To nurture your leads is to take care of what they need and actively help them find solutions to their problems. If you want prospects to convert, then aim to provide useful information via your campaigns, not just bluntly sell your services to them.
With the sudden shift to remote or hybrid work models and changes of company structures, the lead nurturing strategy becomes more challenging for teams to reorganize their workflow processes. Therefore, the need to nurture leads is often underestimated. On the other hand, the pressure to keep existing customers in the business with limited operational resources.
However, unless there are new leads converting to paying clients, there will be no growth and success. In this article, we will first explain what makes the need to nurture your leads even more important in 2022. After this, we will go through 3 actionable techniques to do it right.
Why Is It Important To Have a Lead Nurturing Strategy
To begin with, leads that visit your websites for the first time are not really looking to buy anything. Perhaps they searched for a term you rank for, or looked for a guide on how to do something. So, you need to make sure you nurture your leads at this initial stage by providing easy-to-digest information. In addition, define clear steps to solving their problem.
According to Hubspot, merely 19% of prospects want to speak to a salesperson during the awareness process. Hence, applying different strategies to nurture leads and provide them with the information they need is fundamental.
Apparently, letting leads go without a purchase is lost revenue for your business. Also, it is a waste of your team’s efforts. However, if you capture these leads from the very start into a lead generation funnel, studies show that the number of conversions and the size of the sales increase by 47%.
So, make sure you work out different scenarios and classify your leads. Once you create your lead nurture campaigns, your new prospect will enter one of them and you can gradually guide them through the steps to the sale.
How To Nurture Your Leads: 3 Techniques
Businesses often have to do trial and error to find a lead nurturing technique that leads to increased sales, and hopefully decreased CPA. So, it’s better to use a combination of these to find out what is most effective for your niche and organization. Here are 3 techniques that will help you nurture your leads to conversion:
Retargeting
You probably have your marketing team research your target audience and readership on a daily basis. After all, in order to nurture your leads, you first have to understand where they are, what they are looking for and what problems they might have. It is also very important to have your marketing and sales teams collaborate constantly. This is how you will make sure each has all the information they need to engage a lead so they stay till the end of the process.
Once a lead engages with your brand and takes some sort of action to give you more data about themselves, you can already take note of their profile. This usually happens at the first lead-magnet conversion stage – when a lead has filled in a contact form with a query, or just to sign up for your newsletter. Once you have their contact details, preferences, demographic profile, social media, you can start painting a picture of the buyer persona they could fit if nurtured properly.
There are different retargeting strategies and each depends on the focus of the lead when they land on your site. You could retarget leads using Facebook and Google Ads based on URL visits. Also, you may choose to focus on existing customers that haven’t purchased in a while or engaged with your brand. In addition, you can base your lead nurturing efforts on page engagement lead-gen ads. However, read your prospects’ actions across your site/ channels – let their behavior lead the way.
Nurture At Each Step Of The Sales Funnel
Many companies have an established lead nurturing strategy only at the top of the funnel – the marketing qualified stage. However, this is throwing the net too wide and expect high results with minimal efforts. In order to sustain a lead, you need to nurture them at every step of their conversion journey and beyond.
However, nurturing needs to start at the introductory phase, through adaptation, illustration, decision, to post-sale communication. For example, at the initial stage you need to raise awareness of how your brand solves a particular problem. You can use SEO content, social media marketing, videos, podcasts etc.
At the next stages the lead is more familiar with who you are. So, you can go ahead and introduce them to opt-ins about free trials, free consultations, webinars, courses etc. After the purchase, make sure you keep the communication going. Ask for reviews, testimonials, suggest joining your reward program, offer future promotions, email newsletters etc.
Write Goal-Oriented Content
Content is king indeed. More than 90% B2B marketers use social media and email for their lead generation efforts, and a stunning 79% use blogging as their main tactic. The advantage of content as a method to nurture your leads is that it is relatively cheap and an easy way to bring prospects to your website.
However, most of the content-generated traffic does not convert. The reason – many of these visitors were seeking information, not a purchase. So, in order to nurture your leads to a sale, you need to combine useful, consistent content with lead generation elements. For example, include CTA at the end of your post, link to other articles you’ve written to demonstrate authority. Also, you can subtly implement the benefits of your products in the content body etc.
How To Nurture Your Leads: Final Words
For a successful lead nurturing strategy, you need to first do your research and know them well. Once you’ve identified your target audience, you can use different techniques to guide them through the sales funnel. Make sure you retarget every action your leads take and be present at each step of the lead generation journey. Useful, meaningful content is important for driving more traffic towards your brand. However, incorporate CTAs and perks across it to lead the way. Use a BPM software to keep the communication between your marketing and sales team on point for a great lead nurturing success.