4 Reasons You Should be Calling Association Members Right Now

You’ve done the leg work to recruit, cultivate and grow your membership base. Like many associations, you may find yourself asking what’s next or how can I retain my members? Time and time again the phone has proven to be a successful channel to quickly disseminate information, prevent donor lapse and increase attendance and engagement.

I’m combining our expertise in lead generation and membership organizations to remind you why you should be calling association members right now.

1. Benefit Education

Although many members may be familiar with your mission, we know from experience that many are either not aware or not taking full advantage of the benefits. A short phone call is an easy way to reach out and educate members about a benefit they may not have been aware of or highlight the newest improvement with your offerings.

Related Post: 3 Simple Ways to Show the Value of Your Association’s Membership

2. Build engagement

Like benefit education, building a relationship with your member base is critical for longevity. In a world where media messages are consistently delivered to our fingertips 24/7, the phone provides a personalized touch for one on one interaction. A quick conversation or voicemail can also get out an urgent message faster while continuing to build on that existing member relationship.

Accompanying calling efforts to build membership engagement with Facebook marketing adds additional member touch points, which results in a more active community.

3. Lapse Prevention

We all know the highest costs in membership come from initial acquisition and then having to reengage those same members who have lapsed. Once we have the members in house we need to do everything we can to retain them.

Once again, the phone provides a cost-effective way to reach our members whether in the form of blast messaging, targeted voicemails or personalized conversations. These conversations go a long way in keeping the member engaged and active.

4. Event attendance

Every week we hear from organizations who state one of their biggest challenges is getting members to attend their events. Often, they are only reaching out via one channel. To truly reach your members the way they want to be contacted and increase attendance you need to get the message out in multiple channels—email, social media and phone.

Think of invitations you receive for a party—following up with a call to make sure they are coming lets them know how much they will be missed and how important they are to your organization!

We also strongly encourage combining these efforts to increase membership engagement with a social media campaign. Our clients have had success with using Facebook to drive members to events, or even reaching them through a custom audience on LinkedIn!

Do you know the best lead generation tactics to grow your association? Download our Lead Generation Best Practices Guide Now!

Using our experience in lead generation, we’ve compiled a list of the top 5 lead generation best practices you need to implement in your association this year.

Simply fill out the form to the right to download your guide!

3 Ways to Create Hyper-Targeted Audiences For Your B2B LinkedIn Campaign

With more than 500 million members, 61 million of which are senior-level influencers, LinkedIn is an ideal platform to generate leads for your B2B organization. In fact, according to HubSpot, LinkedIn is 277% more effective at lead generation than Facebook and Twitter.

While Facebook is a very powerful tool for B2B marketing in our experience, LinkedIn allows you to be more effective at creating hyper-targeted B2B campaigns for a niche target audience. Keep reading to see the top 3 ways to create these hyper-targeted audiences for your next B2B marketing campaign.

Company Names

Many of our clients find the precision of this targeting criteria surprising but LinkedIn actually allows you to select a list of individual companies to target. The individuals at those exact companies will be the only people being served your ads.

For example, let’s say you’d like to create a campaign to recruit more members for your software-as-a-service association. Your targeting criteria is specific - director level and higher marketing and sales executives at the top 150 SaaS companies. With LinkedIn, it’s easy to select any company listed on LinkedIn and add it to your target audience!

Group Membership

One of my favorite criteria to use when creating a LinkedIn audience is group membership. This variable allows you to select any group on LinkedIn and serve your ad to the members of that group. Membership of LinkedIn groups are self-selected and most times based on interests or pain points, making this targeting criteria a powerful tool to use in your next LinkedIn campaign.

Let’s continue the example above. Our association can find many potential new members within LinkedIn groups created to help sales and marketing SaaS professionals solve industry problems and thrive. There are more than 7,000 members that have self-selected themselves to be a part of groups meant to help sales and marketing SaaS professionals and is a perfect way to hone in on an audience that your content will resonate with.

SaaS Marketing Groups - LinkedIn

SaaS Sales Groups - LinkedIn

Matched Audiences

Much like Facebook custom audiences, LinkedIn now offers targeting via matched audiences. This can be done in several ways:

Website Retargeting - Extend your brand message by marketing to LinkedIn members who visited your website

Contact Targeting - Upload lists of contacts using email address or other demographic information in order to reach specific individuals on LinkedIn

Account Targeting - Upload a list of target companies in order to reach decision makers at your target accounts

This type of targeting is extremely specific and a really great tool for organizations that are trying to reach a niche audience.

