Lead Nurturing – 10 keys to getting better results from your enquiries
What is lead nurturing?
Lead nurturing is the process of building relationships with prospective customers, to help guide them through their buying process and increasing the chances of that process leading to them doing business with your company.
Effective lead nurturing will shorten sales cycles and enable sales to be made at better margins, as the value to clients will be clear and the key buying issues will be addressed more completely.
The best way to look at this, is from the eyes of your customer and remove the distinctions between sales, marketing and customer service, to create a strategy that seemingly unites these departments.
If you haven’t already defined your Unique Selling Proposition (USP), this is a good place to start, or to at least work on in parallel to this, as it creates the foundation for much of the communication needed to effectively guide your prospects through their buying journey.
Keys to nurturing sales opportunities
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Personalisation:
Tailor your communication and content to match the needs and interests of each lead. Use data from interactions and preferences to deliver personalised messages.
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Understanding the Buyer's Journey:
Map out the different stages of the buyer's journey (awareness, consideration, decision) and provide relevant content and support at each stage.
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Content Relevance:
Deliver valuable and informative content that addresses the pain points and challenges of your target audience. This can include blog posts, videos, case studies, cheat sheets, buyer's guides, whitepapers, eBooks, etc.
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Consistent Communication:
Regularly engage with leads through various channels like email marketing, social media, or webinars to maintain top-of-mind awareness.
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Marketing Automation:
Utilise digital marketing automation tools to streamline and personalise the lead nurturing process. This can include automated email sequences triggered by specific actions or behaviours.
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Lead Scoring:
Implement lead scoring methodologies to identify and prioritise high-quality leads based on their engagement level and readiness to make a purchasing decision.
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Multi-Channel Approach:
Employ a multi-channel marketing approach to reach leads across different platforms and touchpoints, increasing the chances of meaningful interactions.
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Timely Follow-Ups:
Respond promptly to inquiries and engagement to show your dedication to customer service and to keep leads engaged. Well-prepared marketing automations can also assist with this.
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Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System:
Utilise a CRM system to track interactions, manage customer data, and gain insights into the lead nurturing process's effectiveness.
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Tracking and Analysis:
Continuously monitor the performance of your lead management, analyse the data, and make data-driven improvements to optimise the conversion process.
Where should you start with lead nurturing?
Many of the steps in improving lead nurturing assume that you have a good understanding of your target customer and their buying process. The trap here is that buyer behaviour is not static, so if you don’t have a way to monitor and adapt to the buying habits and decision processes of your prospects, your sales efficiency will typically decrease over time.
For this reason, when we guide clients through this process, our starting point is often to get an up to date and deeper understanding of their target market. Once this is clearer, and reviewed against the current marketing and sales processes, opportunities to improve the experience for your prospective clients often start to appear quite quickly.
Taking this approach to implement updated marketing messaging, automations and sales systems not only improves sales performance most efficiently, but also enables a faster ROI on the investment to implement these systems and then leverage growth further when further improvements are made from the increased profitability gained.
Want some help?
Improving your lead efficiency has massive ROI benefits, but it takes some experience to get the best results.
If you’d like to explore how Vizzably can help you review, strategise and implement improvements in your lead nurturing, we’d love to hear from you. Simply add your contact info and some details to the form and we’ll be in contact shortly.
