Lead Nurturing For Your Business: 7 Effective Strategies
Nurturing leads is crucial for the success of your business as it determines whether your prospects convert or not into paying customers. So, you want to put some thought in lead nurturing. We’ve got you covered here with our expert guide that shows you 7 effective lead nurturing strategies. They can be applied to any business (B2C, B2D, D2C, etc). Lead on!
What is Lead Nurturing?
Lead nurturing is the process of strategically building and maintaining relationships with prospects at every stage of the sales funnel – from the moment of first interaction with your brand up until they become a regular client. The key to success with lead nurturing is content. Through providing prospects content that’s educational, informative, and engaging they are more likely to convert.
Image: Traditional sales funnel with the different stages.
You provide content at each stage of the funnel to help build trust and authority for your brand. Remember prospects are always looking for solutions to their problems/pain points and through lead nurturing you providing solutions backed up by trust and authority. The most common lead nurturing tactics include online surveys, quizzes, automated emails after a newsletter signup, and retargeting campaigns.
Top of the Funnel (Awareness Stage)
Content: PR, Radio/TV, online ads, social ads etc
Middle of the Funnel (Consideration Stage)
Content: Media, blog, social ads, direct mail etc
Bottom of the Funnel (Decision Stage)
Content: website landing page, store etc
Bottom of the Funnel (Decision Stage)
Content: loyalty program, newsletter, blog etc
Why Your Brands Needs Nurture Streams
Implementing effective ‘nurture streams’ or ‘nurture tracks’ is a must not a nice to have for your brand as it enables you to send targeted messages based on your prospect’s stage in the buying process. A core part of any successful marketing strategy is strategic targeting and personalisation of messages.
No one wants a one-size-fits all approach. The reason why people travel first and business class aside from the obvious luxury is the personalisation they get with the service. Treat your nurture streams as a form of first and business class and your customers will be coming back for more. Implement the following nurture streams and they will be your raving fans, not just customers!
Define your Target Audience
The first step with any lead nurturing strategy is to define your target audience. If you don’t understand your target audience, how can you sell them your product or service? To define your audience, you need to do your diligent market research and drill down to get 100% clarity on your clients and customers are.
From here you can then create buyer personas which are crucial to any successful marketing and sales strategy. Have a marketing automation platform in place to help you identify, segment, and target your buyer personas as you scale your lead nurturing strategy. By defining your audience you’ve got a solid foundation from which to work from for your lead nurturing. Your now ready to create purposeful content and implement other best techniques to reach your audience.
Create Personalised Content for Lead Generation
Highly personalised and targeted content that’s relevant to your audience’s concerns and needs is a powerful lead nurturing strategy. Create an assortment of targeted content that nurtures each of your buyer personas based on their attributes like goals and overall pain points. Start with first conducting a content audit of your existing content to identify any gaps as well as identify any content that can be repurposed. Remember it’s not just text-based content like whitepapers and blogs that can be repurposed. Consider audio like podcasts and video too. From your audit put all content into a spreadsheet and map each piece against the persona it speaks to.
Create a Customer Journey Map for Lead Generation
Create a customer journey map in which you map the stage in which content is relevant to your audience. This allows you to see your customer’s path from the moment a problem is recognised till its solved through purchase of your product or service. A customer journey map will help you further identify content gaps, predict potential customer behaviours, help you explain the benefits they’ll receive after the purchase, improve quality of your marketing communication, create more targeted messages and more.
Build your Customer Database for Lead Generation
One of your most essential steps for lead nurturing is creating a customer database. The best way to do this is through setting up your CRM (customer relationship management system). There are so many to choose from – Salesforce, Hubspot, Nimble, and more. With such a system in place you’ll able to collect vital information about your prospects, monitor their activities, and track their interactions with your brand. This information will then assist you with gathering important data like your customer’s preferred channels, their engagement rates, most visited content etc. Its invaluable data for all types of businesses.
Use Multiple Channels for Lead Generation
In this highly saturated digital world using one channel isn’t going to work for you, you need multi-channels. Research suggests that on average, prospects need at least seven marketing messages from the time they become aware of your brand till the time they convert into customers. So, it’s essential then that you have multiple touch points like a website, email marketing, paid retargeting, sales outreach, etc to spread your message. Such a combination does wonders for your lead nurturing. It helps if your sales and marketing teams are aligned and working closely together not separately in using multiple channels to spread your brand’s message.
Use Marketing Automation for Lead Generation
In this digital age time is of the essence. You must reach your prospects as soon as possible. Audiences are impatient and we have digital to thank for that. This is where marketing automation becomes your best friend. Automated marketing campaigns enable you to follow up quickly once you’ve put out a message. If a potential customer subscribes to your newsletter or downloads a lead magnet the marketing automation software sends the content based on the recent activity, buyer’s journey phase or score. This lead nurturing strategy is perfect for keeping your customers engaged while providing tailored pieces of content to their preferences and overall requirements.
Score Your Leads for Lead Generation
Lead scoring allows you to get in depth insights into your prospect’s behaviors. You can know things like their website browsing behaviors, social media interaction, levels of engagement and more. Once you have this information, you then assign a numeric level/score from one to ten. You can score them on attributes like demographics, interest, budget, and buying stage. Through this lead nurturing strategy, you will gain insightful understanding. You’ll know which leads are ready to buy your product or service, identify prospects that are a waste of time, and the ones that require more information.
Review & Measure Your Lead Nurturing
Last but not least comes review and measure. Just like with all aspects of your business you must regularly review and measure to see what works and what doesn’t. If you’re not reviewing and measuring the above lead nurturing strategies along with any others you adopt, you’ll waste time and money.
The most important indicators of success for your lead nurturing strategies are your engagement rates, click through rates, amount of time spent on a landing page, number of leads turned into customers, and average profits from these deals. Through these indicators you can then identify problems along with solutions and make adjustments and refinements to the process.
Start implementing these lead nurturing strategies ASAP if you haven’t already done so for your brand. For more expert guidance and help in growing your business Book a Time With WORD EMPIRE®, the content experts who build business empires.
