Selling cold prospects was never easy, but with nearly everything in flux at the moment, cold prospecting is immeasurably more difficult. That makes your digital presence, content marketing, and relationship building ever more critical.
What Does Your Digital Presence Say?
The quality of your digital presence is the difference between being invited to your prospect’s shortlist and your prospect never even knowing you exist.
If your digital presence says, “me, me, me” and not much else, your prospects are already clicking through to the next name on LinkedIn on their Google results page. The truth of the matter is this:
Your prospects don’t care about you.
Your prospects don’t even care about what you do.
Your prospects care about what you can do for them.
Make sure that’s what your digital presence is focused on.
Content — and Content Marketing — is the Key
Largely, your digital presence relies on the content you publish and promote. (As well as the content of others that you engage with.) Make sure your content focuses on the problems your prospects are seeking to solve and, ideally, how you’re able to help them solve those problems.
Check to see that your content is still relevant to your target audience, whether because of a major change like our current pandemic or more evolutionary changes in their industry or your competitive landscape.
Connection is the Goal of Content Marketing
The goal of content marketing isn’t to publish a never-ending stream of content. Even if it’s truly great content, that’s not enough. The goal is to create a connection between you and your target audience and build that into trust over time.
That trust is the difference between the awkwardness of starting a conversation from scratch with someone you’ve never met and the more comfortable experience of segueing from broader a broader, more general conversations into a discussion of a prospect’s individual needs.
I hope you’ve already got some content marketing underway and that our current reality is an opportunity to fine-tune it and allocate more time to it — perhaps the time you might otherwise be on your way to a networking event or in-person sales call.
You may find that given a bit more attention, these tools will help you determine how your market now may power stronger gains even when other forms of marketing return.
