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It’s 2019, competition is fierce, and buyers have the power. So why aren’t you nurturing your leads?
You wouldn’t throw a load of grass seeds onto mud and expect it to grow into a lawn rivalling Wembley, would you? No, you would take care and nurture it with water and feed so that it grows to the best it can be. And that’s exactly how you should be looking at your leads.
You can’t just generate a lead and leave it. You need to be engaging with a lead at each stage of the sales funnel, creating conversation and making their buyer journey as smooth as possible.
What exactly is lead nurturing?
We’ve just touched on it slightly, but the definition of lead nurturing is the purposeful process of engaging a defined target group by providing relevant information at each stage of the buyer’s journey.
When you see that a whopping 96% of visitors who arrive at your website aren’t yet ready to buy, it’s clear to see why having an effective lead nurturing strategy in place is vital to the success of your overall inbound strategy.
There are lots of different techniques you can use to nurture prospects through the funnel, and what’s effective for you may be different for someone else. It all depends on your business and industry. So, it’s worth bearing in mind that testing different techniques is probably the best way to find out what is most successful for you.
What’s important to remember is that the prospect has an interest in your product or service, and so you don’t want to spam them with too much information – because they most probably already know. Instead, you need to offer little nudges in the right direction to successfully convert them from a prospect to a customer.
Tactics
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Targeted content
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Touchpoints
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Multi-channel lead nurturing
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Timely follow-ups
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Personalisation
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Lead scoring
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Sales and marketing alignment
Each of these techniques can work together to create a successful lead nurturing strategy.
Targeted content
Create content that is relevant and engaging for your target audience, using your buyer personas as a reference point for creating all content. Focus on their interests, goals, objectives and marketing triggers and use a marketing automation platform (such as HubSpot) to help you segment and target your different buyer personas.
Touchpoints
The buyer journey for different products and services can vary greatly, but on average, prospects will receive around ten marketing touches before becoming a paying customer. Think creatively how you can reach your prospect with different touchpoints and mix different types of content such as social media, blog posts, eBooks and emails to help you nurture your prospect successfully.
Multi-channel lead nurturing
Mix up your lead nurturing by combining marketing automation with social media, email marketing, paid retargeting and direct sales outreach and more – this will ensure that your touchpoints are effective.
Timely follow-ups
Make sure you are following up as quickly as possible when a prospect becomes a qualified lead. Research shows that the odds of converting a lead into a sales opportunity are a lot higher when the lead is contacted immediately following a website conversion. When you follow up with a call soon after, you know exactly what is fresh in the prospect’s mind and what they need, and so you have enough information to have a very tailored conversation.
Personalisation
Email marketing has got a lot of bad press over recent years, particularly with the introduction of the GDPR in 2018, but it’s not all bad news. Personalised emails are one of the most effective ways to nurture a lead, especially when you use marketing automation and triggers. That way you’re delivering content and tailored messages to the right people at the right time.
Lead scoring
Lead scoring is a highly under-utilised technique that can work wonders in your lead nurturing strategy. Lead scoring can be easily implemented in most marketing automation platforms by assigning numeric values to different behaviours, with the score determining whether a lead should be directly followed-up by sales or further nurtured down the funnel.
Sales and marketing alignment
When sales and marketing work together, goals become aligned and so do standards, conversions will therefore increase. Teamwork makes the dreamwork, right?
Next steps
Take a step back and take a look at your overall lead generation strategy. Are your conversions as high as they could be? Look at the different techniques mentioned and see how you can implement them into your strategy to ensure that you successfully nurture prospects into paying customers rather than leaving them to turn cold.
If you’re interested in finding out more on how to convert and manage leads, then why not check out our free eBook here, filled with all the advice you need to either get started or improve.
If you’d like any more help or information on how you can maximise your lead nurturing, then feel free to drop us an email to grow@bbdboom.com and we’ll be more than happy to offer you some expert advice!
