Table of contents
- How startups can achieve brand awareness
- Strategies for customer acquisition
- The key to overcoming competition
- Importance of customers beyond the sale
Introduction
Are you thirsty for gaining traction fast? Do you want an efficient customer acquisition strategy but don’t know how to? Do you want to explore the market fast but at a lower cost? Then you are at the right place.
According to Forbes, if you gain traction, funding will find you. It is, thus, a goal of any business owner to gain customers fast and grow. After all, that shows a product’s need in the market and proves the product solves the problem it was created to.
Generating leads is an inevitable part of any business, as you have to generate leads to convert them to customers.
When it comes to a new market, the dynamics change as every market is a different entity, and thus you have to understand the market to know how to conquer it.
There are many aspects of lead generation in a new market, and they include:
Brand awareness
Brand awareness is vital for your business. According to Semantics, 59% of shoppers prefer to buy from brands familiar to them. That means it should be the goal of your business to spread out the message about your brand. A strong brand shows authority and thus builds trust, and that is why consumers are more likely to buy from an authoritative brand than any random brand.
Building brand awareness is mandatory when you are getting into a new market. At Sulma & Sulma, we build partnerships with the relevant influencers and the media.
Building a brand is much easier with technology than in the past. There are plenty of options and channels you can use to strengthen your brand, for example, social media channels and email marketing.
We use many strategies but mainly focus on content marketing and community engagement.
It is wise for you as a company to capitalize on press releases for content marketing. That means building brand partnerships with authoritative companies in your industry and partnering with influencers. Posting the PR content in different avenues will ensure a broad reach of the message, which helps increase brand awareness.
Your responsibility as a company is to be creative in engaging with your audience though that solely depends on your buyer personas. For instance, as a strategy, we have a series of interviews dubbed “100 best CEOs disrupting tech“, where we feature the best innovations in a plight to help our buyer personas increase their brand awareness.
In the era of social media, many companies prefer to use social media channels to ensure their customers get engaged. There are also options for using blogs, webinars, startup events, emails, etc. We also cannot ignore offline channels as they are still very effective. They include events such as expos and CSR activities.
Brand awareness is an easy gateway to inbounds. Inbounds are an easy way of getting customers for your business.
Startups in pre-seed and seed stages can capitalize on brand awareness to help them stand out from the crowd even in the eyes of investors, which can help them secure funding. According to studies, startups with strong branding are more likely to secure financing than those with weak branding.
Customer Acquisition
Lead generation and customer acquisition go hand in hand. There are many strategies a company can use to get customers and engage them online.
At Sulma & Sulma, we use various strategies to get customers fast (e.g. we already have customers for you, who we call “boosters”). To have access to customers, you have to do specific targeting, which has helped us a long way. We integrate both inbound and outbound methodologies into our strategy.
For a start, we have to understand your background, including your customers’ needs. That means we have to know your customer journey, buyer personas, and ideal customer profile. We already have a template that they have to fill in to make it easy.
Sharing this information is crucial for you as it will help us identify any gaps and prepare a strategy depending on the persona’s needs. Since the market has many personas, it is vital to adjust accordingly to get the persona’s attention of interest. You can paraphrase a famous saying: “Show me your Customer Journey, and I will tell you how good you’re.”.
Once we get comprehensive information on the CJ, BP, and ICP, we are well armored to create the appropriate marketing material, such as copywriting material that gets the attention of your personas. This helps to lower bounce rates and the number of unsubscribes. The filled templates help us lead generation – for our projects or workshops as we can better understand the target customer and their pain points.
Our methodology is straightforward:
- We start with “heavy lifting”. We run an AI email campaign to find “hand-raisers”, people who will say “I’m interested”, and separate warm leads from the rest.
- We schedule presentations and close the deals with the hand-raisers.
- We run a social media or direct call campaign to the warm leads to separate those who will fall into a bucket “I’m interested” in and some “not for now”.With the interested ones, we repeat step 2 above.
- We also contact the media or create partnerships to build brand awareness during the first three steps.
- We start outbound marketing activities; we apply an inverted triangle strategy. We focus first on the leads at the end of the sales funnel to nurture them and convert them by email campaigns or newsletters.
- We record or perform webinars or run closed groups for lead nurturing and closing.
- We automate the sales process to help the customers onboard themselves. Our goal is to lower Customer Acquisition Costs as much as possible.
Our process helps us explore the market ASAP and know the questions from the bottom of the sales funnel to start automation. Automation is the key to inbound marketing and scaling up.
