Lead Nurturing Combines with Online Marketing to Improve Results

by Celena Watson Technical writer

B2B markets put a lot of effort into generating leads, but lead nurturing is crucial to converting those leads into sales. It can be effectively used as an online marketing tool that can be leveraged to introduce your leads to the value that your product or service provides and support them towards deciding to buy from you. It’s all about having regular and significant dialog with the prospects and setting up an automated system using advanced personalization tools on web sites to deliver targeted content to your leads in order to bring them one step closer towards becoming your customer. You website should have offerings targeted to people who are the various stages of their buying cycle- people who are at their initial stage of product or service research (Top of Funnel), people who are considering which company to buy from (Middle of Funnel) and people who are ready to buy from you (Bottom of funnel).

Statistics shows that lead nurturing done through automated campaign produces a 20% increase in sales opportunities. Carefully designed and executed campaigns can greatly boost Internet marketing success.

Implement efficient lead nurturing programs

It is essential to understand your audience and segment your messages as neatly as possible to address the needs and queries of the target audience. Know where the prospects are in their buying cycle, understand what their job title is and try to comprehend the goals they might have and the challenges they might be facing. The message should offer something of value and instantly draw the attention of your target segment. It makes no sense to go all out with an aggressive sales pitch that does nothing but annoy the prospects.

Set practical, assessable and important goals for your lead nurturing campaigns

Once you have defined your audience and the meaningful content you want to offer them you need to concentrate on the action you should take next to help your business. Ideally, you would want you audience to avail an offer that denotes the next stage of their buying cycle. This could include attending a Webinar, downloading an eBook or just checking out some specific purported targeted content on your web site. Whatever might be t he case, you should be able to assess that response and have a clearly defined, quantifiable sense of what success looks like before you start. Typically email campaigns form an important part of lead nurturing programs. Generally you need to send out 2 or 3 sequenced emails over a period of time. Now the duration of that period varies according to the length of your sales cycle. The sale cycle refers to the time taken to move the prospect from being Top of Funnel lead to being your customer.

Conclusion

It is important to monitor and track the progress of the lead nurturing campaigns and optimize the programs for future success. Alter the segmentation of your target audience, modify your offer and adjust your timeline to enhance your results. According to marker researches, efficient lead nurturing campaigns can generate more Bottom of Funnel leads at much lower costs than their competitors.