For those willing to invest the effort into creating relevant content, dynamic ads, and put the time into extensive testing in order to understand which campaign strategies drive the best results, LinkedIn is an optimal tool for lead generation.

What are your favorite targeting strategies to use on LinkedIn?

Do you know the best lead generation tactics to grow your association? Download our Lead Generation Best Practices Guide Now!

Using our experience in lead generation, we’ve compiled a list of the top 5 lead generation best practices you need to implement this year.

Simply fill out the form to the right to download your guide!

3 Ways to Follow Up on B2B Inbound Leads

Wherever you look online, it seems as if everyone is telling you that you need to generate more leads to grow your business. However, do you have a plan for converting those leads into customers or members? Oftentimes, pitching a sale to new, cold leads will likely not lead to a sale at all and even turn off your potential client from wanting to hear from you ever again.

We discussed how quickly you should follow up with inbound leads, but if you still aren’t sure the best ways to follow up, this blog post will help you start planning.

Immediate Email Follow-Up with Value

The simplest way to follow up with B2B inbound leads is to send an automated email immediately after they fill out a form. This form can be as simple as asking your potential customer to fill out the form if they want more information on your services or signing up to receive a content upgrade download in your blog post.

According to GetResponse, a triggered email averages an open rate of 46.53% and a click-through rate of 10.98%. This high engagement rate is due to sending relevant information to your subscribers in response to their actions in your emails or on your website.

Sending an email instantly after someone raises their hand is key because it reaches them while they are still interested in your business. It also allows your customer to be engaged with while giving your sales team time to personally follow up.

Don’t know what to send in a new member follow-up email? We have a blog post to help you create the best email for your members!

Email Automation

Awesome! You sent your lead an immediate email! But you don’t want to stop contact there. Creating an automated email sequence takes leads down your funnel without needing a team member spending time sending individual emails. They can then use their new-found time more efficiently on answering email replies or calling leads who have indicated greater interest.

An email automation sequence also helps familiarize your leads with your company. When 81% of sales happen after 7 or more contacts, automating emails allows you to keep getting in front of leads and can also assist your calling methodology.

Categorize and Distribute leads

When working with inbound marketing to generate quality leads for your sales team, categorizing leads in your CRM is of the utmost importance. Why? Because your team may choose to handle a marketing qualified lead (MQL) and a sales qualified lead (SQL) differently.

Internally, when there is a new MQL, we take additional steps to further qualify that lead and ensure that there is a good fit for both parties. We want to ensure that they are at the right stage in their business and our sales funnel prior to pitching a sale because as we all know, a warmer lead is easier to convert than a cold one. The key is to not make assumptions on whether or not a lead is a good fit for your business because writing them off without further investigation could have you leaving money on the table!

For SQLs, we have indicated in our CRM that they are a more qualified lead based on a variety of indicators, such as types of pages they visited on our website (think pricing) or lower funnel form fills. Rather than continue sending them more marketing information, we make sure our sales team understands how quickly to follow up with leads and the cadence they should follow.

Download Our Step-By-Step Guide for Ideal Inbound Lead Follow-Up Strategy Now

We’ve tested several strategies in our own business and on behalf of our clients and found that the ideal inbound lead follow-up strategy requires 2 things:

1. Urgency in response

2. Commitment to sales cadence if the prospect does not immediately answer

Fill out the form to the right to download our step-by-step guide to effectively follow-up with inbound leads.

Mastering Lead Generation Using Account Based Selling

Account-based selling is a multi-touch, multi-channel strategy coordinated across the entire company to pursue targeted, high-value accounts. It is primarily used by B2B sales teams and targets 'accounts' rather than specific, individual leads.  This allows marketing and sales teams to work together from the very start of the campaign and throughout the entire revenue cycle.  

Who should use account-based selling?

• B2B organizations offering complex solutions and/or focused on closing larger deals size

• Products or services requiring a longer sales cycles - we're not talking about a one-step close

• Teams that have a laser focus on a distinct target audience - potentially a list of less than 500 hyper-targeted companies

What's different about this approach?

When prospecting and lead generation are owned exclusively by the sales team, it typically takes the form of many phone calls - some warm, but many cold. This approach is not the best for companies targeting a very specific audience with a longer sales cycle or complex solution.

