To turn your prospects into clients, you’ve got to nurture your leads.
Why is lead nurturing so critical? Most new visitors to your website aren’t yet ready to buy a product. To earn their trust, and convince them they need your help, you’ll have to create a buyer journey to help them make their choice.
Not only will lead nurturing help you convert more leads into sales, but research shows that nurtured leads also make larger purchases than non-nurtured ones do — sometimes much larger. This means you can increase your revenues per lead and get a bigger ROI from your digital marketing efforts.
In an earlier post, we covered the "buyer journey," including the journey stages and touched on how even small businesses can craft killer buyer journeys with the help of marketing automation. In this post, we’ll go step-by-step through nurturing your leads into clients. Lead nurturing is how you’ll guide your prospects through the buyer journey, engaging them at every stage with the information they need to move through the funnel.
Stage one: Awareness
Let’s say your site gets a new visitor: say hello to your brand-new lead! At the top of the funnel, lead scoring is going to be critical to your success. But how do you score a lead you haven’t yet interacted with?
At the awareness stage, it’s helpful to already have a well-researched buyer persona, including details like age, profession, location and other interests. With analytics, you can use this information to score your leads: new visitors who match your buyer persona can receive a higher score.
To nurture leads at this stage, keep the spotlight on their concerns, not your product (you’ll have time for that later!). You want to demonstrate that you understand them and what their pain points are. Your goal should be to earn their trust, by providing them high-quality, credible information.
In your preliminary research, you should also find out where your buyer persona spends their time online. Do they read the certain blogs, shop online or cruise social media? Do they prefer Facebook or LinkedIn? With this information, you can reach your new leads through multiple channels with targeted paid promotions.
This is also a good time to capture their email addresses, but don’t be pushy. If you offer enough compelling content, more leads will happily engage.
Stage two: Consideration
At this stage, your users understand they have a problem and they’re looking for a solution. To further their research, they’re looking for highly authoritative content that demonstrates a clear return on their investment.
By now, you’ll have more information you can use to score leads. You can see which leads have interacted the most with your brand and what kind of interactions have led to further engagement. You can learn from this to improve your lead nurturing at the top of the funnel and offer more personalized marketing efforts for stronger leads.
This is where the right marketing automation solution can really start to help you. With the right software, you can automate how you score leads, which ads you display to which audience, and even create templates so you can personalize email content for different lead segments.
You can use marketing automation to determine who’s more likely to buy and who’s just browsing. For instance, is someone clicking on testimonials or pricing packages? That might indicate they’re ready for a more serious level of engagement. With the right software, those clicks will be assigned greater weight, and the software does the hard work of determining who’s serious about buying.
Stage three: Decision
It’s showtime: your nurtured lead is ready to choose the product that’s right for them. Here are some great tactics for ensuring they’ll pick you over the competition:
- Once your lead is in the decision stage, they should have received more than five "touches": seeing your logo, reading one of your social media posts, receiving an email – all the things that will make your lead think of you and establish your credibility. Marketing automation will nurture your lead by sending touches when appropriate, based on lead behaviour.
- You already have a good idea who your customers will be. Your marketing automation has narrowed it down. Use that information to craft a more personalized email: rather than having a one-template "blast," there should be specific information that will entice your future buyer.
- At the decision stage, share testimonials and positive reviews from customers. Social proof is one of the strongest ways to reach your leads, so use your credibility to your advantage.
- Follow-up. Once you’ve connected with a prospective buyer in the decision stage, send them a message shortly afterwards to thank them for their consideration and establish one more connection.
By using lead nurturing, you’re providing a framework for converting your lead into a customer. With marketing automation, software will do much of the heavy lifting that you’ll need to ensure conversion.
If you want to see more of what lead nurturing has to offer your business, Demodia is here for you. We’re always ready to share our expertise to help you see growth and success. Contact us and ask us anything to get the conversation started!
