By Digital Marketing, Lead Generation, Digital Transformation
Marketers are responsible for giving potential customers all the information they need to make a purchase decision, maintaining brand awareness during the consideration phase, and being prepared to close the deal at the moment of decision. Building relationships with leads needing more time to buy is an ongoing activity called lead nurturing.
Companies that excel in lead nurturing generate 50% more sales leads at a 33% lower cost. With this in mind, we will delve into the world of lead nurturing, exploring its importance, benefits, and best practices to put your product on top of your customer's minds.
Understanding the Lead Nurturing process
Imagine caring for a plant: You wouldn't expect it to grow healthy overnight with only one watering; instead, you'd give it regular attention over time to let it bloom to its full potential.
The same holds true for creating long-lasting relationships between companies and their customers through regular communication via email campaigns or social media participation that is specific to each client based on data analysis of their preferences.
In other words, lead nurturing is more of a marathon than a sprint. It demands an investment of time and energy, as well as a plan and process for completion. They will ensure that you stay within your lead nurturing objectives and assist in directing your actions.
Lead nurturing requires much work from both the sales and marketing departments. The focus shifts to the prospective buyers and the demands of those buyers rather than arbitrary sales targets with this method.
👉 To learn more about consumer engagement, read our blog post about why you need a social media audit to put your company on new heights.
Reasons to Invest in Lead Nurturing
- Builds relationships
Lead nurturing is an ongoing method of fostering genuine connections between a company and its target audience. Lead nurturing aims to keep prospects interested and involved in the sales process. Prospective buyers might get answers to their inquiries and begin to trust your business thanks to lead nurturing.
- Helps maintain focus on what's important
Keep in touch with your potential customers by using lead nurturing. Lead nurturing efforts are effective because while potential consumers may forget a cold discussion from a month ago, they are more likely to consider companies that proactively come out to them.
- Builds trust and shows you're a leader in your field
Leads often decline multiple offers from businesses due to a lack of familiarity. Staying in touch with leads and establishing yourself as an industry expert can be achieved through lead-nurturing efforts and disseminating helpful material. In addition, it aids in gaining their confidence and advancing them further in the sales process.
How to Develop a Successful Plan for Nurturing Leads
Over 35% of B2B marketers use some form of lead nurturing since those prospects typically make 47% greater purchases than initial leads. A lead nurturing strategy is essential; now is the time to develop one if you haven't already. The ideal lead nurturing plan may be created by following these steps.
#Prepare a lead nurturing program
Discuss and analyze the sales processes of recently closed agreements to know what motivates the best customers and how they buy.
In a perfect world, you'd define:
- The business and demand drivers;
- The channels;
- The buying committee;
- The questions and issues they have at specific points.
#Understand the buyer journey stage
Only some people who read your ads, watch your videos or sign up for your events will be potential customers. It would help if you didn't force everyone to "push cadence" to schedule a demo. Instead, divide up your leads by:
- job function and position on the purchasing committee
- motivation for participation
Also, it is essential to understand the process of stepping into your customers’ shoes to realize customer personas, needs, goals, attitudes, and pain points, known as customer journey mapping. Another step is to segment your target market by demographics and firmographics, which are the primary attributes of your potential buyers.
Ultimately, introducing lead scoring as a method to prioritize leads based on their level of engagement and potential for conversion. Giving each lead you receive a number value will make it easier to identify high-value prospects that need your urgent attention.
#Find out what drives your customers
The results of previous campaigns can be utilized as a basis for planning new ones. Analyzing past marketing efforts, you can learn which strategies, content, and messaging were most effective.
Verify how many prospective customers made it to the next round and what prompted them to do so. You will be on your way to developing a secure lead-nurturing process if you include these findings in your content strategy.
#Lead Intelligence Data Collection
Lead nurturing relies heavily on giving prospects relevant and tailored material. Therefore, it is essential to collect information on potential customers. Here are a few options for acquiring them:
- Consumer and possible consumer interviews and surveys
- Talk to the customer service team
- Speak with the sales staff
- Using data mining to identify buyer personas and preferences
- Monitoring potential customers' actions and decisions in the digital realm
- Use keyword research tools to learn what your potential customers are interested in
- After gathering information, create buyer personas or ideal customer profiles to better know and assist potential clients
#Adopt the 'Track, Measure, and Analyze' Philosophy
With sales intelligence solutions, you may monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) to assess the efficacy of your lead nurturing activities, such as drip emails or email engagements.
If you want to increase brand recognition, track metrics like direct website traffic; if you want more leads, track metrics like database expansion, target audience engagement, the number of new leads coming in, the number of leads being worked by the sales team, and the number of leads being nurtured.
#Automate your communications
Create a system to automatically welcome new leads as they are added to your database. You may start building a meaningful connection and offering helpful advice right now. Get across the most crucial details you’d like people to remember, and think about discovering more about them.
How can you get the job done without making those who receive it feel overwhelmed? Drip campaigns, which automatically space out your digital engagements, are the best answer. These emails are triggered by specific user actions — or lack thereof.
#Match Sales and Advertising Efforts
The sales team should be responsible for leads ready to be converted into customers. If the prospect still waits to buy, pass them to the marketing department. This process of nurturing leads continues until the leads are ready to be turned into sales.
Final thoughts
The lead nurturing process approach provides the data you need to connect to customers at any point in their journey. Finding the right marketing automation technology can be time-consuming because it takes multiple emails and interactions to move a lead further along the marketing funnel. Lead nurturing is an ongoing marketing strategy.
When you better understand your prospects and their buyer's journeys, you'll be more prepared to create content that engages them at every stage. Learning how to build a lead nurturing strategy is the first step toward making your marketing more customer-centric and realizing the many benefits of sales/marketing alignment.
Contact us if you need to develop a lead nurturing strategy!
