Pursuit Marketing is a hyper-focused form of marketing that more and more businesses with a fully formed vision of their target market are starting to employ but if the term is new to you, you may well be asking what is pursuit marketing?
In essence pursuit marketing is a technique you can use to proactively initiate and develop relationships with decision makers in your niche.
It offers the perfect opportunity for sales and marketing to work alongside each other by combining their respective understanding of these targets’ world, their ‘pain’, their preferred methods of communication, the intel and insight they want to receive and – ultimately – what they need from you to successfully hit their own objectives.
Admittedly for some pursuit marketing can be viewed as slightly more aggressive than other types of marketing. However, if you get it right, it can also be much more effective than more traditional forms of content marketing.
What do you need to get going?
In our experience there are five things you’ll need to put a successful pursuit marketing strategy in motion:
- Clear definition
With pursuit marketing success is reliant on knowing exactly who you want to target. You need to know who you want to pursue (and how to get in front of them). This is definitely not a strategy that’ll work within a mass market.
- KYC
Once you know who you want to target, you need to know why. This requires a deep understanding of your ideal customer, their ‘pain points’, their buying behaviours and what they need to see/hear to make the decisions you want them to make.
- Integration internally
Your sales and marketing teams will need to work together to develop tailored campaigns and nurture leads effectively. This may sound obvious but, unfortunately, in many organisations it’s still not always the case. If you feel there is a disconnect between your sales and marketing teams, it may be a good idea to start with a few pilot campaigns involving the members of these teams you know already work well together.
- Personalisation
You will need to be prepared to deliver fully customised messaging and content that directly addresses the specific needs of each target, not their niche. Again, this will require a combination of your deep understanding of each target and the commitment of sales and marketing to work together.
- Fostering a ‘relationships first’ culture
Ultimately success will come down to you building strong relationships with the key decision-makers you’re targeting. This won’t come with one interaction so you’ll need to be prepared to:
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- Keep going
- Keep trying new things/new angles
- Keep using the data you have
The data is key. It will identify which approaches worked best at different times, with different targets and across different media across all your campaigns. You can use this to make the best choices regarding your next approaches for all your open or harder to reach targets.
What are the benefits of pursuit marketing?
As pursuit marketing is a highly targeted, data-driven marketing approach that is focused squarely on engaging with potentially highly value prospects, it works best when:
- Your product/service is high value
- Your product/service requires a consultative sales approach
- You have a well-defined target profile
- You can seamlessly combine the ‘push’ of your marketing with the ‘pull’ of your sales
- You use your market knowledge to craft genuinely compelling outreach pieces
It might not work as well when:
- Your audience is too broad (this makes a highly targeted approach inefficient)
- Your industry has a low barrier to entry
- Your execution can’t be truly personalised
- You are not set up to gather or analyse the data you collect in the required depth
However, the good news is when you get it right, pursuit marketing will deliver a range of benefits other marketing approaches can’t:
- It is hyper-targeted
By using advanced analytics to identify and focus on high-potential prospects that align with your ideal client profile, you can cut down on wasted costs and wasted effort and increase ROI by focusing on the targets most likely to convert.
- It shortens your sales cycle
By engaging prospects who are already actively engaged in purchasing solutions like yours, you will reduce the time spent nurturing ‘cold’ leads and move more quickly to the close.
- It creates maximum engagement
Pursuit marketing allows you to personalise your messaging specifically to each target and the more relevant your approached are, the more resonant they’ll be and relevance + resonance = engagement.
- It improves conversion rates
With a focus on high-intent prospects, pursuit marketing consistently delivers higher conversion rates compared to broad-based marketing efforts, directly impacting your bottom line.
- It improves client retention
Pursuit marketing is not just for new client acquisition, it can also be used to keep and grow clients by educating them on upsell and cross-sell opportunities aligned directly with their current and, more importantly, future needs.
- It underpins growth
Regardless of how big you are today pursuit marketing is fully scalable and able to flex to your strategy as it develops.
If you feel pursuit marketing could work for you, please get in touch and we can set up a time to chat through how you could use it to your advantage in more detail.
Or, if you’d prefer to talk about any other aspect of your marketing, brand or digital presence, drop us a line and we’ll be happy to help.
