Your world isn’t getting bigger.
By that I mean as a business you probably don’t have customers to spare or throw away. Yet every year businesses spend huge amounts of money on a content strategy that provides little to no change. Why? Because they didn’t follow up their leads. Lead nurturing is a marketing tactic that enables sales, and without it businesses can be losing up to 50% of their customers.
What is Lead Nurturing?
In short, lead nurturing is the process of convincing a potential customer to take some kind of action through conversations and content. This includes providing users with relevant information that is valuable to them at the right time. As they get closer to making a purchasing decision, they will take an in-depth look at your business and decide what they need and how much they need it.
How do you get to Lead Nurturing?
In a content strategy, you don’t automatically start at lead nurturing.
Instead, you start by developing an ideal buyer persona and a buyer’s journey to really hone in on who they are and what steps they take when purchasing from your business. From there, the content you create needs to help your buyer progress through each stage of their journey.
For example, if you are a real estate business, your target persona might be named ‘Lender Leslie’, a property investor that leases her apartment in the city. Lender Leslie likes to know who is staying in her apartment but also likes to know the property value of other apartments in the area just in case she decides she wants to sell. As a real estate business, you would not only provide her with updates of her tenants but you could also provide fortnightly updates on what apartments in the area have just sold and for what price and a yearly comparison of the housing market. This allows her to consider when she wants to sell her property and then initiate the sales process with one of your agents.
But how do you know your newly qualified lead is right for your business?
You score them. As your prospects begin to go through your marketing process, you can score them on how good a fit they are. Lead scoring allows you to rank your prospects and determine their value to the company and if they are likely to convert. If the prospect fits your buyer persona and has a high interest in your business, they should be scored highly. Scoring is used to maximise the efficiency of your marketing and sales processes and avoid harassing your leads when they are not quite ready. You can score your leads manually, although it is time-consuming. There are predictive or logistic regression lead scoring models to determine the behaviours of your prospects but they can be a bit complicated. We recommend automated lead scoring with a CRM such as Hubspot. Scoring your leads essentially helps you make the most of your time and resources by focusing on the most valuable and likely prospects in your pipeline.
Targeted Content
To enable an effective lead nurturing strategy you will need to create targeted content. Targeted content is the creation of content that specifically answers a question or highlights a feature that is most relevant to the stage your buyer persona is in at that exact moment. So you will need to have a good grasp of who your audience is. At Pixeld, our team can help with the development of your buyer personas and buyer journeys to ensure your lead nurturing strategies are effective.
Targeted content used to solely reside in email marketing, where you can automate emails with the person’s name and company included. But as we have moved into this technology-savvy world, targeted content can now be distributed on almost every two-way communication platform. Social media and retargeting advertisements are two of the most effective ways to re-engage users in your brand and turn them into qualified leads.
So what content should I use?
It’s a common question but the answer stands: it depends on your business and the platform. You can use blogs, social media posts, paid advertisements, video content, case studies, infographics, the list can go on.
However, you shouldn’t fall for the trap that people have dwindling attention spans and don’t want long-form content. The debate of long vs short content can be seen on our streaming services, such as Netflix and Quibi. On Netflix, people can watch an entire season in one go, watch episode by episode and can watch it anywhere. It depends on their interest and is modified by their attention span. Where is Quibi is a streaming service solely for people who are on the go and provides users with 10 minute episodes of content on their mobile device. It depends on their attention span and is modified by their interest. Both systems work but one has been more effective.
So if it addresses the challenge, is on the right platform and is easy to find, your leads will invest time into consuming the content you create to ensure they are making the right decision with your company.
Why Should You Be Using Lead Nurturing?
It’s Cost-effective.
By nurturing all of your prospects and filtering your leads through targeted content and automation, you can be saving yourself time, resources and money. According to Hubspot, businesses that have effectively used a lead nurturing strategy have had 50% more sales than their competitors, spent 33% less on marketing costs and had 23% shorter sales cycle. You also are not throwing away your customers.
It Helps with Conversions
A prospect does not automatically become a customer (or a lead) by filling in your form and handing over some information. You need to get to know them and personalise their experience. In fact, it can sometimes take up to 13 touch points or more for a lead to be fully engaged and enter the sales cycle. Lead nurturing provides your customers with multiple touchpoints of information at the most appropriate times. By nurturing your leads, you are helping them make their decision and influencing their overall experience with your business.
It Enables Sales
By nurturing leads, you are driving them towards your sales cycle in a helpful and human way. By the time they reach the sales process, your leads will be more educated and informed about what they need and how your business can help. They will even consider your company to be better than your competitors because of the time you have taken to provide them with the right information.
At Pixeld, we can help you set up lead nurturing strategies, develop targeted content that assists your marketing and enable your sales process. Further, using our inbound methodology, we can help you nurture your existing customers to becoming promoters of your brand, generating even more word of mouth referrals. Get in touch to find out more.
