The mainstream and old-school sales strategies are becoming obsolete. The growing dependence of the world on technology and digital mediums has changed the entire makeup of the sales & marketing domain.
Outdated sales approaches like cold calling are no more instrumental in producing extraordinary results as every individual can easily search for the required information or content using the internet.
This dramatic change is the reason inbound marketing and lead generation came into play. Digital marketers & lead generation specialists now attract and engage with their target audience by publishing educational and valuable content that showcases the Value of their business, product, or services for the end-users.
By offering the relevant content to the right set of audiences at the right time, businesses can hook their high-value prospects & convert them into paying and loyal customers.
But how do this transition towards lead generation and lead nurturing fuel the sales process? The reason is that it particularly enables the sales & marketing teams to build trust with prospects. Building rapport with prospects fills the void between sales personnel and their potential customers or clients.
It helps in nurturing leads, helps boost brand image & authenticity, and relationship building with prospects so they can trust your brand and finalize their purchase decision regarding your products or services.
What is Rapport Building?
Rapport in terms of digital marketing is the foundational base for rational, long-term, and consistent relationships between businesses and potential customers. It provides a sense of trust and connectivity when people connect or talk about their preferred brands and products or services.
Rapport doesn’t solely mean enriching trustworthy relationships with prospects or clients. In fact, it’s the primary driver of business communication and success. Once you build a rapport with prospects, you secure an influential place to drive their priorities, choices, and purchase decisions by resolving their pain points.
By building trust with prospects you can easily make them adapt your ideas and prefer your brand over competitors.
Why is building trust with prospects crucial for Lead Nurturing?
Almost all businesses acknowledge the cruciality of lead nurturing to lead prospects towards sales conversion. But acquiring promising and fruitful results for the business is linked with building trust with prospects. It helps you in:
Lead Nurturing
By nurturing leads, you can make your prospects qualified for sales and forward them to your sales team for final conversion. By building trust with prospects and offering them valuable information in the form of different content formats you can persuade them to think about how well you recognize and care about their problems and potential solutions.
You can persuade them to think that your products or services are the perfect solution for their problems and pain points.
Building Brand Image
By building rapport with clients or potential customers you basically tend to build your brand image as an industry leader or subject expert. Your prospects start perceiving your brand as the most authentic entity that offers the perfect solution to their problems.
By building trust with prospects you can earn loyal and long-term customers who advocate for your brand and help you gain more hot leads for your business.
Improving ROI
Trust and relationship building with prospects can help you convert more leads into customers. In addition, it allows you to reduce your customer acquisition cost and improve your ROI for different lead generation strategies up to a significant extent.
10 Ways to Build Rapport With Prospects
How do you build rapport with prospects and unlock more business & sales opportunities? You can build trust with prospects in several ways. Some of the proven and impactful ways to build rapport with prospects include:
1. Do your Targeted Audience Research
You need to perform comprehensive research about your target audience, their priorities, pain points, preferences, demographics, and expectations. By doing in-depth research on your target audience you can create a perfect buyer persona for your business which is your ideal customer profile.
It helps you understand their pain points and conflicts which enables you to create the right lead nurturing strategy. Nurturing leads in the right way, with the right content, and at the right time helps you build trustworthy relationships with prospects.
2. Offer Value
You need to evaluate how well you can add Value to the customer journey with your brand. Apart from adding Value to your deliverables, you need to make the whole purchase journey of your prospects smooth and seamless.
By offering a smooth and hassle-free purchase process, you can earn the trust of your prospects and easily convince them to become long-term & loyal customers.
3. Focus more on relationship building
Instead of going crazy for making a sales pitch, you need to keep your marketing approach customer-centric. You need to focus more and build trust with prospects by offering them the valuable and right content at each stage of their purchase journey.
It helps you craft an authentic image of your brand that cares for the customers, knows how to resolve their problems, and add Value to their life by putting effort into educating and informing them.
4. Use Testimonials
Another impactful way to boost and build trust with prospects is to use testimonials. You can share testimonials and customer success stories or case studies with your potential customers.
It encourages them to invest their trust in your brand and believe they are making the right choice by choosing your products or services as the most appropriate solution to their problems.
5. Use social proof
You can ask your existing and satisfied clients to share their reviews about your products or services. You can also approach influencers or affiliates to collaborate and share positive remarks about your products or services.
It helps you create a strong social proof of your brand and its receivables that encourage people to trust your brand and invest in buying your products or services.
6. Content Strategy
Make a strong and SEO-optimized content strategy. Your content strategy must include content for each stage of your lead generation funnel. By producing valuable and informative content for each stage of your prospects’ purchase journey in your sales funnel, you can offer them the right content at the right time.
There is no better way to build trust with prospects more impactful than educating and nurturing your prospects with valuable content. By optimizing your content for SERPs and using the right keywords or phrases, you can earn a place among the top Google search results.
According to the research, 95 percent of clicks always go to the top 3 search results on Google. Therefore, by ranking at the top of Google search results you can create a persuasive brand image as your target audience can easily find and start trusting your brand as a more authentic entity.
7. Social Media
Building a dominating presence on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Linkedin can drive your prospect’s perception of your brand. You can use social media platforms to engage your prospects in different conversations and connect with them more personally.
Another effective use of social media in building trust with prospects is to make community groups where you can start conversations about different topics in your niche, answer the prospect’s queries, and ask for their feedback or preferences.
By doing so, you can create a sense that you care about your customers and are eager to resolve their pain points.
8. Offer a Personalized experience
Email marketing helps you engage your leads in a more personalized way. You can create a personalized shopping experience for your prospects by engaging them via emails and sending them weekly or monthly newsletters, product updates, gated content, promotional offers, or discounts.
By connecting with the prospects in a personalized way, you can encourage them in trusting your brand. This trust enrichment and relationship building with prospects can persuade them to choose your products or services as the sole solution to their existing problems or conflicts.
9. Understand their pain points
As we have discussed customer pain points repeatedly, you can get an idea about how important this factor is. Your customer pain points are the primary reason why your prospects bother to search for a particular solution or information on the internet.
These pain points also involve the potential hurdles and roadblocks in their journey to find and purchase the right product or service. By knowing and resolving your prospects’ pain points, you can offer them a seamless and hassle-free ride in your sales funnel. As a result, they start investing their trust in your brand and more often convert into long-term and loyal customers by purchasing your products or services.
10. Be willing to go the extra miles
Always keep an eye on what your competitors are up to and how they are adding value to their prospects’ purchase journey and shopping experience. Don’t refrain from going the extra mile to retain your customers and attract fresh customers by offering something that no one can offer.
You can consider offering some exceptional discounts, seasonal offers, aggressive pricing structures, bonuses, cash backs, improved CX, quick delivery services, easy return or exchange policies, multiple payment options, etc. All you need to do is persuade your prospects to think that your brand and its products or services are the perfect solutions they can find to resolve their problems and make their life or business easier.
Conclusion
All these effective tips and strategies can help you build a strong and trustworthy relationship with your prospects. By building rapport with your clients and prospects, you can unlock new business opportunities, convert more leads into sales, improve customer retention rate, reduce customer acquisition costs, and as a result improve the ROI of your lead generation campaigns significantly.
Just don’t forget to reinject Value at each stage of your customer’s purchase journey and keep them intact with your brand and valuable content.
