Today you need more than “digital body language” from your marketing automation platform (MAP) to effectively engage with prospects. You need “intelligent understanding”: insights into a specific prospect’s challenges, what they need, and what value your proposed solutions can really deliver. You certainly can’t get this from a lead capture form, or discerning from site visits and view / download actions.
So what can you do to improve your understanding, so that your engagements have real meaning, and aren’t viewed as a waste of buyer’s time or a one-size-fits-all sales pitch?
Interactive Content to Improve Customer Intelligence
Interactive content can help overcome the engagement challenge – using value-added dynamic content to capture more intelligence from your prospects. Think diagnostic assessments, benchmarking tools, solution prescriptions, and ROI / TCO calculators.
These Interactive tools provide prospects with a personalized assessment, analysis and content in real-time based on intelligent prompts and responses. Unlike the dread of a lead capture form, your prospects want to interact and provide the requested information from your interactive content, because they get valuable, personalized insights, benchmarks, analysis and prescriptive advice in return.Using interactive content, your prospects can learn more about the hidden challenges they face, which they should prioritize, how their strategy and performance compares to peers, the cost of “do nothing”, prescriptive solution recommendations, and business value outcomes which could be gained. All of this personalized insight is available on-line, but can also be downloaded by the prospect in a customized assessment report, and easily shared with other decision makers (enabling your mobilizer / champion to do more to help accelerate a favorable decision for you).
But its not just the buyer who gains insights. Vital information is captured by the interactive tool in each and every interaction:
- What are this prospect’s specific top challenges?
- Where are they falling behind their peer performance?
- What is the status-quo costing them each and every day they fail to act?
- What are the specific identified opportunities for improvement?
- What unique business value can they derive from recommended solutions?
All of this customer intelligence can be fed to your MAP solution in real time along with a copy of the personalized report, adding significant fuel and decision points to your nurturing process and empowering intelligent follow-up dialogue to get that appointment or advance the deal forward with urgency.
Leveraging the personalized assessment report and captured customer data points and results for each unique prospect, when follow-up occurs, you can improve the engagement and conversation. The reach-out is no longer about downloading a white paper or viewing a video, but specific and insightful regarding each prospect’s unique challenges, solutions and business value benefits.
Further viewing the captured customer intelligence in aggregate, across all prospects, can help better understanding buyer motivation and value, to improve positioning and even in creating derivative content – like insight / benchmark comparison white papers based on the collected metrics.
The Bottom-Line
It is clear that in order to more effectively convert prospect digital interest into a sale, you need the right understanding and follow-up, to make each engagement more informed and poignant.Are you leveraging interactive tools like assessments, benchmarks, solution prescriptions and ROI / TCO calculators to overcome the engagement challenge of relying just on “digital body language”, to achieve true “intelligent understanding”?
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