We’ll talk about everything you need to know about lead nurturing in this article. We’ll talk about lead nurturing, lead nurturing examples, how to create a lead nurturing strategy and lead nurturing strategies.
You spend time, energy, and money getting leads, but you need help seeing actual results. You’re not alone.
Many businesses put so much effort into getting traffic and getting leads that they forget about the other part of the equation: turning those leads into sales.
Lead nurturing comes in
By creating a lead nurturing campaign, you’ll find ways to get to know your leads better and build stronger relationships with them. You’ll also find out what they need and want, which will help you make a plan to meet those needs and turn a lead into a sale.
What is Lead Nurturing?
Lead nurturing is building relationships with leads or contacts on purpose to move them down the sales funnel. Lead nurturing strategies help you turn more leads into sales and better use your marketing resources.
Lead generation is the process of finding new prospects. Lead nurturing, on the other hand, is about getting to know those prospects and tailoring your sales and marketing strategies and how you talk to them about their needs and preferences.
Also, following up with leads is becoming more important. 40% of marketing leaders said their top goal for 2021 was to improve the quality of their leads, and 38% said their top goal was to increase sales across all of their leads. Both can be helped by lead nurturing.
Steps To Create A Lead Nurturing Strategy
- Understand Your Customer Journey: Before you plan your next drip campaign or retargeting ad, you need to know where your customers are in their journey. Outlining your sales funnel from beginning to end helps you figure out where you can connect with leads and nurture them.
For example, conversions drop quickly after your welcome campaign gives them an initial boost. That’s a good time to start a campaign to get your leads interested again or to set up some educational content marketing.
- Know your customers: Lead nurturing means getting to know your customers well enough to build a real relationship with them. To do this as well as possible, you might want to organize what you know about your customers into “buyer personas.”
With a buyer persona or customer segmentation strategy, you can use information about your customers to figure out their needs and pain points and come up with ways to solve them.
- Plan across channels: As we said above, it’s unlikely that your leads will only spend time on one online channel. It’s much more likely that they switch between email, Instagram, and other platforms often throughout the day.
Your plan for nurturing leads should also use more than one channel. Choose the best channels for your audience and ensure your message fits them, even if the content stays mostly the same.
- Create content by channel: No matter what part of your digital strategy, you’ll need great content to keep your readers interested and teach them something.
Your marketing channels, lead nurturing strategies, and business goals will play a big role in your content. You could share a white paper on LinkedIn, an important fact on Twitter, and a summary of a blog post by email.
The important thing is to make sure that your content is as personalized as possible. Marketing automation software like ActiveCampaign even has a feature called “dynamic content” that lets you use information about your customers to write personalized emails. This gives your prospects a special touch.
- Set up lead scoring: Lead scoring gives leads points based on what they do so that the marketing and sales teams can help them better. In a strategy for nurturing leads, lead scoring is an important way to figure out which leads are ready to buy and which ones need a little more work before they do. Some teams use lead scoring to define a qualified lead, while others might use it to differentiate between a sales lead and a marketing lead.
- Get the right tools: Investing in a tool that can help you automate parts of the customer experience is a good idea for a large-scale lead nurturing campaign. You can increase the size of your lead generation and nurturing programs while still giving each customer a personalized experience of the highest quality.
- Measure Results: Like most business processes, your lead nurturing strategy won’t be perfect on the first try. As you see results, you’ll need to change and improve your process.
Use your marketing data to figure out where your lead nurturing process needs to catch up. Then, make small changes one at a time to see if they give you the desired results.
Lead Nurturing Strategies You Should Definitely Try
- Use email marketing: Research from Campaign Monitor shows that 55% of marketers say email marketing has the best return on investment of all digital marketing strategies.
Email marketing is not only cheaper than advertising but it can also be made more personal with the help of data and research into how users to act. Email segmentation, or dividing email subscribers into smaller groups based on different criteria, lets you target leads more effectively.
- Build out your content marketing: Content marketing is a beneficial strategy that involves making content like blog posts, e-books, FAQs, how-to articles, webinars, research reports, and more. You can use this content to spread the word about your brand and get more people interested.
Content marketing also helps with other ways to keep leads interested. For example, you can send your content through social media and email. Or, you can add calls to action (CTAs), such as asking people to sign up for your newsletter or getting in touch if they want more information.
- Get active on social media: Social media is an excellent way to get to know prospects and build relationships. It makes it easy for them to talk to you and puts your content in places where many people spend time. According to Hootsuite, people ages 16 to 64 who use the internet spend an average of 2.25 hours daily on social media.
- Align sales, marketing, and customer support teams: Taking care of leads is a group effort. The sales and customer service teams get first-hand information about a company’s customers, and the marketing team has a lot of useful information.
When these teams work together well, they will get better ideas, leading to better solutions.
- Conduct surveys: To connect with your leads, you need to understand what they want. Surveys let leads tell you in their own words how they feel. You can make a plan for how to get them to the end of the buyer’s journey by asking them about their goals and problems.
- Score leads: Lead scoring assigns a number to leads based on their behavior. Because prospects are in different stages of the sales funnel, you shouldn’t treat them equally. Your lead-scoring model may reward prospects who spend more time on your site and have higher click-through rates and penalize those who signed up for a newsletter but rarely open emails. Focus on prospects interested in what you say to maximize your impact.
- Follow up with your leads after you make the sale: Lead nurturing doesn’t stop when a sale is made. After a customer buys your product or service, you want them to keep coming back because, according to a report from the e-commerce marketing platform Yotpo, repeat customers spend three times as much as one-time customers.
Conclusion
Roberto Garvin of Mofluid says, “There is no one method that works for all leads.” “Every lead is unique. Each has different needs and a different amount of money to spend. Each evaluates differently based on how they act.”
Garvin says, “This means that each time you should expect a different set of questions.”
Neil Sheth, CEO of Your Brand Found, says you should “think omnichannel” because different leads may use different channels. Your customers need to see you on social media, read your advice on the blog for your brand, and get email updates from you.
“You have to be everywhere.”
