How to Turn Prospecting Into an Active Experience in 2022

Social selling and prospecting are crucial first steps in a sales process that are used to find, engage and connect with potential customers. Creating engagement is an important part of successful prospecting. In this article, we will discuss how to establish and grow an engaged network of perfect prospects by turning prospecting into an active experience that moves your prospect along in the buyer’s journey.

To give you an idea of what engagement looks like on different platforms, here are some engagement stats from Social Pilot for you to consider:

What motivates a reader to be an active thinker?

An engaged reader is an active thinker. Dr. John Guthries says engaged reading is a “merger of motivation and thoughtfulness”. If you think about it, these are the goals of an effective post: 

How do you know what your target market finds interesting? I am going to get on my soapbox here and say, don’t guess, test, AND do your research. In other words, engage with your target market directly by creating a conversation. You can do this by asking open-ended questions on DM, email, surveys, reading blog responses, competitors’ social media posts, Facebook groups, LinkedIn groups, Quora, Medium, Answer the Public, and so on.

Understanding what interests your target market helps you write content around the three common buckets used for social media: 

Educational posts teach new concepts or help to solve a repeating problem you hear from your perfect prospect. Entertaining posts are hard for me. When I think about entertaining, I think funny. While I can make myself laugh and I think I am funny, what does my target market find interesting? According to Sprout Social, 72% of consumers want brand communications to include humor! Note to my readers that haven’t worked on branding: We are not talking about your shower voice! If you don’t know your brand voice, I invite you to sign up for my Clarity Program where you will formulate your brand basics!

Inspirational posts often get a lot of engagement. Why? You make your reader think. We tend to tell a story when we want to inspire someone. Stories are powerful. Take for instance a recent post I wrote on owning my self-worth. This post is my highest-performing post for the month.

Could I be better at getting my readers to take action?

Why yes my young Jedi, you could be better. We all can be better at engagement. This doesn’t mean you have to get caught up in the craze of needing to post on social media daily. Get caught up in writing meaningful content. This starts with a deep understanding of your perfect prospect’s behaviors, their self-limiting beliefs, self-perceptions, and the transformation they are looking for as a result of your offer.

Remember, there are different phases of engagement that you can measure. I like to call them micro-conversions. In the graphic below, you can see the types of engagement you would measure for each part of your buyer’s journey.

In my blog, 10 Ground Rules to Follow When Creating Valuable Content to Engage Your Audience there is a list of items to consider when writing engaging content. Armed with this information and the research you have done about your prospect, you can be better at getting your readers to take action.

What are the best practices for getting readers to take action?

An overall marketing strategy should incorporate social media. When creating your strategy, you need to remember the persona (perfect prospect) you are writing to, the type of engagement you are looking for as a result of your network reading the post, and a big one people forget, post structure.

The structure of a post includes a hook at the beginning and a Call to Action or CTA at the end. At the end of each post, you have an opportunity to tell your perfect prospect what you want them to do that will result in a measurable action that has a positive business impact. There are many types of CTAs and I want to list a few for you to consider. The full list can be downloaded here!

How do others suggest I get engagement? 

Other than a good CTA, it is important to focus on the strategy that you have for the campaign. Each strategy has a goal attached to it. For example, take a look at the graphic below. 

In the awareness stage, you would set the goal of impressions, engagement, and reach.

Don’t rely on social media alone. Remember, sales and marketing go hand and hand. There are many ways to engage with your buyers which makes using an omnichannel approach very important.

An omnichannel approach includes being present on the channels that effectively connect you with your perfect prospect through the buyer’s journey. For example, ask yourself: How am I engaging my buyer in their sales processes? Am I leveraging video, email, content, telephone, and SMS?

If you are leaving these important options out, I encourage you to choose one today and add it to your sales and marketing mix.

Another tip for effective engagement is: Don’t fall prey to busy work. Sales is a revenue-generating activity whereas random social media posts can be considered busy work. This is where it helps to deeply understand your perfect prospect and how you can effectively engage with them. 

What are the solutions to gaining engagement while prospecting online?

It helps to know that social selling is a prospecting activity. Social selling happens at the top of the funnel. It is where you can find, engage and connect with your target market both on and off-line in a social context.
 
Making time to actively prospect and engage with your prospect list is part of the solution. I am in favor of time blocking. Block 30-60 minutes of your time for engaging activities with your prospect list. An engagement activity could be joining groups and adding valuable answers to questions that are posted. Be a voice of authority. Learning what people are talking about also helps you to understand what your community may need or want.
 
Another solution is incorporating video email or messages into your sales process. I send a welcome video to all of my new contacts on LinkedIn. I also use an app called Bonjoro to send custom videos before and sometimes after a new appointment. Other resources include Dubb, BombBomb, OneMob, and others. Don’t get lost in the decision-making hole, just pick one and go all in.

How does this solve my problem?

When solopreneurs and brands alike lose sight of the fact that they are interacting with individuals and their emotions, engagement can suffer. Continuing to understand the different stages of your buyer, their levels of awareness, interests, and motivation can move your perfect prospect from scrolling to engaging. Giving your reader a reason to connect and engage with you that is personal to them solves the problem by creating a meaningful conversation they can take action on.

Inviting your network to become a part of your conversation is another way you can solve the problem of low engagement. I love it when I write a post and my network starts talking to each other in the comments. That is a real conversation taking place! Be the catalyst for that interaction.

Simply posting weekly on a platform like LinkedIn can result in a 2X increase in engagement. The formula is to combine an omnichannel approach with consistency and an effective strategy to turn prospecting into an active experience.

Prospecting is an art. Strategic prospecting is a necessity. One downfall I see with solopreneurs is feeling that they must buy into the bro culture and spammy tactics that are outdated. Pale stale males have built huge brands telling you to 10X your results, blast your list, slip into their DM’s, get into beast mode. STOP this insanity. Do not set unreasonable revenue goals and feel that you have to spam and blast for dollars, there’s a better way.

Using an omnichannel approach to create an active experience for your prospects feels natural. Staying in front of your perfect prospects with quality content and creative techniques to help you stand out from the competition will win every time.

How can solopreneurs use active prospecting?

Recently, I had the pleasure of speaking with Mario Martinez, Jr., CEO of Vengreso on The Art of Inspired Selling. On the show, he spoke about how his sales team is winning by using an omnichannel approach to prospecting and creating an active sales cadence. Mario listed out 17 different steps to engage with your prospects. Check out the replay here.

How can I help?

By now you can see how engaging your perfect prospects in active thinking is vital to your online success.

We all want our readers to be active thinkers as long as it includes thinking about our brand and our solutions. In this blog I have given you ideas and action steps for motivating your prospects to take action, resulting in mini-conversions that ultimately move them through the buyer’s journey.
If you feel stuck or need help with understanding how to write strategies to increase sales using LinkedIn, I invite you to get on my calendar for a Content Strategy Session where I will give you two strategies you can implement today!