3min
Lead generation is one of the leading components of any marketing budget. Lead nurturing however relates to how you communicate to leads after they are created, to convert them into paying customers.
Nurturing makes sure that all that investment in generation isn't being squandered. It enables you to further sharpen your focus on the most qualified leads, but likewise makes sure that those qualified leads get to the end of the buyer’s journey and become customers.
Marketing automation (MA) is probably the primary element of any effective lead nurturing strategy. A robust MA system offers plenty of online lead generation tools to greatly help qualify and convert sales leads, rapidly.
Here are my 12 favourite lead nurturing recommendations to beat your rivals.
1 Make Decisions Based on Data
Utilising metrics and analysis to make enlightened decisions is a best practice throughout nearly all sectors. Marketing is no exception. A powerful marketing automation approach will produce profound insight into the outcomes of your lead nurturing strategy, enabling you to constantly concentrate more on what is performing and less on what is not.
You can be extremely imaginative with your campaigns and the content resources you utilise in them. However, it is wise to be certain that as you progress, the decisions you make are dependent on actual data from your marketing automation setup.
2 Personalise
Personalisation concerns the use of lead data to tailor the communications and content you deliver to them. You may incorporate their name, business, locality, previous purchases, or virtually any data you have saved on them in your CRM or MA system. This creates tremendously targeted messaging.
Personalisation has become the norm, particularly with email marketing. Expect to see this phenomenon keep on growing as it becomes the minimum expectation of the public. Therefore, now is the best time to begin adding personalisation into your lead nurturing strategy.
3 Multiple Channels
Nowadays, it really is insufficient to simply put your content out there. You need to nurture your leads in the communication channel they use for information. The channels differ based upon demographics and sector, and your goal is to be ready to hit every channel that is appropriate for your business.
Your leads can be found on social media, email, mobile devices, etc. Marketing automation enables you to engage with leads whenever and wherever they hang out. Forrester states that businesses that master lead nurturing produce 50% extra "sales-ready" leads at 33% lower cost. This makes a powerful case for utilising marketing automation for lead nurturing to make certain you are finding leads throughout all the channels they visit.
4 Establish an Appropriate Cadence
Most of your lead nurturing endeavours will be in the form of direct outreach using email and multichannel marketing campaigns. You will design a story that narrates over time so that you can nurture leads along the buyer’s journey on the road to conversion.
It is essential that you don't overwhelm your leads with continual outreach. Doing this risks irritating them and losing their interest. If you email them every other day, they are most likely to unsubscribe.
It’s crucial to establish a cadence for outreach that keeps prospects engaged, but not overwhelmed by your communications. You need your content and brand to remain "front of mind" without screaming at them. Establishing the correct cadence helps accomplish this and keeps nurtured leads interested right through to conversion.
5 Mind-Blowing Inbound Content
Once you begin to nurture leads, make sure you don't just overtly try selling to them. You need to gradually develop their confidence in you as a thought leader in your market. The most effective way to achieve this is by producing mind-blowing inbound content and employing it in your nurturing campaigns.
Inbound content consists of blog articles, social media, infographics, and every other content type that is developed to resolve typical problems for your prospects. It is not content that talks directly about your brand.
If you're able to solve a specific challenge for a lead by using your inbound content, you'll get their attention, and they will look to you again to address similar concerns.
6 Sales & Marketing Alignment
What point is a nurtured lead if they become qualified and then they fade away. Your sales team must interact whilst the lead is ready for a conversation. Accurate alignment between sales and marketing through marketing automation systems helps avoid this in several ways:
- Using Lead scoring helps determine the most "sales-ready" leads
- As soon as a lead is qualified, a "task" is automatically sent to sales to follow up
- With an integrated platform like HubSpot, the sales team can observe every marketing touch point that resulted in the lead qualification
- Equipped with plenty of knowledge of how a prospect was nurtured, sales can prepare a greatly tailored conversation that directly addresses the lead’s interests
Tune in next time for part 2 of super charged marketing automation lead generation techniques
