A Digital Marketing Appointment Setter initiates phone calls to connect with leads (potential customers) pulled from a database to engage them in conversation. This type of appointment setter is more beneficial for digital marketing as they understand the target audience and digital marketing leads and know exactly how to set the appointment.
If you are in digital marketing and are not getting leads for a long time, possibilities are you do not have a dedicated appointment setter or your sales team is overburdened. The solution is hiring a digital marketing meeting setter, to reach every potential lead and fill the sales pipeline.
So, today let’s understand deeply what is a digital marketing appointment setter, their key responsibilities, and how you can choose the right one. Then, if you want the best appointment setter, we will show you the way, too.
What is a Digital Marketing Appointment Setter?
A Digital Marketing Appointment Setter is a sales professional who sets meetings between prospective clients and the marketing team. Their job is to provide appointment-setting services by contacting leads generated from digital marketing campaigns and qualifying their interest in the companyâs services.
Simply, when a digital marketing appointment scheduler speaks to prospects, they understand their needs to see if the companyâs digital marketing services, such as PPC, SEO, social media management, etc, are a good fit. When qualified, they book a meeting or consultation between the prospect and the sales or marketing team.
By shortening the lead-to-meeting process, digital marketing appointment setters help businesses get more return on their marketing investment. Also, get interested and qualified prospects in front of the right people to move forward. This keeps the sales pipeline full and reduces your sales team’s effort as they get warm leads into sales.
Key Responsibilities of a Digital Marketing Appointment Setter
Here are the key responsibilities of a digital marketing appointment setter:
Prospecting & Research
The professional appointment setter finds and researches leads generated from digital marketing channels like SEO, paid ads, social media, and email campaigns. They research ideal prospects’ demographics, ages, profiles, and preferences to make an ideal customer profile and create a lead list.
For prospecting, the VA (Virtual Assistant) shortens the lead list by understanding how likely they are to convert into customers. They give priority to those who seem ready to buy, focusing on quality leads rather than quantity.
They do the prospecting and research to determine if the prospect is a good fit for services like PPC, content marketing, and web design.
Cold Calling & Outreach
Using inbound leads, the professional appointment setter makes cold calls and follows up on email and social media campaigns to engage prospects.
With the list of potential clients they cold call or cold email them and introduce the digital marketing solutions your company provides. Their motive is to build interest in taking your online marketing service.
To do so, one of the effective strategies is finding out the pain point of the cold leads regarding the need for digital solutions and pitching how your company can solve them. This is a great way to hook the customers through cold outreach.
An experienced appointment setter is an expert in giving both B2B cold calling services and B2C cold calling services. So, whether your company is focused on B2B or B2C, your appointment setter will reach you according to your business type.
Scheduling Appointments
Once leads are qualified the appointment setter books meetings between the prospect and the sales or marketing team for smooth communication. The appointment setter either gives B2B appointment-setting services or B2C appointment-setting services and sometimes both.
However, they use a professional and respectful tone when sharing key details like digital marketing strategies. To confirm appointment details, they ask for feedback to avoid any confusion.
Also, the digital marketing appointment scheduler may use automated scheduling software to manage bookings, send reminders, and prevent missed calls. They also limit the number of appointments scheduled per day to maintain quality interactions as per your requirements. To avoid conflicts, the appointment setter checks calendars for availability before scheduling meetings.
CRM Management
Keeping the CRM up to date means better customer data and relationship management. The appointment setter logs all interactions with leads. They track their prospective customer engagement with marketing campaigns (emails or ads). All the CRM managerial tasks ensure the sales funnel stays full for future outreach.
Data Analysis
The appointment setter for digital marketing reviews data from digital marketing platforms like Google Analytics and social media metrics. They do this to measure campaign performance. Finally, they use this data to refine outreach and identify high-quality leads to get better appointment conversion rates.
Skills & Qualifications of a Digital Marketing Appointment Setter
There are some specific skills that make digital marketing great and stand out from any generic appointment setter.
Proficient in B2B Prospect Qualification: Knowing how to select qualified leads is an important skill for handling only the potential leads in the B2B sales process. Hence, your appointment setter should be skilled at assessing business prospects and determining their readiness to engage with the company’s digital marketing services for B2B lead generation.
Customer Service: The appointment setter should be excellent at giving customer service to build trust and show brand authority. Thus, he should have knowledge of digital marketing and terms like GMB, PPC advertising, and others, as well as how they work. Then, they would be able to address clients’ digital marketing needs, answer questions, and maintain a professional and friendly attitude throughout interactions for the best customer experience.
Sales Skills: You can not hire an appointment scheduler sales representative without excellent sales skills. Otherwise, he wonât be able to schedule meetings for you to apply process sales process. This is one of the core skills.
For example, the appointment setter must know how to sell SEO services to the SEO warm leads. Or how to pitch companies who need help with content marketing. With a good sales skill, he can highlight the benefits of digital marketing solutions, and encourage prospects to take the next step in the sales funnel.
