Contacts are the most critical ingredient in the recipe for business growth. Without adding new contacts to your business’s Customer Relationship Management Software (CRM), you cannot reach new customers or grow your business. Generating new marketing contacts is an important area of focus for the majority of our clients, and as your guide to growth, we love using these strategies to get new contacts and skillfully nurture them into sales conversations.
First off, let’s talk about what a marketing contact is, and some of the best ways to manage and communicate with them. This leads us to our first important tenet of attracting new contacts, a great CRM or marketing automation tool. If you’ve read any of our numerous blog articles in the past, you’ll know that our agency strongly suggests the HubSpot platform for this task. HubSpot makes it incredibly easy to build a digital repository of all of the marketing and sales contacts that you interact with over time. This is important because a solid repository of contacts serves as a list of potential clients who will eventually be in the market for your goods or services, if they aren’t already. There are dozens of different options available for collecting and holding contact information, but we prefer HubSpot due to its ability to leverage additional tools in order to interact with these contacts over time, while growing your list of contacts.
HubSpot’s email integration is one of the best ways to add contacts to your hub. Having a sales background, I’m biased because as I’m emailing people in my network, HubSpot automatically adds these contacts, as well as the company they work for into our hub. This is how HubSpot will work for you as well, adding relevant contacts and bolstering your ability to nurture non-converting leads. The more team members using HubSpots Sales CRM with the email integration, the more contacts that will get added over time, building a list of potential clients interested in your products and/or services.
The second way that we attract new contacts is using an inbound marketing strategy to provide helpful content to our target audience. Just as you build a repository of contacts, you want to build a backlog of content that is relevant to them. By talking about pain they experience, and providing helpful knowledge in their field, you can entice them to connect with your company by encouraging them to sign up to receive updates on your content. By using the HubSpot Forms tool, anyone who fills out a form through our website is automatically created as a contact and company in our Hub.
We also can help you create and develop lead magnets, or as we call it, premium content offers. These offers are typically more in-depth content that provides additional value to the contact, which they exchange their email address for via a form. The form captures information from them at that stage in time, but their contact record evolves as they fill out future forms. This helps us capture more information about a prospect’s interests, allowing us to provide more relevant content to them and other prospects based on their preferences.
Once you’ve developed content, relevant offers, and ways to capture contact information, we deploy strategies that keep these offers in front of our existing contacts in our hub while attracting new ones. Some of these strategies include email marketing, social media management, webinars, speaking engagements, and pay-per-click advertising. By taking time upfront to develop relevant content, we ensure that that content is used across multiple touchpoints, so you get the most bang for your buck for each piece of content. The beautiful thing about using HubSpot is that we can tailor our messaging, channel, and timing of these communications based on the contacts actions or intent expressed. The result is a personalized and customized stream of communication that is able to target a large number of contacts. This recipe continues attracting and converting new contacts into our Hub, and creates a valuable revenue-generating stream for your business.
Lastly, there are a few manual ways to add new contacts as you meet them organically, and I’d be remiss not to mention them. You can always add a new contact into your Hub as long as you have their email. By adding them manually by email, HubSpot will also automatically create the associated company record tied to their email. In addition, networking events or trade shows can be a wonderful way to connect with new contacts. If you meet someone externally, and happen to get their business card, HubSpot’s Mobile App has a business card scanner that automatically adds these contacts to your Hub by capturing the information on a business card.
It’s really cool to see how this works. When you combine an inbound marketing strategy with more traditional methods, you’ll consistently build a list of contacts that can potentially convert into happy customers, building your business and increasing your revenue over time.
It’s so important to remember that not everyone is interested in an immediate sales conversation regarding your products and or services. Sometimes, the contact you meet may not even have a need at all, but by adding them into your Hub and providing them with content about your products, services, or solutions, you may eventually earn a referral from them. Constructing an internal system for your business contacts is a tremendous way to grow your bottom line, and add value to your company. If you’d like to talk about how you can add a supercharged way to attract new contacts and potential customers, we’d love to give you more ideas on ways we could help you. Feel free to let us know and we can schedule a time to chat.