For many B2B marketers, finding the right balance of nurturing activities is a struggle. Often, new leads from your website are in the early stage of awareness and are not ready to buy.
In order to drive your business to new levels of sales, it’s important that you implement nurturing programs that identify where a prospect is in the buying process. Knowing this information and providing the right content at the right time to the right lead can help shorten the time in the sales cycle.
In fact, according to Gleanster research, 50% of leads are qualified but not yet ready to buy. Lead nurturing programs allow you to build brand awareness so that you stay on their radar.
Here are some best practices for lead nurturing programs:
Personalize and target communications
Personalizing communications helps build trust and informs prospects about your products and services. It boosts brand affinity and prevents broad email marketing campaigns that lump all clients and leads into one category.
Once a lead has completed certain tasks (like downloading a white paper or signing up to an email newsletter), you can create targeted communications to address their needs.
Create integrated content campaigns
No one likes boring campaigns that focus on one method of delivery. Now more than ever, social media channels let you create a variety of different content types to address the needs of your prospects. Video, images, infographics and blog posts allow you to showcase your expertise in different ways. Whether online, email or events, there are multiple opportunities for you to create multi-stage, multi-touch campaigns.
Be proactive, not reactive
In the rush to generate interest in an event, webinar or product launch, marketers often ramp up nurturing campaigns. When these are reactionary and short term, leads are exposed to a swing from “nothing” to “everything.” Proactive lead nurturing programs allow for multi-channel campaign implementation that builds awareness over the long term.
Measure, measure, measure
Effective performance management of lead nurturing programs demands a comprehensive approach. More than measuring the results of click-through rates in email marketing campaigns, marketers need to create a framework of tracking activities to score and grade leads against predetermined criteria. By driving a mix of both quantitative and qualitative factors, marketing execs can optimize their lead nurturing activities, so that results are measured against goals.
By reviewing and adjusting your lead nurturing activities, your communications will offer the right balance of content to meet both short- and long-term needs – regardless of where a lead is in the sales cycle.
