When using inbound marketing to generate more leads, it is essential to have an effective lead nurturing strategy. On average, a small percent of your inbound leads will be ready to make a purchase, leaving approximately 90% of your inbound leads up for discussion. Thus, having an effective lead generation strategy can vastly impact your results, along with providing the opportunity to gain an advantage over your competition.
Lead Nurturing Process
The nurturing
process intentionally engages your target audience by providing valuable
information, any form of support, and being an integral part of the buyer’s
journey throughout every stage. Critical to the success of your business, these
tactics immediately impact whether a customer decides to convert into a paying
customer. Below are 7 of the most effective lead nurturing tactics and
what they entail. Set both quantitative and qualitative goals with your team,
and start experimenting with these tactics today to boost your results.
1. Targeted
Content: Customize intriguing and entertaining content to members of your
target audience to identify the most qualified leads.
2.
Multi-channel Lead Nurturing: Reach out and nurture your audience on multiple
channels instead of just email.
3. Multiple
Touches: Increase touches with various channels and content types to improve
engagement and interaction with members of your target audience.
4. Timely
Follow-ups: Promptly follow up with your leads to keep them engaged and
interested while keeping your brand top of mind.
5.
Personalized Emails: Personalize emails and lead nurturing tactics to promote
customer retention.
6. Lead
Scoring: Determine which leads you should focus your time on by implementing a
lead scoring strategy.
7. Sales and
Marketing Alignment: Align marketing and sales teams to enhance customer
retention and improve your lead nurturing tactics.
Content
Creation
In terms of
lead nurturing, all content is not created equal. Significantly improve your
results by strategically nurturing your leads with targeted content. Start by
understanding the uniqueness of each of your buyer personas. Then, create
targeted content specifically designed to nurture each persona based on their
characteristics, such as goals, interests, marketing triggers, and objectives.
Create buyer
stage-specific content by sending customized emails. Email marketing is a
successful tactic for lead nurturing, as personalized emails often produce
highly effective results. However, there are many ways to improve your lead
nurturing strategy via customized emails. For instance, send triggered emails
when a sightseer downloads your content, visits specific pages on your company
site, clicks on links within your emails, or expresses an elevated level of
engagement. By combining the benefits of marketing personalization with behaviourally
triggered emails, you can create the best content, for the right people, at the
proper time, with the appropriate marketing message.
Benefits of
Marketing Automation
A marketing
automation platform can help you identify, target, and segment your unique
buyer personas as you scale your strategy. The need for automation software has
been on the rise over the past few years, with around 49%
of companies and 55% of B2B businesses currently taking advantage of
the benefits. As leads expect consistent contact, more “humanized” experiences,
and more personalized offers and content, automation can help marketers
succeed. So, can you benefit from automation? Below are 6 signs that all point
to yes.
1. You are
exhausted from repetitive, manual, inefficient tasks.
2. You can’t
scale up because you’re too short-staffed.
3. Your
competition is on the rise.
4. You are
not sure how to display your success.
5. You are
using way too many marketing tools.
6. You spray
and pray your marketing.
Marketing
automation programs separate your contacts into segmented lists based on job
title, recent interactions, and gender and make it simple to send customized
offers or content to leads based on collective qualities. In addition,
marketing automation programs allow you to target contacts in different stages
of the buyer’s journey while also allowing your strategy to become efficient
and intuitive. This way, you can get the point across to the right people
without hours of research.
There are
further advantages to automating your email campaigns. They automate sending
emails and allow customization to individuals at different stages of their
buying journey. Additional key benefits include email content personalization
opportunities, low-hassle revision, and continuous improvement through testing,
long-term planning for campaigns with automated scheduling, maintenance of
clean and well-segmented lists, increases in traffic to the business website,
and SEO. And, best of all, they provide more time and resources for the
marketing team to devote elsewhere.