As inbound marketing continues to become ubiquitous with generating leads, and ultimately revenue, the importance of a lead nurturing strategy also becomes more evident. The goal of any marketing and sales departments is to turn leads into paying customers - and lead nurturing is a successful way of doing so. But what is lead nurturing, and how do you it productively?
What is Lead Nurturing?
You and your team want to move your leads from prospects to paying customers through your marketing efforts – an essential goal of any marketing department. To effectively do this, you must engage in lead nurturing. Lead nurturing involves targeting your target audiences, or buyer personas, by providing relevant information to them at every stage of their buyers’ journey.
How Do I Effectively Nurture Leads?
Unfortunately, only a small percentage of inbound leads are ready to make an immediate purchase, according to studies done by Forrester.com. This only highlights the importance of having an effective lead nurturing strategy your team can utilize.
Forrester’s study also concludes that you can see up to a 20% increase in sales opportunities from nurtured leads versus non-nurtured leads. So, that begs the question: What are the best tactics to employ when it comes to lead nurturing?
Engaging, Targeted Content
The foundation of a solid lead nurturing strategy is delivering the right information to the right people, at the right time. To do that, you need to focus on creating content that’s both engaging and targeted. And it all begins by ensuring you have up-to-date buyer personas – another key piece of lead nurturing.
So, with your personas in tow, you can begin creating content based on the interests, goals, objectives, and motivations of each of your buyer personas. You can also use them to ensure you have content that relates to the three stages of the buyer’s journey.
Part of this strategy involves producing a variety of content that is designed to move someone down your funnel. A lead that’s in the early awareness stage may react positively to a blog post while someone else who’s in the consideration stage may respond better to a comparison chart or whitepaper.
Tip: To keep your content organized so you can employ it in a lead nurturing campaign, (like an email campaign, for example) apply a naming convention in your HubSpot portal.
Personalized Emails
Email marketing remains a classic, effective tactic for lead nurturing. Many lead nurturing campaigns come in the form of a series of emails that increasingly move someone down your lead funnel. But, to make it even more effective, you should personalize your emails.
Thankfully, with HubSpot, there are numerous ways to personalize your emails. You can send behavior triggered emails, like when someone downloads a gated piece of content, and reference the content in the body of the email. Similarly, you can send them follow-up emails if they clicked or opened other specific campaigns. And of course, you can include their first name or company name in emails with personalization tokens.
However, when it comes to emails involved in your lead nurturing strategy – personalized or not – there are certain things you shouldn’t do:
- Do not email them every day, even if they are in a lead nurturing campaign.
- Do not send them every email in a drip campaign – some may not apply to them.
Smart CTAs and Smart Content
As noted, personalization helps in lead nurturing. When your content relates better to your visitor, they’re more likely to react favorably.
For example, with HubSpot’s smart CTAs you can make sure your users aren’t seeing something that doesn’t relate to where they are in your buyers’ journey. If she or he has already signed up for your newsletter, they will not be prompted to re-enter their information. If they’re somewhere closer to the middle of your funnel, they’ll see a more appropriate CTA, helping in the effort to nurture them.
Likewise, HubSpot’s smart content tool can alter the content displayed in a specific module on your website, email, or landing page depending on that viewer’s characteristics. You can set things like preferred language or country, so users can see text that’s tailored just for them.
Timely, Appropriate Follow-Up
Seeing a lead come through to your team is always exciting, and you may be tempted to hand it off to sales. According to a study done by the Harvard Business Review, timely-follow up is critical. That means not responding too quickly, but also not responding too late. The most optimal time is to respond within a day – if that lead is truly ready to be contacted.
So, this tactic involves a little research about your leads. HubSpot makes that easy by providing metrics on your contacts such as: what they’ve been looking at on your website, how often they’ve been viewing your website and content, what type of content they’ve seen, and more. Combining this information with a timely follow-up should prove successful.
Sounds Great – How Do I Start?
Lead nurturing can potentially sound complicated, but once you start, you’ll see it’s worth the effort. Once you have your buyer personas in place and content ready, you can start utilizing our tips to create your initial lead nurturing strategy.
At LyntonWeb, we’ve helped countless marketers generate and subsequently nurture their leads. If you’d like help getting your process started, consult with us today!
