Today’s marketplace is driven by the consumer. This means effective lead developing entails establishing and nurturing buyer relationships. This is based on lead scoring as well as content marketing.
Web traffic is not guaranteed by good content alone. Visitor retention is what matters; that’s how visitors can be converted to prospects. Content created should be centered on what the lead is looking for to effectively cater to them.
By using lead nurturing tactics, you can develop successful leads who will then bring about the actualization of your desired results; you can identify which of them have potential, how much effort is worth being invested in them and what expectations can be set from them.
After all, a lead is nothing but a prospective consumer turned into an effective promoter.
Understanding Lead Nurturing
Lead nurturing is developing relationships with buyers at every stage of the sales funnel. It focuses on marketing and communication efforts on understanding the needs of prospects and providing the information they need.
The next obvious question raised is what a sales funnel even refers to. In simple words, it is customer buying cycles broken down into distinct stages:
The Top – At this stage, people are searching for ideas, tips, and resources to help them answer questions and get ideas for problems they’re facing. The objective is to assist and provide enough value to get a conversion and move them from anonymous visitors to known people.
The Middle – At this stage, people took some conversion step to express interest – subscribe, register, or download brochure, etc. You need to learn if this person and/or their company are fit and their level of qualification.
The Bottom – At this stage, you’re moving them from being a lead to a sales qualified opportunity. This is where the hand-off from marketing to sales takes place and where people ultimately make the buying decision.
Effective Lead Nurturing tactics
The following tactics can effectively be utilized for effective lead nurturing. Some of these are effective across the Funnel, while others are more applicable to the individual stages:
1. Craft Your Buyer’s Journey
To move your buyer through the Sale’s funnel it is important to create a personalized engagement journey for them. This data can be collected and analyzed using customer relation platforms (CRP).
They store comprehensive data about current customers, their buying habits and their engagement level with the business. You should create a list of individuals who match certain traits with your ideal clients.
This creates a contact list of people. Then the marketing team targets those individuals with ads across the digital landscape: Facebook, Instagram, Google, YouTube or news outlets. For a personalized engagement that encourages the buyer to move forward, it is important to adopt automation.
2. Implement a Follow-Up strategy
Automated lead nurturing can help you reach large groups of prospects, but to convert inbound leads to qualified sales leads, you still need a timely follow-up email or a phone call.
Recommended for You
A well-researched call to an inbound lead is far more effective than any volume of cold calling. You know exactly what the prospect is researching based on their recent browsing behavior and you also have enough information about the prospect to do some initial research about the organization they work for and their specific role within the company.
You can send triggered emails when someone downloads your gated content, clicks on links in your emails, visits certain pages on your website, or when they demonstrate a high level of engagement.
When you combine the power of marketing personalization with behavioral triggered emails you can deliver the right marketing messages to the right people, at exactly the right times.
3. Adopt Lead scoring
Lead Scoring is ranking of prospects by the value of their contributions to the business. Lead scoring can be implemented in most marketing automation platforms by assigning numeric values to certain website browsing behaviors, conversion events, or even social media interactions.
The resulting score is used to determine which leads should be followed up with directly by a sales rep or which leads need to be nurtured further down the funnel.
Parameters used to determine what makes a qualified lead include engagement with the business, content generated and sales values brought by the prospect.
4. Enable Sales during nurturing
Sales are an essential part of building your lead nurturing process. The ultimate goal of lead nurturing is to get more sales and advance more qualified opportunities into the pipeline.
Ground test ideas for nurture messaging before you implement. From the initial stage of interest, the prospect must be pushed towards an assured sale. Salespeople often struggle with developing nurturing content without support.
Sales cycles must be tracked diligently to determine whether the lead is qualified or not. Correctly identified qualified leads deserve concentrated efforts of Sales and Marketing.
5. Co-ordinate Sales with Marketing
Sales and Marketing depend on each other for effective sales nurturing. Information from Sale helps Marketing target the right prospects, while marketing research gives Sales potential qualified Leads.
Marketing and Sale’s efforts must thus be aligned with one another. Your sales team is on the front lines when it comes to dealing with prospects, and has the best understanding of your prospects’ pain points, needs, and interests.
Sales and marketing should be touching base on a regular basis to see how each team can get the most value out of your nurturing programs.
As sales funnels lengthen, buyers become more independent, and attention spans shrink, the case for strategic, effective lead nurturing continues to grow.
In today’s environment, there is tremendous competition, which means your competitors are working on their own lead nurturing strategies. Immediate attention to lead nurturing with full involvement of Sales and Marketing then is imperative.
Content should then be developed for each stage in the funnel. Brand awareness can also be raised better if automation is integrated into the process of lead nurturing.