If you are marketing your business appropriately, you should be building a list of prospects long before they are ready to make a purchase. You should be doing this by putting yourself on their research path to buying. But if you are collecting these prospects and they aren’t ready to buy, how are you going to get them to become customers? That’s where lead nurturing comes into play. What is lead nurturing?
What Is Lead Nurturing?
Lead nurturing is the practice of communicating consistently with prospective customers in order to educate, build a relationship, and close a sale.
By creating a strategic lead capturing plan and combining it with a solid lead nurturing strategy, your sales team will be able to spend less time convincing and more time closing high quality, ready to buy leads.
For a more detailed definition, check out techopedia’s description here.
How Does Lead Nurturing Increase Conversions?
If someone is doing online research about hiring a company like yours or buying products that you offer, that doesn’t mean they have purchasing intent at that moment. But if someone downloads one of your lead magnets and gets a phone call right away from a pushy salesman, they aren’t going to make the purchase and they’re going to be turned off. All that hard work you got to attracting that prospect to your website and converting them into a lead all went down the toilet in five minutes.
Depending on the type of product or service you offer, the lead nurturing campaign will vary in length. Keep this in mind, the 80% of sales aren’t made until at least the fifth communication between the prospect and the brand.
The more expensive your product or service, the longer the decision process will be for prospects. This is why you have to know your ideal customers before planning any kind of marketing strategy. Understanding what they want and need to know in order to do business with you will guide your entire marketing process from lead generation to customer satisfaction.
Once you have an understanding of what your customers will need to have from you in terms of trust building with your brand, understanding of your product or service, and motivation to become a paying customer, you will easily be able to list the topics of your lead nurturing campaigns.
How To Create A Lead Nurturing Strategy
Your lead nurturing strategy can involve any form of communication ranging from email, phone calls, direct mail, or social media. Normally a combination of multiple communication forms work best. With the technology available today, it’s possible to have your lead nurturing highly automated.
For creating the content that you’ll need for your lead nurturing strategy, you can follow a similar outline to your content marketing campaign strategy:
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Map your content development to your buyer persona decision making process
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List all questions prospects have
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Do keyword research
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Create articles
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Setup sign up capturing on your site
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Setup email campaigns with content from articles
If you plan this appropriately from the beginning, you can actually save a lot of time and duplicate efforts by incorporating the lead nurturing idea while developing content to attract visitors to your website.
What Is Your Lead Nurturing Strategy?
Do you have a lead nurturing strategy? If not, why not? Leave your thoughts and questions in the comments below.
Want To Learn More?
Want to learn more about strategies and tactics that can help your business grow?
Your lead nurturing strategy can involve any form of communication ranging from email, phone calls, direct mail, or social media. Normally a combination of multiple communication forms work best. With the technology available today, it’s possible to have your lead nurturing highly automated.
