Generate More Business Leads and Close More Deals with Real Time Intelligence – Part II

April 19, 2010 | by | Category:

9 Steps for Using Real Time Intelligence to Generate More Business Leads and Close More Deals


The following process incorporates the steps explained in our last post: Generate More Business Leads and Close More Deals with Real Time Intelligence – Part I. Each step correlates to the different stage in the purchase cycle (attention, interest, direction and action, advocacy and post-purchase behavior) and should be treated appropriately:

Real Time Intelligence and AIDA as illustrated on Glengarry Glen Ross

Attention

1.   Use monitoring tools such as Radian6 , Twitter hashtags, or Sentiment Metrics to uncover and understand the trends in your industry.
2.   Create content and campaigns that leverage those trends to attract traffic to your website and increase your brand and product awareness.
3.   Track the results of those campaigns and tweak them accordingly. Use applications like Optify, Google Analytics, and Ominture to track your campaign results and to see if your efforts have paid off. Optify’s Twitter for Business application is a unique application that allows you to not just create and automate Twitter campaigns, but also to link specific campaigns with specific visitors and leads.

Interest

4.   Analyze the website behavior and performance of your web pages to understand the effectiveness of your website in converting visitors into leads. Adapt to the real time micro-trends on your website to maximize the potential of your web pages.
5.   Set alerts to notify you on changes in micro-trends on your website—spikes in traffic, an increase in rank for a specific keyword, or a higher conversion rate for a specific webpage. Use that information to tweak your lead paths to leverage those micro-trends.

Decision and Action

6.   Set alerts to notify you when a specific lead has reached his or her decision stage.
7.   Use the visit history to tailor the message and the offering to help with the decision.
8.   Reach out at the right time—when the lead is on your website (if appropriate) to leverage recency effects.

Advocacy and post-purchase behavior

9.   Use real time data, alerts, and real time intelligence to encourage advocacy or to apply preventative measures (if, say, users haven’t used your product for more than two weeks send an email).

A few key things to keep in mind when using real time data for the activities we have listed above:

  • Reach out only when appropriate: make sure you are not scaring people away and be aware of privacy issues.
  • Use the right message: Craft the message to match the purchase stage and the data you have.
  • Use the right medium: Remember, “The medium is the message,” so don’t send direct mail to someone who communicated with you on Twitter.
  • Call to action when and where appropriate, with the right action.