Have you considered how to use strategically timed stories to nurture your leads and accelerate your sales funnel? This week’s infographic by Marketo focuses on how to use narrative to nurture leads and reminds us that it can take an average of 10 marketing touches for a prospect to move through the sales funnel to a purchase.
In the early stage of the funnel, our prospect is usually not ready to buy and has little knowledge of the products and services we provide. According to the infographic, we should be offering educational material at this time such as ebooks, blog posts, research data, infographics, curated lists and funny videos. If you are on the fence about using videos, 82% of marketers said using video had a positive impact on their business.
At mid-stage, the prospect has displayed some buying behaviour and engaged with the content sent to him or her. This is the time to offer materials that showcase your product or service sucy as a buying guide, templates, ROI calulators, analyst reports or an RFP.
The final stage indicates the lead is close to becoming a customer. At this point in time, offer materials to support the purchase process such as pricing demos, third-party reviews and case studies.
To help inspire you to create and deliver this content, decide on the right story genre (via Sam Boush, founder and president of Lead Lizard):
Red Carpet Track: Give leads the celebrity treatment by showing them how we can cater to their needs
Sales-Nado Track: Pick up stagnant “sales-qualified leads” and accelerate them through the sales funnel
Detective Track: Build systems that can follow a lead’s trail to qualify them as leads and for sales.
Sleeping Beauty Track: Send targeted content to sleeping contacts to re-capture their interest
Finally and most importantly, your story and message should be personal and incorporate these top 5 emotional factors:
- curiosity
- amazement
- interest
- astonishment
- uncertainty
Which genre will you focus on and how has this information inspired you to revise your message to accelerate your leads through your sales funnel?
