At its core, lead nurturing is the process of cultivating leads that are not yet ready to buy. Successful lead nurturing anticipates the needs of the buyer based on who they are (using profile characteristics like title, role, industry, etc.) and where they are at in the buying process. Nurturing keeps prospects engaged by providing relevant content (such as white papers or webinars) that are the best fit for their situation.
If done well, nurturing can build strong brand loyalty long before a prospect is ready to buy. By cultivating latent demand, companies can increase the conversion of unqualified leads to opportunities and drive more revenue. Nurturing also helps accelerate active opportunities by giving prospective buyers the information they need to make purchasing decisions.
Lead nurturing is about helping buyers along in their educational journey. So it’s most effective when triggered by prospects’ activity or behaviour. Lead management technologies are often used to automate such real-time marketing. This type of software makes it possible to track leads and automate the delivery of content. While simultaneously collecting beharioural data and triggering corresponding actions.
Why Does My Business Need to Understand Lead Nurturing?
Not every prospect is ready to buy now. In fact, according to SiriusDecisions, of the 20% of leads that sales reps follow up on, 70% are disqualified. But it’s a mistake to ignore those leads. After all, 80% of prospects that don’t make the grade today will go on to buy from you or a competitor within the next 24 months. When they do, you want your company at the top of their short list.
Once prospects are in the funnel, nurturing them with helpful, relevant content moves potential buyers through each stage of consideration at a natural pace until they’re ready to be passed on to sales. Nurturing is the “safety” net for every stage of the buying cycle, helping ensure that no revenue opportunity is missed.
5 Steps to Lead Nurturing Success
Before you define your nurture program, you need to lay the groundwork. By doing so, you’ll gain valuable insights and maximize revenue potential.
1. Understand your buyer. Prospects go through a series of stages. You need to understand those stages and what content assets best apply to each. Interview your customers—and those that didn’t buy from you—to define your ideal customer profile and develop buyer personas. What are their pains? What is their purchase process? Why should they be interested in your product? Define what messages are most appropriate at each stage of the buying cycle and who owns the delivery of each communication. Good alignment between marketing and sales will keep the branding, voice, messaging and experience consistent.
2. Pinpoint what motivates your buyers. Analyse your past marketing campaigns and determine how they contributed to revenue. Look at the percentage of responses to campaigns and determine how many leads moved through all stages, and the messages and content offered at each stage.
3. Whiteboard the ideal user experience. Come up with a lead nurturing structure that best reflects your buying process and troubleshoot to see where you might have difficulty putting it into practice. Consider personalising the experience based on what you already know about the prospective buyer. Then modify the flow of communication based on that person’s behaviour and engagement with your content. Start out with the end goal in mind and create a blueprint. Develop a structure that makes the most sense for your business and try to anticipate any roadblocks to implementing and make revisions. Once your plan is locked down, document it so you can share it and so you’ll remember why you made certain decisions.
4. Define your nurture programme. Determine the campaign goal, message flow, content offers, communication channels (e.g. perhaps email works better than the phone in one stage), and overall cadence based on previous interactions. All of this planning helps define the timing in your automated programme. Be sure to think through all possible scenarios. If the objective is to send six emails and make three phone calls over eight weeks, what happens if you don’t get the intended response? What happens once someone “expires” from a nurture program? How do you keep that prospect engaged and who owns the relationship?
5. Automate communications. An automated “welcome campaign” is a great place to get started. Set up automated communications to greet those who enter your database and start delivering educational information. What are the three most important things you want them to know? And, what more do you want to know about them?
Lead nurturing is typically focused on converting contacts that are already in your database, not generating new enquires. Companies that don’t have a lead nurturing process see a huge drop off in the number of leads they are able to generate for their sales team. Those that nurture can grow leads, and turn those enquires into qualified demand. Without lead nurturing, all those enquiries are nothing more than hand-raisers. They’ve demonstrated interest but require further profiling and cultivation before they get passed to sales.