Overcoming competition
There is no doubt that the marketplace is getting more competitive. There are plenty of innovations and opportunities that come up every day. If you are not aggressive in the market, it is hard to get a competitive advantage.
There are different kinds of customers, and most of the time, they might be using an alternative solution that you are using.
It depends on a company’s methodology when it comes to overcoming competition.
At Sulma & Sulma, we have a methodology that works in stages. The first stage is where we go for the most accessible prospects. These are prospects that are easy to convert to customers, what we refer to as low-hanging fruits. They are referred to as innovators or early adopters in the startup world. To hook them, they have to know about the solution you are preparing, have the right message, and then connect them at the right time.
As for the other group of prospects, we first try to reach out to them through an email campaign where we try to introduce the solution to them using a different view to find the best for future scaling up.
We can say it happens in different stages.
When we send emails, we judge by the responses we get. The first lot are the ones that will open the emails and express their interest. From the ones who respond, we can group them into two hand-raisers interested and want to try out. The second group is interested but is not sure about it. In some cases, they ask questions about products or case studies. For those interested but not sure, we nurture them through articles or contacting them.
We judge them by open and click rates from the lot that do not reply to emails. The higher the rates, the more interested they are. So even though they do not respond, we will reach out to them through warm calling or alternative methods. We believe they are warm leads because they are not entirely new to the company as they have heard about it in one way or the other. Most of them in this category are interested but are not sure. That means they need nurturing to see a clear path on how the solution can apply in their situation. In this case, we set up a separate email campaign for nurturing. We nurture them with more information with examples and case studies to give them a visual perception of applying the product to their situation.
For those that do not click or open, we try to investigate why, and then we decide either:
a) Find another person at the company to contact
b) Call and inquire if they saw the emails. If not, send it again or ask why they are not interested.
c) If possible, invite them to nurture, e.g. invite them for a webinar.
d) leave them.
One of the easiest ways of overcoming competition is dealing with a company that has been in the industry before.
The main key pointer that gives us a competitive advantage is working with similar customers. Dealing with a similar industry before means that prospecting and qualifying leads are much easier. We can use our experience to apply the best practices.
The best part is that we can do it with precision, making closing deals faster. Sulma & Sulma has a stronger brand as a tech supplier, so often, when we hear “we are not interested”, the prospects add, “but we want to stay in touch with you.”
Our platform and adapting our methodology to our customers have helped us a long way. Working with many customers from different industries has given us many insights and best practices, translating to networks and making selling easy. That provides us with a database that we can adapt to a customer.
Customers beyond the sale
In many instances, a customer does not use your product as they do not understand the impact of your product on their needs. In some situations, a customer may be using your product but not deriving the maximum benefit from it.
We believe in service beyond the sale as a company, something we refer to as account management. We concentrate on this as we believe that a happy customer is a happy business. According to Gartner, account management is more likely to improve customer satisfaction by 48%.
You can use different strategies to ensure this. First, you have to ensure that there is a product-market fit. That means that the product needs to be adjusted to fit the changing needs of the market. By understanding the needs of the customer, you can align accordingly so that the product meets the needs of the customer.
You can also do a lot of education to your customers as we believe that information is power. Through education, you can ensure that customers can derive maximum utility from the product. You have to maintain steady communication with customers, and in case you plan on new features you communicate to them early. You can also involve them in different aspects of decision-making to ensure you maintain your chemistry. This as a result will lead to many referrals, which is mandatory for growth. Remember, you must be sure that your customers spot the value you offer, and they understand the short and long-term profits it generates for them. You have to ensure that by educating them to deliver an outstanding customer experience, to build your community.
Conclusion
Generating leads in a new market fast is attainable. You only need the right strategy, the right plan, and the right methodology. In the same way Sulma & Sulma, we have our methodology, you can have yours. At Sulma & Sulma we believe that everyone should have equal access to new tech, so we focus on increasing the pace of tech adaptation, driving the development of societies.
We support startups and scale-ups with product-market fit and sales generation services. We combine product-market fit, inbound and outbound marketing, customer acquisition, and account management into one platform. We’re your exponential factor to build brand awareness, get traction, and scale up. We optimize on boosters, who are potential customers that we already have in our database. With them the inertia is minimal and thus converting them to paying customers is easy.
You can also borrow a leaf from us and create a winning strategy. Above all, it is good to integrate technology for more efficiency. Technology such as automation is the key for inbound marketing and scaling up.