Instead, the best account-based selling strategies include several steps, outlined below:

Targeting

With account based selling, teams target 'accounts' rather than individual leads. This means that you target organizations as a whole instead of individual decision makers. Your list of prospects may be so specific that you have less than 500 accounts made up of hyper-targeted criteria. A few examples:

• Geo-location

• Number of employees

• Revenue

• Industry

• Use of specific technologies

Content Marketing

Starting your prospecting with content marketing is essential to account-based selling.  Your marketing content must be tailored to your target market and offer enough value to your prospect for them to be willing to trade some personal information for it. That could look like a subscription to your organization newsletter, a downloadable guide, or an industry whitepaper. It's the initial step to warming up your lead and moving them down the marketing and sales funnel. 

Multi-channel Strategy

A healthy mix of social media, email, phone conversations, etc. should be used in account-based selling campaigns. By being 'everywhere,' you reiterate your brand message and since it’s a basic marketing principle that it takes 7 touches before a prospect can internalize your message, it’s important for your marketing and sales teams to be aligned across all channels.

Personalized Messaging 

Personalized communication with your targeted accounts it extremely important. This doesn’t simply mean that you use their name in an email and goes further than referencing a recent blog or award (although you should absolutely do both). To show your interest and dedication to the account, account based selling is most successful when messaging is so personalized that you send employees of the prospective company a custom report, private webinar invite, or even a company workshop.

Multi-Person Sales Team

Lastly, it’s important to structure your sales team with several key players, including an Account Executive, Digital Growth Specialist, Account Growth Specialist, and additional support roles if necessary. Each team member has a specific and important role that combine to make account based selling successful for your organization.

5 Lead Generation Trends for 2019 That We're Excited About

It’s no secret that lead generation is something that we excel in. Because we want to continue to help our clients grow and succeed in their own businesses, we strive to stay in-the-know on cutting edge ways to bring in more leads for them.

We interviewed several members on our InceptGrows team to talk about trending lead generation tactics that we’re either currently employing or excited to test in the coming year. See what they said below:

Email Marketing

“There are countless numbers of people who say they just delete "those types" of emails, but we have found that email marketing is an amazing tool for B2B lead generation. So many people look at a digital screen throughout the day and don't always have time to take a call or even have the desire to call someone back. However, a short response via email when doing B2B marketing can connect companies who would otherwise not know about each other.

While also being able to monitor email open and click rates with applications, we can then connect with those who have shown interest right away and not wonder if they opened the email or even took a second to skim over it. Email Marketing has also proven to show a high ROI over simply making phone calls and it has increased the number and quality of leads that we are able to send to our clients.” – Victoria Chernikovich, Account Growth Specialist

Targeted Social Media Marketing

“I think that targeted social media ads/marketing have so much potential to generate B2B leads. We’re all constantly monitoring our social media on a daily basis and I think this could be a fantastic source of leads if mined correctly for our clients!” – Lauren Gill, InceptGrows Senior Account Executive

Related Post: 3 Ways to Create a Hyper-Targeted LinkedIn Campaign

Influencer Partnerships

“I’m intrigued by influencer partnerships for B2B lead generation in this coming year. B2C companies have been partnering with influencers for quite some time now, introducing their products to millions of new prospects with one Instagram story. Online users place a lot of significance on messages shared by their peers whether that be through reviews, blogging, or social media so this is a natural extension.

It looks like the trend is finally making its way into the B2B space. When done authentically, this trend has the power to extend brand reach to hyper targeted communities and generate qualified leads for B2B organizations.” – Sarah Nelson, Marketing Manager

Chatbots

“I really like the idea of incorporating Facebook chatbots for lead generation and qualifying leads. It allows your target audience to engage with your business on the platform they already spend their time and you can easily create an automated download or survey to qualify a lead within Messenger.” – Amanda Blakeman, Digital Growth Strategist 

Content Upgrades

“We’re currently testing downloadable B2B lead generation content on our blog and using this information to generate our own leads/pipeline for the division. I think this has opportunity to be introduced as a lead generation option for clients to grow their organization’s sales funnel” – Lauren Gill, InceptGrows Senior Account Executive 

Personalized Connections

“I get so many LinkedIn requests daily and once we connect, they are typically followed up with a message or email trying to sell me something. I’ve found that personalized connections, even if not a ‘new trend,’ will still be a hot topic in 2019.

While personal connections take longer than sending a pitch email, they tend to pay off tenfold for both parties. When you create a personal connection and take the time to learn what the other business is struggling with, you have better insight on how you can best help and serve them.” – Darren Hudach, Chief Growth Officer

Do you know the best lead generation tactics to grow your association? Download our Lead Generation Best Practices Guide Now!

Using our experience in lead generation, we’ve compiled a list of the top 5 lead generation best practices you need to implement this year.

Simply fill out the form to the right to download your guide!