What is Lead Nurturing?
Lead nurturing is the process of tracking your leads, gradually moving them toward a tighter focus on your product until they are qualified to be passed along to your sales team for conversion.
Importance of Lead Nurturing In today’s B2B world
A Lead Nurturing program plays a critical role in the B2B marketing world. According to Forrester Research B2B, a buyer’s journey could be anywhere in the range of 65-90% complete before they contact the vendor to continue with the sale.
Most recently, prospect behavior has added a layer of complication to the strategic approaches always used to nurture leads, especially with the leads coming through multiple business channels.
Updated technology and easily available mobile access have made buyers smarter. Buyers do their homework before purchasing any product. This has created new challenges for marketing. The ideal solution to deal with this challenge is lead nurturing.
This week’s post is all about how lead nurturing goes beyond typical email blasts and is now a key requirement of effective marketing.
See how Lead Nurturing helps
Nowadays, buyers have become more powerful. Changes in market conditions have begun favoring the buyer. Prospects have become smarter and are doing much of their research online, long before contacting the sales rep. To deal with today’s buyers, lead nurturing and marketing automation have become crucial tools for marketers. First, marketers need to understand the importance of lead nurturing. They can use nurturing not only for educating their customers but also for distinguishing their services from the competition. To deal with a 65%-90% ratio of buyer’s journey, lead nurturing is a must.
Limitations to email marketing
Marketers generally resort to email marketing to nurture leads. Email-based lead nurturing is beneficial only if the prospects have shared their email addresses, and it doesn’t go to a spam box. If the right message is not conveyed at the right time, then the chances of losing a sale increase. This is where lead nurturing beyond emails becomes essential.
Nurturing that goes beyond email inbox
Lead nurturing is not just about writing emails and sending them: it’s about how you are keeping your audience engaged. It focuses on understanding the prospect’s persona and offering a relevant solution to the buyer’s pain points.
Moving beyond the inbox involves keeping in touch with the prospects at different stages. This includes using multiple channels to reach out to your prospects throughout their buying journey.
Ensure you use the right tools
Robust multi-channel lead nurturing program uses a variety of tools and touchpoints that add value to your nurturing emails to attract prospects.
Examples include:
•Well targeted social media posts
•Dynamic web content
•Sales Enablement tools
•Personalized text messages
Publish the right content for your buyer’s journey
To increase sales opportunities, sending the right message at the right time is a must. Gaining an in-depth understanding of your target buyer persona, getting a 360-degree view of the leads, and mapping out their journey becomes vital in sending the right message.
To conclude, expanding lead nurturing beyond the inbox requires the right mix of effective content and technology all at the right time..