subject: Building Lead Nurturing Program Is Not A Cakewalk [print this page] For years, tech marketers have been unequivocally focused only on generating new leads to fill the sales pipeline. But unfortunately it has been observed that only a varied percentage of newly captured leads were ready to engage with sales. This has led to much frustration and anxiety between marketing and sales. So what happened to the rest of the leads that were not ready to make purchase yet? Honestly, an email or two every so often does not make for an effective lead nurturing campaign that you can expect to yield satisfying results. However it seems now that things are changing in tech marketing mechanism. According to current marketing investments surveys, tech marketers have now become more open to the idea of escalating their budget allotment for lead nurturing considerably, as much as by 11%.
Developing lead nurturing program
So let us now discuss how we can build an efficient lead nurturing program that will deliver the desired results. Lead nurturing is a process of providing relevant information to and engaging with the prospects at each stage of their buying cycle in order to convert them into customers. It is an important part of sales and marketing process and demands significant attention from the respective departments. Of course it is important that the marketing and sales team jointly establish the definition of the sales ready lead before jumping on the bandwagon.
The next step is to define the objective of the program which is to answer all the prospects queries and move them down the qualification path so that they are fairly satisfied with your offerings and are ready to enter the sales process. Once the objective is defined tech marketers should focus on developing a lead nurturing plan that will be consequential to the buyers. It need not be a cumbersome task. What is required is a simple approach.
Lead nurturing strategy
The key to a successful campaign is to focus on the prospect and make relevant and meaningful communication with the prospect on regular basis. This is the time when you should segment your prospect database on the basis of industry, geography, demography, etc, and focus on messaging pertinent content to them. The more forceful and relevant to their issues and pain points your content is, the more likely they find will find the message interesting and worthy enough to take notice, and respond.
It is essential to maintain consistency in your messaging. Making changes in messages will only cause confusion, diminish message reinforcement, and portray your company in a poor light. As you create multiple collaterals like white papers, case studies, leaflets, brochures and webinars, make sure that the message is consistent.
Pay a lot of attention to the quality of content. Content development should be approached with the audiences perspective in mind. It should be educational though not preachy in nature and must advocate thought leadership. The idea is to get greater responses from the prospects and engage in meaningful conversations with them, the primary objective of lead nurturing.
Finally in order to build an effective lead nurturing process you need to clearly comprehend the buyers cycle. This is crucial and is the basis of any good lead management campaign. Since you would be required to develop the lead nurturing campaign content in line with customers buying cycle it is important that you use the best sources of information about your prospects buying cycle. Leverage the help of sales and inside sales team members who have led prospects through the educational process in the past to build the lead nurturing process.
Conclusion
Designing an efficient lead nurturing campaign is not as daunting as it may appear. All you need to do is to give careful thought and consideration to the elements mentioned above.
