This Brick Marketing article will discuss the following:
Digital marketing attracts new opportunities for business development professionals.
Digital marketing builds brand familiarity before direct sales outreach.
Consistent digital content supports relationship building during sales cycles.
The function of business development is to help your business grow over time. It’s the art of identifying new business opportunities, building relationships, and prospecting for new customers. Many business development professionals tend to nurture their own lists and focus on growing the business in that fashion. However, many don’t realize that when digital marketing is done properly, it can play a supportive role with business development by creating new opportunities that support growth. Here’s a closer look at why this is the case.
Creates New Opportunities for Business Development
One of the ways that digital marketing can work well with business development is that digital marketing can attract new opportunities. While business development professionals often rely on networking, referrals, and direct outreach, digital marketing helps your business reach potential customers who might not otherwise know about your company or what you offer.
The reason for this is that digital marketing attracts new potential customers, and it can help nurture existing prospects, as well. This is an example of how it works: Someone might discover your business through a search engine, read an article on your website, or encounter your company on social media. Eventually, they may fill out a contact form. From there, your business development team can take over and nurture them so they can become paying customers. However, it was the digital marketing efforts that eventually attracted them.
Digital Marketing Builds Familiarity Before Direct Outreach
Another way that digital marketing can support business development is by helping potential customers become familiar with your business before someone from your team reaches out to them. This establishes a level of comfort that just isn’t there in other networking and prospecting approaches. We’ve found that leads that have come in from digital marketing do tend to be a bit warmer, and this is one of the reasons why that is the case.
This level of familiarity can make it easier for business development professionals to establish relationships with potential customers. The reason for this is that conversations go a lot smoother if the prospect has some knowledge of the company! The familiarity that was built during the marketing process helps during the nurturing process.
Supports Relationship Building During the Sales Process
Digital marketing and business development can work together to support relationship building. This is especially true if care is taken to align the digital marketing strategies with each phase of the sales cycle. Depending on the industry, it could take months or even years for a prospect to become a paying customer. During this time, digital marketing can help keep your business visible to the prospects by providing information that supports the decision-making process.
For example, a business development professional might share a relevant article from your website with a prospect who has questions about your services. The prospect may also encounter your business through social media, email marketing, or other digital channels. These interactions help reinforce the relationship that the business development team is already building
Digital marketing and business development can work together to create more opportunities for your business to grow. By aligning these efforts, you can attract new prospects, build stronger relationships, and create more opportunities to turn those prospects into paying customers.
