Solutions to help: Protect your brand

Influence prospects who AREN’T leads – yet

Only a relatively small percentage of companies that need what you have to offer will be specifically looking for a solution at any one time. It’s one of marketing’s tasks to help identify those people who are currently in the market. But there will always be a large proportion of potential customers that will be looking for something you sell in the future – but that aren’t ready yet.

It’s important to educate and nurture those prospects so that when they do start to look, they know about you and you know about them – and ideally you’ll already have a trusted relationship in place by then.

It’s also vital that you protect your brand with these prospects by only sending relevant collateral, by listening and understanding and by telling a consistent story – which is another way we help our Clients.

Eliminate contradictory messaging and uncoordinated campaigns

There are more marketing channels than ever today. How do you ensure that you are telling a consistent story across all marketing channels to an individual prospect? And what does it do to your brand if you don’t?

All communication is perceived at an individual level. In other words, every prospect reads, sees, hears or listens to each communication and judges it against his or her own experience.

If a prospect receives different, often contradictory, messages via different channels, if information they share isn’t passed on, if they receive marketing collateral that doesn’t apply to them, if they perceive that they aren’t being taken notice of or that their time is being wasted, then it reflects badly on your brand.

The Database Dept.’s cloud based WebONE Integrated Marketing Database ensures our Clients know who has said what to whom, when, and how. It captures all customer communications via all marketing channels so you can provide prospects with a consistent, coherent, progressing and relevant narrative.

As well as helping you sell more this enhances your reputation in the market and protects your brand.

Ensure you are professionally represented in the market

Every time someone representing your company communicates with a prospect your reputation is on the line – especially in these days of ubiquitous social media.

Think for a moment from the perspective of a prospect. If they are important enough for you to communicate with them, if they are a decision maker, a recommender or an influencer, then they are almost certainly being contacted by many other people; not just by your direct competitors but by anyone else that wants to sell them something.

If you don’t already have a relationship with them, from their perspective you are just one in a long line of people trying to sell them something. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t contact them. But it does mean that when you do you must be professional, offer them something of value and respect their time and viewpoint.

So it’s critical that anyone who represents you understands the prospect’s perspective, can gently overcome their initial reticence and knows how to gradually develop a trusted relationship by offering valuable information and relevant advice, by understanding their business issues, by being politely persistent and by following through.

The Database Dept.’s ARM Business Platform achieves just that. It’s the science of building relationships with decision makers that are not yet ready to buy so when they are, they trust you – as our other Clients trust us.