Power up your sales activation with PR — Ambitious PR
PR can create a solid environment to nudge prospective customers into purchasing. By helping your company connect with customers, PR can nurture your prospects, build trust and increase sales.
PR can be 90% more effective than advertising. However, the most successful customer activation strategies involve a combination of marketing, PR and sales efforts. Here’s how integrating PR into the sales process can benefit your business.
What is sales activation?
Sales activation is a term that describes the conversion that happens at the bottom of the marketing funnel. It involves customers who are at the decision-making stage of the buying process. Customers like these only need a final ‘nudge’ in the right direction to make a purchase or use a service.
Sales activation campaigns usually focus on capturing existing demand from prospects who are already problem and solution aware. For sales activation to be successful, you’ll need to set up an ongoing strategy. This strategy needs to work to convert long-term branding efforts into short-term sales results.
What is brand building?
Branding is a visual representation of your business. When done correctly, it can set you apart from the competition. It can also help you build those all-important emotional connections with your customers.
Brand-building is the process of creating awareness about your business using carefully planned marketing efforts. Usually, a potential customer at the sales activation stage would have been positively influenced by your brand-building efforts already.
How do sales activation and brand building work together?
Sales activation and brand building are considered by many marketers to be two sides of the same coin. Sales activation can be described as the final ‘nudge’ of the buying process, designed to push conversion.
Eminent marketing strategist Peter Field describes the emotional and rational considerations of consumer choice. When customers have a high emotional attachment, brand building is easier. When customers have high rational considerations, activation is easier.
Sales activation and brand building are essential elements, but they are entirely different. Successful brands that have increased revenue generation are more likely to combine brand building and sales activation efforts. In fact, 72% of marketers agreed that utilising both sales activation and brand building is the best way to gain revenue growth.
The customer journey
The sales funnel describes the different stages that a customer has to go through before they make their first purchase.
A customer is led from the top of the funnel (TOFU) through to the bottom of the funnel (BOFU). This is where their purchasing decision is made, and it happens as a direct result of carefully planned marketing tactics.
These tactics usually involve planned customer interactions that happen at various stages of the customer lifecycle.
Benefits of a customer activation strategy
Customer activation strategies are all about establishing ways to motivate customers to move through the sales pipeline faster. They usually target a variety of prospects, including:
- Current buyers and customers
- Customers who have returned recently
- Previously active customers
Besides the obvious advantage of increasing sales, a sales activation strategy can benefit you in a variety of ways. It can raise your ROI, increase your customer lifetime value and lower your cost of acquisition.
Sales activation campaigns
This stage of the sales process is all about building customer confidence and strengthening trust while reducing any doubts and anxieties. It’s about finding ways to move your customers to the next stage of the lifecycle faster.
Here are some of the key things you’ll need for a successful sales activation campaign:
Relevance
An expert PR team will tell you that the greatest success doesn’t come from what you say about yourself. It comes from what other people say about you. By aligning your marketing strategy with PR efforts, you’re building organic trust and leveraging those important word-of-mouth recommendations.
Great PR can increase visibility and generate more revenue by publishing consistent content across multiple platforms. One effective strategy would be to keep up with and utilise current media stories in your target market. This would focus your efforts and allow you to create more valuable interactions with customers and buyers.
Knowledge
Effective PR usually involves the creation of buyer personas to identify customer online behaviour. By monitoring online behaviour, you can predict a customer’s next steps. Your marketing and sales team can then turn your customer data into something actionable. This is crucial to a successful sales activation.
Authority
Establishing authority is incredibly powerful in business, but it’s a long-term game. A sales activation strategy usually involves a ‘quick nudge’ to get customers from point Y to point Z. However, the chances of getting prospects to that point are greatly increased with longer-term tactics.
There are many ways you can establish authority as a brand. One example would be to continually publish authoritative content on channels such as LinkedIn. Another would be to position yourself as a thought leader, garnering a positive online reputation for your company in the process.
Credibility
Building credibility is paramount to the success of your organisation. It tells both prospective and existing customers that you have a reputable company that they can trust.
PR can have a tremendous impact on the credibility of your brand. It can communicate clear brand values, promote positive engagement and share stories from current customers. PR can also place your content with a trusted news outlet, aligning your brand with credible organisations.
Value
Great PR can provide more value to your customers by boosting your content and marketing campaigns. Creating content that’s useful, original and engaging will help people identify with your brand and keep customers coming back.
Here are some of the ways PR can help you continue to show value through content:
- Addressing commonly asked questions
- Providing insight and thought leadership
- Identifying and solving pain points
- Aligning your content with your brand values
- Creating story-driven content consistently
- Testing and retesting engagement levels
Unlike a top-of-the-funnel marketing campaign, a lower funnel marketing tactic is all about the hard sell. At this stage, you’ll be creating relevant content that sets you apart as a strong brand. This content will also diminish any concerns your customers might have.
Your new customer activation strategy
A solid customer activation strategy can help you create and sustain better customer relationships, manage customer experience and boost conversions. Contact us to see how we can help you build sustainable growth today.
Originally published at https://www.ambitiouspr.co.uk on August 30, 2022.
