Have Great Client Relationships Without Face-to-Face Meetings

After months of nurturing your SaaS leads and developing your inbound SaaS marketing strategy, you've now hit a big hurdle: No more face-to-face meetings. 

As we all try to stay safe and protect our families, colleagues, and clients during the current pandemic, we're turning to remote working methods to maintain our client relationships and continue supporting our customers. 

Face-to-face interactions and focussed meetings with prospects have a significant role to play in lead conversion, particularly for SaaS companies that sell big-ticket items or offer on-site onboarding for B2B clients.

Understandably, you may be a little stumped when it comes to figuring out the best way forward from here. You don't want to sound opportunistic and uncaring by trying to revive conversations via webcam when many of your potential leads may be facing financial difficulty or are firefighting new problems of their own. By applying an inbound methodology to your client relationships, however, you can find fantastic ways to become a resourceful guide to your prospects and clients. 

While now may not be the time to push offers or try to close deals, it certainly is the time to ramp up your content strategy and offer helpful and relevant support to your existing and prospective customers. 

Businesses exist in ecosystems. If a link in your sales chain isn't performing optimally right now, the best way to secure future business is by helping to build and restore the balance in your industry as quickly as possible. If your prospects aren't able to jump on a call right now, you can still provide useful content to help to solidify your relationship.

Content mediums that keep you in business 

Videos

Have you been sidelining your video content for a time when you'll feel more confident in front of the camera?

Well, the time has come to start experimenting with your phone or other video recording equipment to create compelling presentations for your prospects. Since most of us are adapting to remote working, customers won't expect polished videos from you. In fact, they may appreciate a concise and info-packed walk-through of your software that they can watch at a convenient time – even if your cat makes a cameo appearance.  

This kind of content places no obligation on the customer to purchase anything or follow through on a quote; it simply allows your prospect to put a name to the face, get their questions answered, and assess whether you are right-fit for their needs. 

Have you been plotting your explainer video strategy?

Now is also an excellent time to reach out to freelance animators or content agencies and begin collecting quotes or commissioning an explainer video. 

Social media platforms

Undoubtedly, you've had to make changes to your online advertising. One of the first things you should do is fine-tune your social media campaigns. You want to ensure that any content you put out on your social media platforms is sensitive to the situation at hand, courteous, and, more than anything, helpful and informative. 

If you find that this is the first time you're leaning into your social media strategy because you've previously used other promotional tactics, then you should be focusing on brand awareness and building your audience. You can implement remarketing campaigns that leverage content that has been successful in the past. 

Take advantage of tools such as Facebook and Instagram Live. By doing this, your customers can tune in, ask questions, get the facts, and build a bond with your business. Stepping away from a sales pitch approach and simply providing helpful information in an informal manner may feel less pressurising for customers. 

Email marketing

Keep your audiences engaged and continue to nurture your SaaS leads with an email marketing strategy. You can use your social media platforms to prompt leads to sign up for your exclusive email list. Assure them that you'll only be sending educational content based on their particular concerns and interests at the moment. This may mean that you have to update your email nurtures and link to some of your evergreen content.

Remember, the goal right now isn't to push for a sale. If you do get a conversion, great; but if all you do is sow the seeds for a fantastic trust-based relationship at this point, then you've ended up with a potential customer who will be happy to purchase from you when the market improves. 

Update your Help pages 

Your customers' needs are likely to have changed or shifted in response to the crisis. The frequently asked questions (FAQs) you are accustomed to encountering may be a little different now. 

Pay close attention to what your customers are asking on social media, in emails, and on the phone. Contact your top customers and find out what their pertinent concerns are. Using this information, you should update your Help and FAQ pages to help customers self-serve their queries. 

This is a particularly important point if your customer service team has been affected by current COVID-19 related events. Your website will be equipped to address the needs of your customers and prospects, even if you're operating with skeleton staff or are getting out-of-hours queries. 

Chatbots

Chatbots are really coming to the foreground at the moment. They provide an option for businesses to reinforce their customer service delivery, collect relevant information, and assist customers and leads while their human staff handles other critical requests.

Your chatbots can tap into your content library and support customers or leads around the clock, helping you to keep your SaaS marketing strategy in play. 

Thanks to huge strides taken in the sophistication of AI, your chatbot can be programmed to help you qualify leads, book one-to-one meetings, and have personalised conversations with your website visitors. 

If you're curious to learn more about chatbots or see first hand how one could integrate into your SaaS lead nurture strategy, you can build your own free chatbot with HubSpot today. Check it out here.

Be helpful, not hungry

The content you put out now can significantly affect your business once the current level of uncertainty subsides. Trying to sweep up low hanging fruit or using unethical sales tactics to secure profits can really damage your brand. 

Right now, consumers are cautious, and purse strings are tight; but it's important to remain optimistic, to communicate your continued commitment to delivering a high standard of service and proving yourself to be a capable industry leader that can offer valuable content to your clients. 

Ultimately, your conduct now will help to boost your referrals in the future, and you're likely to garner some fantastic testimonials from existing customers who felt genuinely impressed by your comprehensive support. 

Face-to-face meetings are great, and we all look forward to a time when we can see our clients, conduct on-prem visits, or simply have informal coffee meetings to pop in and check on progress. But, we hope that what's also been brought to light is the importance of having a solid content strategy that allows you to draw on helpful resources to support your clients.

If you would like us to lift the hood on your current content strategy and see how it might be adapted to address the needs of the current market, book a call with Ellie below .