Listening to the market
To understand what is relevant to your clients and prospects, your team should be actively listening to the market. Rather than exhaustive industry-wide research, this is more about finding out what matters to the people that are most important to the growth of your firm.
Insights into clients and prospects can be found in an increasing number of places. Thanks to the digital world and social media, these are more available to marketers than ever before. The best sources of information are:
- Whichever social network is most relevant to them. This may be LinkedIn, Twitter or even Facebook & Instagram
- Speaking events, presentations and panel discussions
- Conversations with your people
Rather than looking at corporate channels or media releases, you are looking for personal professional insights. Information that helps you understand and better communicate with an individual rather than a firm.
Each of these sources above offers a chance to learn about the client. Specifically, you are looking for information on:
- Topics that are important to your client that also coincide with your firm’s area of expertise
- Areas of passion or interest
- Subjects that your prospect has expertise in or is recognised for
- People, organisations, and providers your client is connected with
Any insight into your market should be shared with the relevant people around your firm as soon as possible. This can be a simple chat with a salesperson, an email around the account team or discussed in a standup. It’s important that this is a quick process: account teams that have deals in the pipeline may be able to find a use for this information immediately.
To open doors and start conversations with your prospects or to nurture existing prospects, insights into clients can be turned into effective content. For example, a speaking engagement with the customer addressing a particular challenge is a great prompt for your own expert content on the topic. Sharing this with the speaker has a strong likelyhood of starting a conversation and sets you apart from the competition as understanding the topics that matter.
