Lead nurturing is an essential ingredient of inbound marketing. It is key to nurturing relationships with your customers and successfully converting them into loyal customers.
Encouraging a user to share their data and become a lead is a crucial first step. However, there's still a long way to go before they achieve final conversion. A good lead nurturing helps optimize and automate this process, ensuring your contacts receive the right messages at the right time.
What is lead nurturing?
Lead nurturing literally means “feeding contacts.” It is the process of preparing and supporting prospects throughout the buying cycle, from the first contact with your brand until they become loyal customers .
To guide potential customers along this path, we offer them a range of content, actions, and interactions. This content varies from general articles to personalized incentives based on their interests. In short, we nurture the customer relationship to keep them connected with relevant offers at all times.
Lead nurturing has a long history in marketing. As soon as a company can collect information directly from users and create a database , it can engage in lead nurturing. Some traditional methods included phone calls, postal mail, or sending magazines and catalogs to people's homes. There were also numerous other ways to establish and qualify contacts.
However, it is in recent years that digital marketing has enabled the significant development of lead nurturing. You now have the ability to collect information directly from users and create a more scalable digital database, containing thousands, even millions, of people. As a result, manual work, contact by contact, is no longer possible. Now, marketing automation .
The advantages of lead nurturing
Below are the main advantages 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 data you have on users, because it converts "raw" information into concrete actions to take;
- By automating the process, lead nurturing saves resources , both time and energy. By not having to perform many manual follow-up tasks, the team is freer to focus on higher value-added activities, such as 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 is happening at any given time.
- It allows for a very high level of segmentation and personalization , with a consequent increase in efficiency.
Requirements for a lead nurturing strategy
To successfully implement a lead nurturing strategy , several elements are needed: a good online presence, effective means of communicating with customers, and a system to qualify 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 well-developed online presence and elements such as:
- An optimized website with a pleasant user experience . These are two fundamental factors that define a website's success. 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.
- Social media presence . For brands that directly target consumers, it's generally advisable to be present on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. B2B brands should focus particularly on their LinkedIn page and take advantage of all the interaction opportunities it offers: company pages, personal profiles, groups, articles, etc.
Effective communication with clients
Having a presence on the web and social media is essential for attracting users and generating leads . However, it's important that brand channels aren't designed to be one-way, but that you actively communicate with your audience through these channels:
- Email campaigns. Email marketing remains a cornerstone of lead nurturing campaigns. It allows you to connect directly and personally with prospects. The key is to offer them relevant information without any hidden agenda other than building a relationship, for example, by sending them engaging content.
- High-quality content . Content strategy is another cornerstone of inbound marketing. It serves to provide value to users and nurture the relationship at every stage of the process.
- Valuable sales material. If you strive to create quality content from the early stages of the process, there's no point in neglecting brochures and catalogues, 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. Therefore, you shouldn't treat them all the same way. Typically, you should score prospects using a lead qualification , in which various elements are taken into account to assign a score to the lead:
- The level of brand awareness and interaction, determined by the actions taken. For example, whether you visited a page, left a comment on social media, or clicked on ads.
- How closely does the user match your ideal customer profile ? You need to clearly define the brand's personal buyer. This will help you determine which 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 must clearly identify and segment prospects based on this criterion.
Lead nurturing is a fundamental element of inbound marketing strategy. This process increases the sales team's productivity by establishing communication only with users closest to making a purchase.
In addition, it also increases the productivity of the marketing team by creating a process that automatically operates user segments.
And of course, it influences an increase in sales by investing the sales team's time in prospects who are already familiar with the company and the benefits of its products or services.
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