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Tips For Lead Nurturing

 

How nice would it be if every lead that entered your system was ready to buy? Ready to be converted into a customer and, hopefully one day, an evangelist. Unfortunately, some leads need more time to make a decision and aren’t ready to commit day one or even after a longer period of time. 

That’s why it’s important to tailor relevant content to them and to speak to them with their specific desires in mind. So how can that be done? Two words: Lead Nurturing.

In order to effectively target these leads in a lead nurturing campaign, you need to understand who they are, where they are in the buying process and what content you should provide for them.

Identify Your Leads Through Buyer Personas

Knowing who your leads are is essential in tailoring your communication to them. Buyer personas help you to strategically categorize your target audience. 

Buyer personas are semi-fictional representations of who your target customers are. Personas should include information on their demographics, like what their job title is, their age, education, where they’re located, as well as what their goals, challenges and needs are. Once you’ve determined this, you’ll gain a better understanding of how you need to shape your messaging. 

Where Are They in the Buyer’s Journey?

Mapping out your personas is a great strategy to learn what goals they’re trying to achieve and understand why they think the way that they do. Now it’s time to focus on your buyer’s journey, where they fit into it and make sure you have content that also aligns with it.

Awareness

The awareness stage is the first step in the buyer’s journey. This is when a potential customer is just starting to realize that they have a need for a specific product or service. At this stage of their journey, they haven’t done a lot of research yet, so they’re looking for answers and more information on what can solve their problem. 

Since this is the beginning of their decision making process, it’s important to keep in mind what kind of content this person is looking for. They’re searching for answers, data and resources that’ll help them feel more informed. They’re going to look at blogs with related search terms, social media, quick 101 videos and any easily digestible content. 

Consideration

Your persona has moved out of the awareness stage. They’ve gathered their research and evaluated what service or product they need. At this point, they’re considering what’s out there that would work for them. The awareness stage was more broad and determining what solution would work best for them. Now, they want to compare their options.

In the consideration stage, content offers like comparison guides, free samples, expert guides and case studies are very effective. You want this persona to choose your service or product as a legitimate option and further as the best choice, so you want to provide them as much valuable content as possible.

Decision

Yay, your persona hasn’t given up! This stage is pretty self-explanatory. They’re getting ready to make a decision, so how can you make yourself stand out? Remember, this journey is focused more on the person than it is about you or your business. Think about what you would need to know to make a decision that you’d be happy with. 

Have offers like a free trial, live demo or discounted pricing and coupons. You don’t want to leave anything on the table that could have been really important for them to make that decision.

Keep in mind that, depending on your type of business, the buyer’s journey looks different for everyone, and that’s why knowing your personas is key.

Content Helps With Lead Nurturing

You will never regret having an arsenal of valuable content that can be used throughout all the stages of the buyer’s journey. Once you’ve identified your personas and the process of how they make a decision to purchase, you can better create content that targets each stage more effectively. 

When you have that content, you can strategically use it in various places. Blog posts don’t have to just live on your website. You can re-share those posts on your social media, through email marketing and paid advertising campaigns. Consider what keywords your personas are constantly searching for and write social posts centered around them. Always keep your persona in mind first; that should always be your main priority. 

Leverage that Content 

As mentioned, you don’t have to use content once and then never see it again. Really good content is meant to be shared in multiple ways. Knowing your personas and buyer’s journey, you can set up automated workflows in tools like HubSpot that can be built out once and turned on for use over and over again.

For example, you have a group of leads that were once in the consideration stage of the buyer’s journey, but they decided not to make a decision and haven’t made any changes in a long time. You could set up a workflow that would trigger emails to be sent at specific times. The first email could include a teaser to a blog post that would interest them. A few weeks later, you can send them more information on how you compare to competitors and include a testimonial promoting your product or service. Reengaging with these leads is extremely important, and you want them to remember who you are and why they evaluated you in the first place.

You also could monitor these leads by implementing lead scoring. Maybe they’re not ready to be poked now, but with lead scoring, you can set up criteria or actions that leads have to meet or do in order to hit a score. Once they reach a certain score, you could trigger actions to be executed from there. This is a great way to categorize leads and also helps align sales and marketing to know when leads can be handed off between teams.

Let’s Nurture Some Leads Together

We just threw a lot at you, so how can we help? Contact us today and we’ll show you the ways we develop strategic marketing campaigns and how we can be your go-to solution for all your digital marketing needs.

Lauren Lippert
About the Author
Lauren is Vendilli Digital Group's Account Manager. Outside of work, there’s a good chance you’ll find her listening to Taylor Swift regardless of what she’s doing.
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