In the War for Attention - You have to Make Every Click Count

For most businesses, there isn’t a long line of customers queuing up beyond the horizon for goods and services offered. Most companies have to work hard at reaching out and signalling to the prospects that there is something valuable and meaningful to be had at then end of a certain URL.

And when the prospects arrive, with their short attention spans (alleged), you have to do your best to lay down some kind of marker. Of course you need to respect privacy and not bombard and cajole the intended with too many promotional messages and aggressive calls to action. But then also, you need some triggers to establish whether the prospect is the appropriate interested party - so that something might be done to establish a lever or connection for a follow-up action.

The Affino Unified Digital Business Solution has several aces up its sleeve when it comes to attracting and converting potential customers, they include but are not limited to the following 7 essential Native Affino Elements:

Conversion Events | Affino Automated Customer Ladder

Affino’s expansive system of Sales & Marketing Automation currently includes 54 Conversion Event Triggers - and growing. This allows you to set a variety of trackers on pretty much any on-site activity, interaction or transaction. You can form chains of actions which identify and follow specific behaviour - the Conversion Events can identify, notify, action and reward.

They can assign customers to specific interest groups or contact lists based on a specific grouping or path of activities. You can serve up precise and absolutely relevant content and incentives for whichever stage of the Customer Ladder the customer is currently at.

Content Metering

You can encourage potential customers to exchange registration information for access to valuable content and insights - whether it be strategy, key market or financial reports or smart infographics. The best path is usually to offer a couple of free passes to view high value content, and when a customer tries to view a third - it already singles them out as an interested party, and it throws up a metering gate which requires registration or subscription for additional views. This form of technology has been used successfully for a number of years now by several leading publishers - including The Economist and The Financial Times.

Topics and Personalisation

Topics are the glue that enables personalisation, interest streams, content filtering and auto-related content amongst the key uses. They also ensure that all content, media and campaigns can be singularly streamlined to present customers only with the value added content and collateral they seek / need. Affino Topics really are at the core of most things within the system - helping you to identify specific interest streams within the CRM and the various analysis and analytics screens.

Peer Networking

Professionals like to be able to seek the advice of their experienced peers and sector compatriots. The very best Professional Services organisations are run like a highly-tuned members club - providing every service and amenity that is core to the career aspirations of someone within that sector - intelligence, training, jobs boards, seminars and events, and of course collaboration and networking. Something Procurement Leaders does incredibly well on the Affino platform.

Lead Capture and Management

Using Lead Generation Profiles, Checkout Lead Capture and Conversion Events - you can create your own lead workflows which trigger notifications and follow-up actions based on specified patterns of activity. You can qualify high-value potential customer leads and notify your senior sales team automatically to initiate further contact.

Persistent Content Delivery and Tracking

All of Affino’s cookies and activities are native to the same core system (and domains), where campaign and promotional elements are indistinguishable code-wise from other content. This means that Affino sites have the highest resistance to ad-blockers and privacy tools. Which means that anyone deploying Affino stands a better chance of logging and identifying every potential opportunity. At the same time the data is all contained in one centralised database owned by yourselves, and not distributed among dozens of tools, legal juristictions and suppliers’ systems. This means that at any point you can have access to the entire secure data set.

Dynamic Responsive Design Centre

The average person nowadays glances at their smart phone circa 100 times each day. Even though professionals may mainly access your site(s) via their work desktop or laptop - these same people typically commute and travel between places, and you can be certain that they will have one device with them at pretty much all times. So it is essential that you do something to capture some of that mind-share from those 100 glances - that your site is fully dynamically responsive, and that you have high value, short and snappy content which suits those in-between moments - some kind of short-hand briefing, highlight or overview that Yahoo News Digest and The Economist Espresso do so well. Short soundbites accompanied by single visually appealing pictures; in fact it will be the next Section to go up on this site - so keep your eyes peeled!