A quick start guide to lead nurturing success

What’s the quickest, cheapest way to implement lead nurturing? 

I get that question frequently when I talk to marketers about lead nurturing.

What is Lead Nurturing?

Lead nurturing as consistent and meaningful communication with viable potential customers regardless of their timing to buy. Nurturing is developing relationships with potential buyers at each stage of the sales process and helps progress every step of the buyer’s journey.

Lead nurturing is pretty easy to understand but hard to execute when you have little time or budget.

The following is my barest-bones lead nurturing strategy to help you get started fast.

Lead nurturing checklist 

When you’re designing a lead nurturing program, ask yourself the following:

• Exactly who do I want to nurture?
• What problems does the prospect need to overcome each day?
• What is the prospect’s top priority right now?
• Do I know what the prospect worries about?
• What messaging do I want to communicate?
• What is the best way to deliver the message?
• What action do I want the prospect to take?
• Will I need to demonstrate my product or service?
• How often should I strive to be in contact?
• Which tools require direct sales involvement?

Step #1. Set up your nurturing database

Include all of the people you could potentially sell to, such as people you’ve met at trade shows, who have spoken with your sales team, and who have responded to your website.

Step #2. Review your database

What do you know about the people in it? What industry are they in? What are their titles? Where did you get their names?

3 Tips to Reengage Stalled Marketing Qualified Leads Fast

Step #3. Segment your database into personas

Not everyone is the same. Ensure you understand what each persona looks like, their needs and goals, what information they’re looking for, and how they prefer to receive their information.

Step #4. Decide what information would be most relevant to them 

Begin by asking your sales team, “What questions do our customers ask most often? What do they care about? What issues are they facing?”

Find content – articles, blogs, white papers, and the like – that addresses these issues. Pass this content by your sales team. Ask them whether their customers would value it.  As much as you can, repurpose content. For instance, white papers can be transformed into articles and articles to blog posts.

5 Ways to Immediately Boost Account Based Marketing (ABM)

Lead nurturing channels and timing

Lead nurturing is not a single marketing campaign. Instead, it’s better to think of it as a conversation.

Lead nurturing takes on the form of a series of steps and communication tactics with defined objectives and strategies tailored to developing and building a relationship with the potential customer – out of which will come conversations that convert to sales.

Step #5. Email prospects relevant content 

These should be simple emails that are written as if you are speaking to them directly. Be genuinely helpful.

Provide your sales team with email templates to follow up and engage in their own conversations.

Content Marketing Tips and Ideas for Lead Nurturing

The channels you’ll use, and the frequency of touches will depend on the product or service being sold and the prospect’s buying cycle.

A general rule is to bring salespeople into the process about six months before the targeted purchase time.

A simple lead nurturing path might look like this for your personas:

The mix and selection of lead nurturing channels and content should be based on what is being sold and how the specific market and prospect have been shown to prefer acquiring information.

Step #6. Follow up with insides sales as the human touch

Make a personal connection and follow up emails with phone calls to directly gauge prospects’ interest. Never rely on email alone.

Lead nurturing can be executed without expensive marketing automation tools; there are plenty of simple, low-cost platforms to start with.

You can create databases in Excel and run mail merges from Microsoft Outlook.

Marketing Automation: Lessons from 4 case studies

Lead Nurturing: You can’t automate trust

4 Ways you can humanize marketing to get better results now

Summary

I hope this is helpful as you implement lead nurturing for your organization. I’d love to hear your tips on what you found helpful to get started with lead nurturing? What else have you learned to implement lead-nurturing programs in your company?

Must read lead nurturing articles

The following will help you get started with developing your lead nurturing quickly.

4 Step Do Lead Nurturing That Helps More Customers Buy

How to use lead nurturing to revive leads and ROI

Lead Nurturing: 5 Useful Tactics to Get More Opportunities

Lead nurturing via email series and content marketing

4-step lead generation analysis to optimize sales conversion