Lead nurturing is an important aspect of B2B marketing and plays a pivotal role in the conversion of leads into qualified leads and qualified leads into customers.
Lead nurturing is best known as the process of educating and interacting with your leads consistently, building trust and gaining mindshare in the process till they are ready to buy from you.
But despite the best of intents, many lead nurturing programs fail to deliver the desired results, simply because they become nothing more than monthly email blasts to a list of leads in your database.
So what is it that really differentiates a lead nurturing activity from your regular email marketing activity?
Well the answer lies in your approach and how well you try to address the needs of your leads, having a basic understanding of your leads and their needs is critical to a successful lead nurturing program.
If you are ready to spend some time on putting together your lead nurturing campaigns there is a great marketing tactic, which can really improve the quality and success rate of your campaigns.
The B2C industry has always relied on building buyer personas, which then become the core of all their marketing programs. This method of breaking down you prospects into different groups based on their demographics, interests, motivations etc. can go a long way in customizing your messaging to their needs and ensuring they in turn identify with the messaging and respond to it.
When applied to B2B, building lead/corporate personas based on the size of the company, industry type, their search query, expressed intent etc. can help marketing teams customize their messaging in a way that is in line with the needs of their leads. You can also add your product use case scenarios if possible for the personas you create, this will help you pre-empt a need and offer a more relevant solution than a generic one.
This works best when you have a large lead database to tackle and you need a starting point for initiating your lead nurturing process.
Developing personas
Base them on your past interactions with clients – You have been measuring your marketing efforts and know what kind of leads are entering your funnel, you have been noticing their behavior and their responses, use this data in putting together the lead personas.
Take Sales feedback – Sales guys work closely with the leads and hence have a more real feel of their needs, apprehensions and requirements, speak to them, use their experience and insights to build your personas.
Talk to your customer service guys – They are the ones who deal with the customer on a regular basis, they can share with you data on the experience matrix of your company’s existing customers
Work backwards – Since you understand your product and its real world applications, think of the real life problem scenarios and the kind of leads who are more likely to face those problems, develop their personas accordingly.
Creating lead personas can come across as a tedious task, but is very useful in ensuring you connect with your leads better. Also, the persona templates should be a work-in-progress document, with your team fine-tuning it every now on then, based on the responses they get or other insights they might come across.
Once you have your lead personas are in place you can also use them to develop content that will help connecting with these leads, when reaching out to them as part of your lead nurturing campaign. Creating personas will not only make your marketing efforts more targeted, but will also help in building a better relationship with your leads.
Image courtesy – Toon Pool.com
