Written material is profitable. When used properly, it sells more quickly. Too many offers are made to your leads these days to sell them stuff they never would have thought they needed. But each year, attention spans are getting shorter. Because of this, nurturing your leads is essential to keeping them in the sales funnel. We'll look at the many approaches of having meaningful conversations with leads by employing a content marketing plan that resonates with them in this post.
Lead Nurturing: What is it?
The practice of providing purchasers with relevant material that aligns with their wants is known as lead nurturing.
Why Is Lead Nurturing Necessary?
There isn't a secret formula for turning leads into paying clients. The fact that lead nurturing necessitates collaboration across your inside sales, sales, content marketing, and sales enablement departments makes it a complicated process as well.
Let's take a brief look at these numbers:
- 96% of online users aren't ready to buy right now, but they could be if you provide them content in return for their contact information. Marketo is the source.
- The largest issue, according to 61% of marketers, is generating visitors and leads. HubSpot is the source.
- Merely 29% of brands provide after-sale support to their current clientele. Demand Gen. is the source.
- Before interacting with a sales representative, 47% of purchasers interacted with three to five pieces of material. Demand Gen. is the source.
- The deal value of deals that resulted from cultivated leads was 47% greater than that of deals that did not. Annuitas is the source.
- Let's examine how to engage your leads with the appropriate content now that we've established the importance of lead nurturing for conversion.
Seven Content-Based Strategies To Develop Leads
Create A Lead Profile
Because you don't need a ton of leads to convert, profiling your leads might help you focus on a more specific target market. A small quantity of high-quality content leads with a greater conversion probability is what you need. Do you recall the 80/20 rule? 80% of your sales come from 20% of your clientele. It implies that the caliber of your leads matters more than their number.
Please find out about their wants, problems, and issues, then create material that speaks to those things. Send a survey to your leads, for instance, with probing questions such as, "What is your biggest challenge?" Alternatively "What are you looking to fix?" The drawback of this strategy is that the response rate will only be between 5 and 10%, even with an incentive. However, that will give you an idea of what content marketing strategy collateral is ideal for them.
Asking a customer, though, won't always be successful. Rather, search social networks for hints about potential customers' behavior. Find out what they enjoy, tweet, or comment on on Twitter or LinkedIn.
Consider that you work as a sales representative for a provider of HR software. Your business provides organizational data and personnel information management support to human resource (HR) managers. HR managers may use your solution to use data to assign positions based on employee competencies. Assume that Michael, an HR manager at a medium-sized business, is one of your potential clients.
Customize The Content
The content is not customized for each customer. It is created by digital marketers for a wide range of target audience personas with comparable wants, goals, and specifications. However, conversion rates increase when you tailor it to your intended audience. Not everyone will have the time, for instance, to read a white paper.
However, you will draw in more qualified leads if you condense the information in a white paper into an infographic or a short film.Picture yourself in front of an exquisite food buffet, starving. You can binge on almost any kind of food. Which food will you decide to eat?
We refer to this as personalized content marketing success. It involves incorporating various content types into personalized microsites to meet the demands of buyers. Allow your customers to select what they want. During a sales pitch, for instance, offering a range of it-for instance, podcasts, research papers, photos, and videos-allows you to address every consumer concern and boosts the response rate.
Choose The Appropriate Timing
Recognize that not every person is prepared to become a convert at first. Your potential customers are in varying phases of the purchasing process. While some may be in the process of investigating, others may be about to make a decision.
Customers thus require material that is appropriate for the stage of their buying process. Customers who are in the Awareness stage, for instance, want content marketing materials that enlighten them on the difficulties they confront. They're still not prepared to spend. For this level, thought leadership articles, viewpoints, e-books, etc. are perfect.
On the other hand, prospects who are in the Consideration stage are analyzing the advantages and disadvantages of the different goods or services that are offered. These consumers want information that will enable them to weigh their alternatives. Therefore, at this point, product comparison sheets, buyer guides, and brochures are appropriate.
You run the danger of losing leads when you publish material that does not live up to their expectations. Prospect engagement and action may rise when media is presented to them in a way that fits their buyer's journey.
Read More: Maximize Your ROI: 6 Steps to a Powerful Content Marketing Strategy
Establish A Bond
Is it crucial to establish trust with prospects before interacting with them? Through a range of channels, including blogs, landing pages, social media posts, events, and websites, content marketers may establish trust with their target audience. Every one of these touchpoints enables clients to understand a company's values and how it may meet their demands. When sales representatives pressure customers without showing them personal attention, problems occur.
However, before trying to sell, they need to establish a rapport with purchasers. Developing a relationship with a buyer might be as easy as delivering material that aligns with their KRAs (Key Responsibility Areas) and showing empathy for them.
A business owner process manager who wants to cut down on duplication will want information that outlines the possible time and cost savings that may be realized via business goals process optimization. Thus, they connect with blogs, video marketing, and e-books that emphasize these subjects. They facilitate the target audience's improved performance.
A Multiplatform Public Relations Campaign
Sales representatives must interact with leads outside of emails in order to convert them more quickly. Every third day, sales representatives remind potential customers about their offer using drip marketing. However, a drip marketing team is not the only way to engage customers.
Keep in mind that your leads are people, not email addresses. Approach them in a way that addresses their issue without being obtrusive. To establish a sincere relationship, interact with your customers on many social channels and platforms.
After sending a work email, follow up with potential customers on social media platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter. Leaving comments on their postings and liking them encourages sales representatives to keep in touch with customers via various content marketing platforms.
Sales representatives shouldn't, however, appear robotic or boring while interacting with leads on social media channels. It only widens the gap between the buyer and seller rather than closing it.
Distribute Self-Evident Information
Picture yourself delivering an engaging presentation to a prospective customer testimonial. You really don't have long to make an impression-about eight seconds. Excellent material doesn't need any help from us to speak for itself.
It is ineffective to nurture leads with sales material only for the sake of doing so. Prospects and leads are searching for proof of how your solution addresses actual issues in the world. Share information that people may easily connect to, such as figures and facts. Use keywords that are hard figures that purchasers want to know, such as money saved, time saved, increase in sales/conversions, etc.
Buyers can be easily persuaded, for instance, by providing brief case studies that summarize the original issue, your proposed remedy, and any ensuing advantages. Customers' trust may be increased by using videos for features, product launches, and current customer endorsements. Written language lacks the visual attraction that images have.
Evaluate Content Performance
How can you tell whether your lead-generating content creation process buyers are responding favorably to your type of content marketing tool? Only if you measure will it be easy. An essential first step is to gauge its effectiveness by counting the views, downloads, reshares, and time spent. You can see how much closer your leads are to making a purchase from each measure.
Obtain Useful Information That Advances Sales
When a customer base focuses most of his attention on page #7 of a 10-page sales presentation or PDF document, you may engage in contextual dialogue with him. For audio and video content, frame-level analytics let you find out what degree of interest your audience is showing.
Conclusion
Lead nurturing is an ongoing activity that enhances a buyer-seller connection with each new interaction and forms of content marketing. It takes a long time to execute and reach perfection; it is not a phenomenon that happens in a day or a week. Collaborate with departments within your content marketing company to find, produce, and nurture leads using relevant content marketing campaigns all throughout the buyer's journey.
But cultivating leads doesn't have to be overly difficult. It requires a cautious approach that helps potential customer journey rather than coming across as pushy. In the end, you get what you want-that is, more money in the bank.
