Lead nurturing is an essential ingredient of inbound marketing. It is the key to nurturing the relationship with your customers and to successfully converting them and building loyalty to the brand.
Getting a user to leave their data with you and become a lead is a very important first step. However, from there to the final conversion, you still have to go a long way. lead nurturing strategy helps optimize and automate this channel, ensuring your contacts receive the messages they need at the right time.
What is lead nurturing?
Lead nurturing literally means “feeding contacts”. It’s the process of grooming and guiding prospects through the buying cycle, from first contact with your brand until they become loyal customers.
In order to move potential customers along this path, they are offered a series of content, actions and interactions. This content ranges from general articles to personalized incentives based on their interests. In short, we take care of the relationship with the customer to put them in contact with relevant offers at any time.
Lead nurturing has a long history in marketing. From the moment a company can collect information directly from users and create a database, it can do lead nurturing. Some traditional methods were telephone calls, postal mail, or mailing magazines and catalogs to your home. There were also many ways to make contacts and qualify them.
However, it is in recent years that digital marketing has enabled a great development of lead nurturing. You now have the ability to collect information directly from users and create a more scalable digital database with thousands or even millions of people. The consequence is that manual work can no longer be done contact by contact. marketing automation tools and technologies .
The advantages of lead nurturing
Below are the main benefits that lead nurturing brings to businesses:
- Improves the ROI of marketing campaigns by achieving more conversions at a lower cost;
- It makes the most of the user data you have because it converts “raw” information into actionable actions;
- By automating the process, lead nurturing saves resources , both time and energy. By not having to do a lot of manual tracking tasks, the team is freer to focus on higher value activities, like creativity and strategy;
- It reduces the risk of rejection and abandonment , because instead of sending mass messages, you contact the right users with the right messages at the right time;
- It allows you to clearly see the entire marketing process and optimize workflows to know what's happening at any given moment.
- It allows a very high level of segmentation and personalization , with the consequent increase in efficiency.
Requirements for a lead nurturing strategy
To successfully implement a lead nurturing strategy , you need to have several elements: a good online presence, effective ways to communicate with customers and a system for qualifying the leads obtained.
Online presence
inbound marketing methodology is based on attracting customers to the brand. Therefore, when they search for you, it is essential that they find a developed online presence and elements such as:
- An optimized website with a pleasant user experience . These are two fundamental factors that define the success of a website. The first and most important is that people can easily navigate the page and find quality information. The second is that the site is optimized to appear when users search for it.
- Presence in social networks . For brands that target consumers directly, it is generally advisable to have a presence on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. B2B brands should focus particularly on their LinkedIn page and take advantage of all the interaction possibilities it offers: company pages, personal profiles, groups, articles, etc.
Effective communication with customers
Being present on the web and social networks is essential to attract users and generate leads . However, it is important that brand channels are not designed in a one-way manner, but that you actively communicate with the audience through these channels:
- Email campaigns. Email marketing remains a pillar of lead nurturing campaigns. Indeed, it allows you to enter into direct and personal contact with prospects. The key is to offer them relevant information without hidden motives other than building a relationship, for example by sending them interesting content.
- Quality content. Content strategy is another of the bases of inbound marketing. It serves to provide value to users and nurture the relationship at each stage of the process.
- Valuable sales material. If you strive to create quality content from the early stages of the process, there is no point in neglecting brochures and catalogs, so make sure they stand out for their quality.
A lead qualification system
One of the fundamental principles of lead nurturing is that not all leads are the same. So you should not treat them the same way. Normally, you should score prospects through a lead qualification , in which different elements will be taken into account to assign a score to the lead:
- The level of knowledge and interaction with the brand, determined from the actions it has carried out. For example, if you visited a page, left a comment on social media, or clicked on ads.
- How well does the user match your ideal customer profile ? You need to clearly define the personal buyer of the brand. This will help you know what type of users to focus on.
- The point in the buying cycle they are at. The interests of a user who has just discovered the brand will be very different from those of another user who is almost ready to buy, which is why we need to clearly identify and segment prospects based on this criterion.
Lead Nurturing is a fundamental element of the Inbound Marketing strategy. Through this process, sales team productivity is increased by establishing communication only with those users closest to the purchase.
Additionally, it also increases the productivity of the marketing team by creating a process that makes user segments work automatically.
And of course, it influences an increase in sales by investing the sales team's time in prospects who already know the company, the benefits of its products or services.
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