Your secret weapon is here!
I am not futuristic, as I have stated in one of my previous LinkedIn articles, but I can see this coming.
You incoming business development and digital marketing professionals and your management should know a little SEO.
I don’t know everything about search engine optimization, but I do know that we rely on it every day for our agency visibility and for our clients. SEO steers new leads to your front gate. Prospects use search engines as a vital step toward inevitably becoming your clients.
As a marketer, niche leader or partner, you need to know how search engines work… on Google, LinkedIn, Indeed… these are all search engines! How do they work? How do they evolve? At least familiarize yourself with a couple of the latest updates, what’s changed and then ask yourself, “What can I do to improve my buyers’ experience when they find my channels?”
High-growth professional service firms are hiring talent who not only have great project management skills and communication skills, but they also know how their prospects search for and identify new services. This is why SEO is the new must-have skill for anyone involved in business development.
Breaking it Down
For example, you may use HubSpot or another CRM to track leads, and a lot of them will be tagged as “referrals,” if your pipeline is pretty good already. When your sales or development people tap into the database and they see “website lead,” do they know that this lead is marketing generated? Are they familiar with your latest campaigns and target keywords? In order to win more relationship-based opportunities, they need to think like a marketer, and this entails understanding the referral-to-digital vetting journey from Point A to Point B and eventually to Z.
If you’re not tracking website leads or digital marketing campaign leads in your CRM, start now. This helps marketing show ROI for their hard work and positive results. It also shows the sales team that digital leads are valid and worth following up on.
And finally, SEO knowledge helps your staff cross-sell client services. For example, your marketing team may notice more web searches for a particular service that you offer. Do your existing clients need that service, too? Does your website have a blog about this service? Do you have social posts promoting this service? You should!
SEO is kind of like taking two steps ahead, then looking backwards at your results to attract the ideal leads. You notice a trend in search, then you reinforce that search with related marketing and you look back to track any new leads for that service. It’s a science and an art to be in the right place at the right time, but consistency builds success.
To be honest, sales and marketing should always work together to align with business goals and integrate those goals in the right tactics…both physical tactics such as events and speaking and digital tactics such as ads, videos and emailed content.
Once you understand how SEO should be built into your buying process and lead tracking, where do you go from there?
What’s Next?
Your next step is pretty simple, as it includes adding “familiarity with SEO” to your job description for business development or management positions.
Explain in your job descriptions how keyword search and lead nurturing experience are a “nice to have” or “valued” skill that will help certain candidates rise to the top. Digital skills make traditional business development (through referrals and networking) much easier. Your people can drive new relationships faster when your digital presence is finely tuned to nurture and encourage those leads to take action.
I hope this gets you thinking about how to align SEO with business development.
Now, let’s get them some SEO experience. Ask me about how Ingenuity Marketing Group delivers SEO research and integration with your recruitment and business development goals.
Until next time!
Dawn
