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LEAD NURTURING TACTICS -White Paper
8 Winning Lead Nurturing Tactics Demystified Learn how to set up a revenueWinning generating lead - nurturing program It is a buyers’ market today. The customers no longer easily give in to ‘salesy’ messages. Instead, they want to take their time to research and evaluate their options before they invest their precious time and money in a brand. Buyers want to be heard and understood—a behavior that challenges the traditional ways of selling. Owing to customers’ changed behavior, inbound marketing that involves promotion of a company or an organization through blogs, videos, eBooks, newsletters, etc., has become the primary way to bring more leads on board and drive sales. However, no matter how well you reach out to people or how strong your lead base is, it is worthwhile to note that more often than not, as much as 50% of total leads are not sales ready. So as a marketer, what should you do? Do you simply dump the cold leads and focus only on the ones ready to invest in your company or, is there a better way of dealing with the situation? Well, there certainly is. To convert this unready lot, marketers can initiate a campaign that ensures even the ‘not-so-keen’ customers are transformed into happy brand advocates. So instead of simply doing away with not-sales-ready prospects, marketers should educate and nurture them to increase their haul of sales-qualified leads. It’s important to build trust and foster relationships with qualified prospects, regardless of where they stand in the buyer’s journey. This means companies must find ways to nurture leads and engage with them until they are ready to buy. This brings us to the concept of lead nurturing. What is lead nurturing?
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Lead nurturing is a process or initiative where you educate and inform your pros pects about your brand. This essentially helps your buyers to understand your business and how it can add value to their life. The process allows you to build trust with your leads and move them from top of the purchase funnel where they are not quite ready to buy, to a place where they become ready. It focuses marketing and communication efforts on listening to the needs of prospects, and providing them the information and answers they need. Why do you need a lead nurturing strategy? Today’s information-hungry customers are no longer swayed by elaborate sales pitches. To move them deeper into the purchase funnel, companies need to build a strong marketing-communications strategy that focuses on delivering impactful information about the company, its products and how it can address customers’ pain points. By continually offering value-adding material, companies can create, maintain and sustain great customer relationships. To nurture your leads it is important for you to be present on the channels your buyers are. That way you can engage with them and increase the chances of a relationship between them and your brand. An effective lead nurturing strategy can also significantly impact your inbound marketing strategy. Research conducted by Forrester has shown that marketers see an average 20% increase in sales opportunities from nurtured vs non-nurtured leads. Further, the research also reveals that companies that excel at lead nurturing, generate 50% more sales at a 33% lower cost (Source: Forrester, 2014).
So how can savvy marketers build and implement a successful lead nurturing campaign to gain a competitive advantage? Outlined here are eight steps to help you get started with your lead-nurturing strategy:
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A lead management process It’s really important to have a lead management process in place to handle huge volumes of incoming leads. An effective lead management process helps to ensure that your sales teams only talk to the most qualified leads and filter out the less sales-ready ones for lead nurturing. If a lead is ready to enter the sales process, assign it to a sales person who can follow up. If not, the lead should be handed over to the marketing department, which should strive to make it sales ready through its lead-nurturing process. Develop your program one step at a time. Build nurture-able leads The goal should not be just to build a huge database of leads. On the contrary, you should focus on building a base of ‘nurtureable’ leads that are open to communication and have a high potential to transform into revenue generators without complicating the efforts of sales or customer service. There might be a segment of people who regard even a modest nurturing program as spam, so it’s important to define an ideal lead, and send them tailor-made communications as much as possible. Simplicity is the key A multi-pronged, complicated strategy to nurture your leads will only end up confusing them. Some might even feel you are bombarding them with unnecessary sales messages. So it is best to start off with a single nurturing campaign for leads. Send them a monthly newsletter or a regular webinar offer, or even an occasional free white paper to engage them and to stay on top of their minds. This way you can eventually convert your prospects into loyal customers. You can get deeper later, but get something going to those latent prospects right away. Content is king Content is what will keep your leads engaged on a continuous basis. Focus on creating and delivering value-adding content that not only helps your readers but also highlights you as a thought leader or expert. Send across whitepapers, videos, blog posts, articles, cases studies, guest blogs, etc., to engage the prospects. You can use your content base and break it into pieces of fruitful material. For example, convert your whitepaper into a series of blogs or interesting videos.
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Go glocal Purchase behavior of customers varies from one region to the other. While formulating your lead-nurturing strategy, think globally, but act locally. Create specific nurturing programs for different regions so that your messages and communication formats are suited to particular locations. Going generic or using a blanket communication strategy should be replaced with more tailored messages to suit the varying local needs and requirements of prospects. Invest in a lead nurturing software Invest in a robust solution that provides necessary tools to nurture leads in a personalized way and engage them till they become ready to buy. Such solutions that offer targeting, segmenting, and content management features can help you track qualified sales leads, automate content delivery through various marketing channels and build long-term relationships with prospects. Track, measure, and analyze Being able to measure the performance of an initiative and analyze its impact on return on investments is the key. It goes for all lead-nurturing activities too. Ensure metrics are in place and they should connect to your goals. If you want to drive brand awareness, you should measure branded search or direct traffic to your website. For increase in leads or subscriptions, measure how you are growing your database from you lead nurturing efforts. If you want to measure the increase in lead quality, measure sales conversions. Keep a count of the leads that come in, the number that gets handed to the sales team, and those which enter the lead-nurturing program. Conclusion Convert leads into meaningful business opportunities faster and more effectively Lead nurturing is not an immediate process and is certainly not about instant gratification. It takes time and sustained effort to succeed. Dedication, cooperation, and lots of hard work within the organization pay off when everyone is on the same page. Companies that devote time, money, and the right resources to this process can far outperform their competition.
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Implemented a strong lead nurturing strategy? Next up, you need to convert those leads to sales!
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