Active Listening & Communication Skills: With excellent communication skills, the meeting setter can pay close attention to prospect needs and respond clearly and effectively.
Email Management: Managing email inboxes, and scheduling them is another important skill that a digital marketing meeting setter should have. With this skill, he can manage email outreach and organize email campaigns, respond to inquiries, and follow up with leads in a timely manner.
B2B & B2C Cold Calling Skills: Experienced in making cold calls to both businesses and consumers, helping businesses reach any type of customer and find new business opportunities. Thus, your appointment setter should be skilled in cold calling. This can be a company whose website loads slowly and needs SEO service. Or any eCommerce site needs to advertise marketing.
In this way, they can build interest and qualifying leads for digital marketing services.
Technical Proficiency: Lastly, since your digital market marketing appointment setter would be using CRM (customer relationship management) and other digital tools, check their technical proficiency in using advanced tools. Because you can not be there to fix every technical issue.
How to Choose the Right Digital Marketing Appointment Setter?
Digital marketing appointment setter is beneficial for any business to collect high-quality leads. But you need to find a suitable appointment setter; otherwise, you wonât get your desired result.
When choosing a digital marketing appointment setter, first prioritize their experience in your industry, strong communication skills, and ability to handle objections. Let’s break down how you can choose the right appointment booking service.
Industry Expertise
Look for someone with specific experience in your industry. Every industry-specific business sales goal varies, and you can not use the same appointment-setting strategy.
For example, when you are running a real estate company your leads need would be buying commercial or residential space. The target should be a real-estate appointment setter service. Hence, the online appointment setter pitching strategy will be different from that of your digital marketing industry.
An industry expert appointment setter can better understand the ins and outs than a generic meeting scheduler.
Target Audience Understanding
Unless the appointment setter understands better how to create an ideal customer profile, and how to find out the target audience based on the company type and requirement. Otherwise, he may end up pitching to the wrong customers and bring no value to your company.
For your digital marketing company, the ideal customers can be those who need help building an online presence and driving traffic through SEO, social media, or paid ads. Or someone needs content marketing, SEO, influencer marketing, and social media advertising. Your appointment setter needs to understand the type of target audience.
You can ask the appointment setter sales representative some questions like,
- How do you go about researching and identifying the target audience for a company’s services?
- Can you explain the steps you would take to qualify a lead and determine if they fit within our target audience?
- How would you adjust your outreach approach when dealing with different segments of the target audience?
Communication Skills
Communication skills with personalized touch, either through phone calls, messages, or mail, are the key to how your cold leads are engaged with your business. Only with a great communication skill the appointment setter can gauge the interest of the potential customer in your company product.
Even if the customers are not converting immediately, the appointment setter tries to build a good relationship with the customer to create a better brand image.
So, when you are hiring an appointment setter for digital marketing, try to take a small test to asses their communication ability. You can take a sample real-time test or ask different questions in the interview session to understand how they communicate with you.
CRM Proficiency
There is no alternative to manage a great customer relationship and automate many repetitive tasks of a CRM. Hence it makes it inevitable for every appointment setter to become proficient with CRM.
While conducting the interview, you can ask the candidate if they know how to use CRM and which CRM they are comfortable with. Give them small tasks and check how they manage lead information and scheduling.
Objection Handling
Now you may start thinking, why would you asses the objection handling capability of your digital marketing appointment setter. But this is important because, in this appointment scheduling job, it is not easy to fix every contacted lead appointment. There are a lot of rejections which can demotivate the employee and impact their work badly.
Those who can better deal with objection handling always stay motivated, and nothing affects their work. So, when choosing the appointment setter, try to understand how they address common objections and concerns from the potential clients.
Appointment Setting Track Record
Having a proven B2C or B2B appointment setting track is not mandatory, as companies should encourage freshers, too. However, you can check the candidate’s previous appointment-setting records. This will make it easier to choose the right candidate.
Check how many high-quality digital marketing appointments they set for their previous client. This would include conversion rates or digital marketing lead quality.
Pricing Structure
Lastly, be transparent about your budget and align it with the appointment setter pricing model. They may work on an hourly rate basis, project, full-time, or part-time. Clear all these things from the beginning.
Where do You Hire a Digital Marketing Appointment Setter?
Undoubtedly, a digital marketing appointment setter is a valuable part of your digital marketing agency. You have a wider customer from who need SEO services, advertise marketing to LinkedIn marketing.
But do you have the right digital marketing appointment setter who would understand your ICP, personalize their sales efforts, or be skilled with cold outreach?
If not, then in CallingAgency we have the best digital marketing appointment-setting solution for you. We are the appointment-setting experts with a bunch of talented niche-specific appointment setters. Whether you are in digital marketing, solar appointment setting, or others, it does not matter; we have every solution for you.
Need more proof? Check our clients’ reviews and our years of experience. So, to experience the highest client conversion rate with our skilled appointment setter, book an appointment with us today!
