Lead generation has become considerably more popular over the last few years. What people soon realize is that many leads that have converted on their website may not be ready to purchase. If sales gets involved, the lead tunes the company out and the company is back at square one. So, many companies are creating a journey for the warm leads to be nurtured into customers and this technique has also became increasingly popular. While lead nurturing is quite successful, taking a lead through the buyer’s journey is a task that may need to be handled with a little more finesse than you may have originally thought. Here are 4 tips for nurturing warm leads.
First on the list is understanding why lead nurturing is worth the effort. According to Alumnify CEO, AJ Agrawal, “Nurtured leads are far more valuable than market leads” (@ajagrawal24| Source). Think about your buying process. If you are like most people, you like to seek out your own information and make conclusions about what you want before you buy. Typically, buyers will go online to find information and they often buy from the company that provided that information. Trust and authority are built through this process of nurturing. Don’t be too nurturing, but it is kind of like a child grows to trust its parents.
Getting buy in from warm leads via your content requires that your value proposition is selling your company … subtly. According to Springboard Enterprises, “Content is key to the success of lead generation, lead nurturing or customer marketing, and it should clearly support your value proposition” (@SpringboardEnt | Source). If your content is written in such a way that it sells the value of what you offer and how you offer it, then they have all but said yes to your sales pitch. On the other hand, you will have to convince them.
While I am all about letting your content sell your product or service, that doesn’t mean that you should be very promotional within the content. According to @Engagio CEO, Jon Miller, “nothing is…more likely to cause an opt-out than content that is too promotional, especially for the early stage buyers…” (@JonMiller | Source). Once again, think about your buying process. Does promotion warm you up or make you cold? In reality, using content to directly promote is more like selling. However, “nurturing doesn’t mean selling, especially at the beginning of the buyer journey when people aren’t convinced of the value you can provide,” says Hana Abaza, VP of Marketing @Uberflip (@HanaAbaza | Source).
Finally, it is important to understand that leads come into your funnel and pipeline at different stages of the buyer’s journey. Therefore it is important to address all stages of the buyer’s journey and use your content to eliminate as many objections as possible before sales gets involved. Addressing all stages well is very important, because according to @MKTGInsiders CEO, Michael Brenner, “[a]bout 70 percent of the buyer’s journey happens before a potential customer ever contacts sales” (@BrennerMichael | Source). Once again, this really goes back to the value proposition, its delivery, and how these factors will directly affect your online success.
Using content to move buyers down the funnel and forwarding them on to sales is the new marketing process. Going forward into 2016, the ability to do this tactfully will be one important factor that separates successful and unsuccessful marketers. A company’s relevance will be increasingly tied up in how well they craft the pathway of their buyer’s journey, because this is the golden road to sales in the foreseeable future of marketing.
