Optimize Your Lead Nurturing Strategy

Reposted from original article Optimize Your Lead Nurturing Strategy


Did you know that 79% of marketing qualified leads (MQL’s) never
convert into sales due to a lack of lead nurturing? Given this fact, it
may be time to revise your lead nurturing strategy to optimize
your selling success, especially since companies that excel at lead
nurturing were found to generate 50% more sales (source: Social Media Today).


Relying on just email campaigns to lead nurture is like fishing: cast
the net wide and pray you catch something. But true sales and marketing
professionals understand that successful selling in today’s world is
actually about connecting, nurturing and building a relationship that in
time may yield a sale.


Here’s some proof! – In a survey of more than 5,000 business
customers, it was discovered that of all of the possible factors that
could drive customer loyalty — including brand, product and service
quality, and price-to-value ratio — by far the biggest driver is
something most companies don’t even think about: the sales experience, accounting for 53% of the overall total. So what keeps customers coming back to your brand is a function of how you sell, not what
you sell. More specifically, prospects choose the suppliers who “offer
unique and valuable perspectives on the market” and “educate them on new
issues and outcomes.”





What is Lead Nurturing?


“Lead nurturing” could basically be renamed “relationship building,”
because this is exactly what sellers and marketers are doing. They are
building a trust-based, authentic relationship with potential customers
even if they’re not currently looking to buy a product or service. This
may in time lead to a sale. It could even be said that lead nurturing is
the most crucial part of the buyer’s journey. The primary goal is to
make the company more enticing to the potential client, so when it’s
time to buy, the company remains top-of-mind.


It can be tempting to assume the internet has rendered
relationship-building obsolete. But in fact, the internet has made
relationship-building more vital than ever before. Businesses now have
the potential to reach thousands of prospects with ease, but it is
important to have the right lead nurturing strategy to help them stand out.


Here are some things to keep in mind when creating or revising your
lead nurturing strategy. Always keep in mind that your strategy
objective is to move leads closer to being sales-ready.

Use Multiple Channels to Nurture Leads

• Website – Your website is often where your leads
  became leads and so it makes a great choice to continue the conversation
  through. You can do this by providing personalized content on your
  website’s business blog based on lead’s attributes.
• Retargeting – You can carry on nurturing these leads as they browse the web by using retargeting pixels to display ads to them.
• Direct Mail – The majority of lead nurturing is
  done through email but getting buyers to actually read them is a bit
  hit-and-miss. To get noticed, remember, short and sweet is the name of
  the game. You’ll want to include a short intro where you relate to the
  target persona, and highlight some great content you think they’ll like.
  Highlight a few bullet-points on why the content is useful, include
  links where they can read more, and then close with a CTA.
• Social Selling – It’s not enough
  to just rely on your leads reading direct emails. Leveraging social
  media sites gives sales professionals higher visibility and the
  opportunity to engage directly with their buyers. Respond to tweets,
  messages and comments across various virtual platforms to carry on
  building a relationship with your audience and leads. LinkedIn’s social
  selling index is a handy tool for fine-tuning your social selling
  technique.
• Phone Call – Never underestimate the power of a
  simple phone call. Your sales team can speak directly to leads, offering
  solutions and giving the advice to continue building the relationship
  and trust.

Use Engaging Content to Nurture Leads

Creating valuable and relevant content is not only the most
challenging obstacle to lead nurturing success, it is also the most
effective tactic to use.


If you are honestly focused on helping customers be successful, you
cannot force them through the sales process. Selling with content is
about enabling (and sometimes provoking) potential customers to move
themselves to a close. This requires your sales team to leverage
content, whether it be unique, curated or user-generated content, that
resonates, educates, entertains, and challenges. Your prospects must see
your sales people as trusted advisors.


You can make content engaging by adding a bit of humor, dropping the
formal corporate speech, use real-life anecdotes and don’t take yourself
too seriously. The aim of the game with content is to carry on building
relationships with prospects by telling stories of experiences, telling
them of struggles and how you overcame them and gave advice and tips to
help them.


A successful lead nurturing strategy should include an array of different content types to keep prospects attracted.


Types of Content that Prospects Love to Share:

1. Infographics – remains a loved and powerful way of
   getting across important—sometimes complex—information. Infographics
   are excellent for communicating almost any message, especially when you
   are working with numbers, research and statistics. So it’s no surprise
   that a study by BuzzSumo found that infographics had three times the
   sharing potential than other forms of content.
2. Lists – Online readers love to skim through
   content. Lists allow these readers to quickly and easily scan the
   content from top to bottom and, hence, easily share them with others.
   But don’t forget that lists still need to be detailed and have real
   substance to them. Be insightful and provide real value under each
   subheading. And in the event that readers do stop skimming and actually
   read the entire text, you want to be sure the content meets their
   expectations.
3. Videos – Videos can come in many forms: explainer
   videos, webinars, product reviews, company culture videos and guest
   interviews, etc. Videos simplify the sometimes tiring task of reading
   full articles and absorbing complicated material. Information overload
   and instant connectivity have led to shorter attention spans, as low as
   eight seconds per visit. Videos are a great way for engaging these
   attention-deprived visitors. When done properly, videos communicate a
   message in a succinct and memorable way that can be extremely
   persuasive.
4. Long Form Content – The rise of mobile reading has
   established a misconception that with smaller screen sizes, one must
   write shorter, “snackable” content to satisfy the short attention spans
   of audiences. However, studies by BuzzSumo, and an analysis of the most
   emailed articles from NY Times by the University of Pennsylvania, have
   shown that longer content offers greater shareability. Longer content
   goes into deeper detail on the topic at hand. Depth (not breadth) of
   expertise is directly translated into higher brand authority and trust
   and, therefore, better results.
5. ‘How-to’ Content – Everybody loves free, detailed,
   expert opinions, commentary, insights and methods of solving problems,
   don’t they? When creating ‘how-to’ content remember that the more
   thorough your explanation, the better the engagement.

Regularly Analyze and Optimize

There is always room for improvement which is why you should never
stop testing, analyzing and optimizing your lead nurturing strategy
including using some social selling tools.
Once your strategy is in place, you must continuously review how well
it is working. By studying the numbers and metrics you might discover
one element outperforming the others and have to shift focus on why that
might be. Your strategy should always be changing with your customers.
If not, you’re doing something wrong. Just like face to face sales,
email marketing should be able to pivot to turn leads into customers
with a little information.


Here are few things you should be analyzing:

• The frequency of communication with prospects (follow up within the hour they fill in a form as opposed to the next day).
• The conversion path that leads to higher conversion rates (traffic source and funnel)
• What type of content leads to more conversions (traffic source 1 vs. traffic source 2)
• What method of communication works best in building relationships?
• Which email structure and layout such as subject lines, wording, and image.

So there are some things to think about when creating or revising
your lead nurturing strategy. At the end of the day, always put yourself
in your prospect’s shoes. Would you want a disconnected experience
consisting only of batch emails hitting your inbox, or a
well-coordinated series of touches that take you through a journey based
on your interests? Lead nurturing can seem like a long and tiresome
process, but you can be sure that its benefits far outweigh the effort
and patience in getting there.

As the buyers journey has changed It is important to interact with
the prospect where they are active online whether that is LinkedIn or
elsewhere. If the prospect is not active on social media then no point
trying to engage them there, so sometimes trying the more traditional
methods of communications such as an email or phone call can work
better.


There is so much more to social selling, feel free to contact me regarding training workshops or comment on your own training tips.