Lead nurturing is not a one-size-fits-all strategy. Instead, it’s better to consider it a dynamic and personalised process.
What is lead nurturing?
Lead nurturing is the process of building and maintaining relationships with potential customers (leads) throughout their buying journey.
What’s the point?
Lead nurturing aims to keep the brand top-of-mind, address prospects’ needs, and gradually move them toward making a purchase decision and becoming loyal customers.
Lead nurturing has become an essential aspect of modern marketing because of how buyer behaviour has changed in recent times. Sales cycles are becoming longer and journeys less linear. More often than not, your prospects are increasingly comfortable finding information out for themselves, educating themselves long before they speak to someone from your sales team. With an effective lead nurturing approach, you are acknowledging this change in behaviour and distinguishing yourself as a trusted source of information and insight for your prospects.
Understanding your audience is fundamental to successful lead nurturing. Spend the time to create buyer personas that detail things like their pain points, key challenges, and motivations. This will make segmenting your database for email nurturing and creating relevant content a lot easier and a lot more effective.
We just so happen to have a great blog about creating your buyer persona in more detail!
Content is the backbone of lead nurturing. The main thing to remember here is to make sure that the content you produce to support your lead nurture efforts is informative and adds genuine value to your leads. A simple way to do this is to create a content strategy that aligns with the different stages of the buyer journey (educational blogs, interesting webinars, insightful eBooks… that sort of thing).
Everyone is different – for some of your leads, email might be their preferred channel to hear from you. For others, it could be social or something else altogether.
If you haven’t done any lead nurturing before, try a few different channels to get a feel for what your leads prefer, and then refine your strategy accordingly. The important thing is to recognise these differences and adapt to reach your audience where they are most active. This may change over time, so keep an eye on it as the years progress and tweak when you need to.
You have all this data, now use it wisely! Hopefully, you have a system in place that will help you segment your data in whatever way you need (such as industry, job role, or location). Once this segmentation is done, you just need to make sure your messages are tailored for each segment. This will ensure your communication feels relevant and resonates with the leads in each segment.
Implement a lead scoring system to help you prioritise prospects and leads based on their engagement level. This makes working together so much easier for your marketing and sales teams. Marketing can warm up leads until they become MQLs (marketing qualified leads) ready to be handed over to sales to turn into SQLs (sales qualified leads) and, hopefully, customers. As a result, sales can focus only on the leads most likely to convert, maximising efficiency and generally keeping everyone involved sane.
This last step isn’t essential, but it will make your life easier. If you have access to marketing automation tools but you’re not using them, or don’t feel you’re using them to their full potential, it’s time to change that. Set up automated workflows to deliver targeted messages to your segments at the right time, ensuring your leads receive timely and relevant information. Marketing automation can streamline the lead nurturing process and free up a lot of time in your day. It also enhances the consistency and effectiveness of your lead nurturing efforts.
Lead nurturing is a strategic and ongoing process that requires a deep understanding of your audience and a commitment to delivering value at every stage of the buyer’s journey. By taking the time to understand your audience, personalising your approach, leveraging automation, and refining your strategy, you stand a great chance of building lasting relationships with your leads and increasing the likelihood of conversion.
