Effective lead nurturing is crucial to successful b2b marketing. 95% of the prospects visiting your website today are there for research, but as many as 70% of them will eventually buy from you or your competitors. Lead nurturing lets you keep moving those leads down your funnel and stay top-of-mind so that when they are ready to buy they purchase your solution.
Lead nurturing can be an extremely effective way to increase your conversions over time and get those additional incremental sales.
Ready to get started? Read below. Ill show you how.
Before starting with the execution of lead nurturing strategy you need to plan out what you need to get things going. Here are questions you should have the answers to before starting with lead nurturing
- Do I understand my buyers buying cycle? You need to be able to map out your typical buyers buying cycle. It is the basis of any good lead nurturing campaign. You will building nurturing content and messages for each step of the buying cycle. Involve sales and confirm your the buying cycle with them.
- Do I have quality content for each stage of the buying cycle? Ensure you have content and the different means to deliver that content at the appropriate time to the appropriate buyer. To ensure you have the right content consider what goes through a potential customer’s mind as he or she makes a buying decision. Are they looking for more information on the product? Do they need more explanations on the value proposition? What are the problems your target prospects are having? Once you have a better idea of what they are looking for build content that solves those different questions.
- How will I measure my results? Make sure you know how you will measure your success before you start. Trying to measure once everything is in place can be difficult especially if certain component are missing.
- Why am I doing lead nurturing? Do you want to see an increase in the numbers of sales closed? Do you want to build trusted relationship with your economic buyer? There are many reasons to start a lead nurturing campaign. Make sure you know why you are doing it.
Execution
Typically, a lead nurturing program uses these communication mechanisms: emails, case studies, articles, events, podcasts, white papers, social media messages and webinars. Use the map that you built during your planning stage and map content pieces (emails, case studies on product successes, invitation to a webinar) to each step. Good practice dictates that mechanism be mixed and matched at each step since different buyers’ prefer different means of communication (written vs. audio vs. video). Providing a way to get in contact with sales during the later phases is also a good practice.
An example of simple lead nurturing campaign could be:
- Day 1: Visitor downloads white paper on “Lead nurturing 101”. Capture his email information in exchange of download
- Day 3: Lead is sent email thanking him for the download and inviting him to a webinar on lead nurturing.
- Day 7: Lead attends webinar. Send follow-up email asking if he would be interested in learning more how your product can help with lead nurturing?
- If answers yes schedule demo with sales. (qualified lead!)
- If no answer continue nurturing
- Day 15: Email recent customer case study.
- Day 21: Email “touching base” note. Offer other valuable information (case study, new blog post etc..)
- Day 30: Prospect calls up sales (qualified lead!)
Spacing and number of communications should be based on the length of your average sales cycle and complexity of product/services being sold. The more complex and the longer the sales cycle is the more spaced out communications should be.
For some this execution might seem complicated but marketing automation tools make lead nurturing much smoother and efficient by providing automatic follow-ups based on prospect activity. You can create effective lead nurturing campaigns in no time.
After reading this you should be ready to start your nurturing your leads. If you start a lead nurturing campaign after reading this article l would be interested in knowing how it went. Leave a comment below.
