Capturing Your Engaged Leads Attention

How To Drive Prospect Engagements

Properly transitioning suspects into engaged leads and high intent, all starts with building customer trust, reciprocity via extending true value, and educating them through the stages of awareness to considering your platform as a solution.

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Moving People Though The Funnel

When creating content marketing, you need to understand what stage of the buyer's journey your content fits in. Too many marketers tend to focus on consideration-based content and wonder why they are always having trouble bringing new prospects to the website or why they once saw a lot of interest, but now it's slowly dying off.

The two types of content are awareness and consideration, coined by HubSpot.

If you split out your content this way, you'll easily be able to identify when there is true intent for your platform versus someone just becoming aware of the problems they have, researching solutions, or possibly just looking for ways to solve the problem themselves and have no interest in buying your solution.

It's for this reason, as I shared above, those companies who once saw attention with their marketing start to see a downward trend.

The content created was attracting attention, but it skipped the awareness stage and didn't focus on the problems, but instead on why the prospect should choose their platform.

Prospects pick up on this and say, "This isn't thought leadership, it's a platform demo," and stop engaging with anything you have to offer because it all comes off as a sales pitch.

What Is Awareness Content Then

The key difference between awareness and consideration, is when you are truly providing thought leadership, you're just sharing insights on what you've learned about a specific problem, perspectives on what causes it in the first place, and in-depth information about how they could solve the problem themselves.

In the Awareness Stage, your brand and platform are obsolete. The moment you introduce anything you have to sell, it's no longer Awareness but Consideration you're marketing, and the modern-day buyer picks up on this very quickly.

Another big difference between the two is most Awareness Content is ungated and freely offered online via the website, email, social media, or handed out at trade shows or conferences.

Consideration content, on the other hand, is gated with a form.

Taking this one step further, thought leadership webinars shouldn't require you to register. Instead, record and upload them to YouTube and be freely accessible on your website, if they are truly thought leadership.

If the webinar talks specifically about your platform's capabilities, it then should require registration and be gated on-demand, which allows you to understand the next stage of high-intent leads.

Understanding Engaged Leads With High-Intent

By gating your Consideration Content, you can easily start to understand who is interested in what you have to offer versus those just researching, looking for ways to do it themselves, or being entertained by what you're sharing but have no interest in buying what you have to offer.

Managing Your Engagement Flow

The balance of this stage is understanding how much of each type of content you need to share before moving to the next. Too often, marketers share one piece of Awareness and immediately jump to a Consideration piece such as signing up for a demo or trying our free trial.

These days, this mindset doesn't work because most people don't want to be pressured into a sales presentation. You need to build trust and reciprocity before moving into a situation where you ask them for their information and to move forward in the process.

My Favorite Analogy For Marketing

Marketing is a lot like dating. How successful is the person who walks up to a stranger and says, "Hey, you're cute, want to get married?"

Probably not very successful, right?

Then why do the typical marketing and sales teams do this with their LinkedIn messages, Google Ads, and content on the website?

Instead of trying to build a relationship with the prospects, understanding who they are, what their goals and aspirations are, how aware they are of the problems they face, and solutions they've researched already, we instead assume that we're the right fit and they should say yes.

When marketing is done properly, it shares content at both stages and with the right balance. This allows you to build trust and reciprocity, and when there is actual intent, from the buyer, will lead them into making the first engagement naturally instead of you forcing the interaction via push engagement such as phone calls and emails.

Take your time, in the long run, a well-courted prospect will want to do business with you longer and enjoy working with you. These two aspects will likely lead to lower churn rates and higher lifetime value.

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Measurements For High-Intent Leads

Lead scoring is a methodology used by marketing and sales teams to determine how likely a lead is to buy. The process assigns a score to your leads that share the leads' buying intention. The higher the score, the more likely they'll buy.

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