The digital marketing space is incredibly crowded, and it’s only getting busier. To succeed through digital channels, marketers must make intelligent decisions and leverage sophisticated technology to stay ahead of the crowd and ensure they’re converting every lead they can.
With the increase in available channels and touch points, marketing and sales funnels are becoming more merged. Gone are the days where marketers would hand over warm leads to the sales team and be done with it. Modern marketing teams must be involved in the conversion and nurturing process until names are signed on the dotted line – easier said than done for teams who lack confidence in the digital space.
To maximise the success of campaigns and ensure that every prospect is kept in your sphere, even if they’re not ready to buy, marketers should design and develop lead nurturing, sales development, and lead capture follow up strategies and tactics.
The Benefits of Nurturing Leads
It helps you maintain and grow relationships. Especially in B2B industries, just because a prospect is not immediately in a position to purchase your product or service doesn’t mean their situation won’t change. Keeping prospects in nurturing campaigns ensures your brand will be top-of-mind when they’re ready to begin their research.
It allows you to build thought leadership. Lead nurturing is the perfect time to show prospects that you’re an expert in your field. Feeding leads quality content before they’re at the buying stage gives you the ideal opportunity to demonstrate your knowledge and assert yourself as an informed consultant rather than simply a service provider.
It enables you to gain further insight. Lead nurturing campaigns are a great way to learn more about your prospects, the challenges they’re facing, or the services they’re most interested in. By offering different types of content and seeing who responds to what, you can qualify your leads and set yourself up for more lucrative sales conversations.
Convinced? Check out these 5 effective tactics for effective lead nurturing.
1. Implement Retargeting Campaigns
Consider for a second that 92% of people that visit your website are not yet ready to purchase your product or service. Retargeting campaigns typically involve serving paid ads to target audiences who have visited your website or social media profile and getting them to return and buy. This is a great, hands-off approach to lead nurturing, ensuring your brand stays top-of-mind in warm leads without risking being too pushy through direct outreach.
In your retargeted ads, switch up the messaging your leads originally saw – there’s probably a reason they didn’t close after seeing your initial content. If your original content was benefit-driven, try an ad that’s more product-focused.
You can retarget and nurture prospects through social media (one of the most lucrative strategies due to reasonably low costs) or through display channels (which are great for keeping your brand front of mind).
For the best chance of success, you should use a multichannel digital approach to your lead nurturing. Using multiple touch points in your retargeting increases your chance of conversions as leads are more familiar with your brand and (if you’re producing quality content!) will be primed to make purchasing decisions. For a winning combination of multiple touch points, why not try combining paid media retargeting, content sharing through email, and some light direct sales outreach?
2. Personalise Your Direct Outreach to New and Warm Leads
Psychologically, people are more likely to respond if you ask specific, direct questions such as:
“I’ve noticed (Company Name) just launched (Product Name), and it seems like a really exciting time for you guys! Might now be a good time to have a chat about how we can help improve your service offering for this product?”
It might take a bit more time and digging than generic outreach, but it’s real relationship building stuff. There are plenty of websites available which can give insight into business happenings. Alternatively, you can monitor a business’s social media pages for any relevant news or updates.
3. Up Your Content Marketing
A key aim during the nurturing process is giving your leads a reason to come back, and creating valuable content which inspires trust and determines you as a thought leader in your field is a great way to do this.
You can also get super personal with your content during the nurturing process. Did a lead have doubts due to stringent compliance requirements at their organisation? Send them a blog post on how you keep your customer data safe. Was a prospect particularly interested in a specific product? Keep them in the loop with any new videos or collateral you release about that product. To speed things up, you could start capturing your audiences’ “challenges” as frequently as possible via lead capture forms, then later segment your CRM data into “challenges” lists to bulk send relevant and more personalised content to those lists based on their specific needs.
Not only does this provide more clarification on any sticking points, it will also delight warm leads as they feel valued and remembered.
4. Align Your Sales and Marketing Teams
Lead nurturing doesn’t have to involve adding more software to your marketing tech stack. While there’s a huge market of tools available to help sales development, efficient lead nurturing cannot begin without thorough internal streamlining.
Aligning your sales and marketing teams under the same clear, focused objectives is one of the best ways to mitigate leads being dropped – after all, regardless of industry, the common goal of both teams will always be to land more sales.
Investing in sales technology while your departments are working in silos is like throwing money at a broken machine – what’s the point in paying for expensive lead management software if prospects go cold in an inefficient handover process?
5. Make Sure to Score Your Leads
Lead scoring is the process of ranking the sales readiness of a lead so you can determine who to prioritise outreach to: usually either the highest-budget prospects or those most likely to close.
Scoring your leads can improve efficiencies in your lead nurturing process as well as give your campaigns some direction – it’s a great first step if you’re at the beginning of your lead nurturing journey.
Lead scoring can also help improve your ROI by directing your budget, time, and resources towards the most lucrative potential deals.
Start Building Out Your Lead Nurturing Process Today
Following our 5 top tips for successful lead nurturing will send you well on your way towards increasing your conversions and mitigating lead wastage.
