According to Forrester Research, companies that have good lead nurturing skills are able to generate 50 percent more sales ready leads while spending 33 percent less. Lead nurturing for your organization must be done carefully to maximize your ROI. Here are four main steps to focus on to add fuel to your efforts and spawn the success you want to see.
Lead capture
A strong marketing strategy will use a variety of different platforms and strategies for identifying strong leads and prospects. To effectively capture these leads, you must first be able to identify precisely who you are targeting. You must know who is most likely to be interested in your product, what motivates them, and what their pain points are that they want you to solve. The more insight you have into their budget, buying power and personal background, the easier it is to effectively target these ideal customers.
Take the insight you have about your target customers and use it to guide your campaigns across all channels. This includes your PPC campaigns, inbound marketing and content marketing efforts, as well as your social media networking. Your guidelines describing what your target customers are looking for will guide the topics you cover, the target keywords you employ, and the platforms where you focus your efforts. When you fulfill this step effectively, your prospect will provide you with some type of information, such as an email address, a name and their company.
Lead nurture
Once you have first attracted your new leads to your site, you now need to engage with the prospects and spike their interest in your products and services. You need to nurture them throughout their buyer’s journey, so they remain connected with your brand and build their relationship with you. This is accomplished through email marketing, building a strong social media community, and creating landing pages with effective assets that interest your prospects and encourage them to keep turning to you for more information. Using marketing automation platforms like Experiture can help you target customers after they perform certain actions, such as downloading an e-book.
Once again, the stronger your insight is into what your customers want to see from you and what is likely to motivate them toward a purchase, the better you will be able to construct messages to attract your target audience.
Lead scoring
As you progress with your leads, you also want to be able to accurately score them so that your marketing and sales teams can easily interpret the level of priority for particular prospects. Your lead scoring should accurately reflect two main categories. One, it should describe how well the prospect lines up with your ideal buyer personas. Secondly, use behavioral activity to better see how interested the prospect is in the company, where they fall in the buyer’s journey, and how likely they are to buy. Look at where they click on the website, the assets they download, the information they provide when they complete forms, and how often they visit your website to help you determine an accurate score.
Lead conversion
When a lead is qualified and ready to be passed over to the sales team, it is important that this is handled well. When sales and marketing teams work together, they can generate as much as 208 percent more revenue from their marketing efforts. Your marketing and sales teams should be on the same page as to how to categorize a sales qualified lead, where the marketing team left off, and where the sales team should start to ensure that the communication the prospect receives from the brand is consistent.
Carefully nurturing a lead from the early stage of capturing the prospect’s information until they are ready to be passed to the sales team to make a purchase is a process that must be done purposefully to ensure a strong success rate. Brands that want to improve in their abilities to cultivate and convert these leads need to focus on these four main steps of the process to boost their success rates.
