time to develop all the content yourself? Get others to write it for you! Your affiliates, distributors and partners should jump at the chance to write articles or blog posts in exchange for a great back link and promotion on your site. You can also consider outsourcing – many marketing agencies have tech copywriters who can write articles on any subject on your behalf. The key is to have a system that churns out content on a consistent basis – even when your internal teams do not have the time or energy.
Alright, I’ve created content. What’s Next?
After creating a content library, you will need a reputable email service provider (ESP) and the ability to frequently add content to your website. Technology marketing agencies use providers such as iContact as ESPs because of their ability to deliver a large portion of emails past spam filters.
However, to take full advantage of drip marketing, we recommend a marketing automation/demand generation systems (a good one is Infusionsoft) which have recently become affordable even for small businesses.
