Lead Nurturing: Definition, Tactics and Benefits

Finding the leads sometimes becomes a daunting task, especially when one has weak lead-nurturing strategies. The inability to find qualified leads seeds the instability between marketing and sales departments and makes it nothing but a culture of blame games.

The severe friction between leads and sales conversion makes it harder for companies to create an enhanced sales cycle. However, with a sound lead nurturing strategy, brands have the power to create long-term relations with potential customers and can also explore future upsell opportunities. 

Studies show that nurtured leads tend to make 47% bigger purchases than leads that aren’t nurtured. 

This blog will give meaningful insights into finding leads that convert in the later stages of the sales funnel and improve overall conversion rates.

What is Lead Nurturing – A Quick Overview

Lead nurturing is the process of convincing prospects to perform specific desired actions at different stages of the buyer journey. A lead nurturing marketing strategy focuses on maintaining a connection until the prospect is ready to make a purchase.

A lead nurturing process usually does two things:

• Convert leads
• And cover different areas of the sales funnel.

Building Blocks of Winning Lead Nurturing Strategy

To create a profitable lead generation cycle, one needs to square up certain things, such as creating buyer personas and identifying sales goals. Understanding and creating content for each stage of the buying journey by creating transparent workflows that navigate prospects toward a sale.

Creating Sales and Marketing Goals

The first stage is setting marketing and sales goals. This stage aims to create a sales cycle that sets the duration of leads getting converted over a certain timeframe.

For instance, most business-to-business (B2B) leads take around 6-8 months to convert. Therefore, brands set multiple checkpoints across various channels and launch numerous lead nurturing campaigns during the duration of conversion. 

Creating a sales cycle ensures that marketers know about the conversion journey of their leads and tells how much time it takes before they buy. One can make a tailored lead-generation process that matches prospects’ preferences and buying behaviors.

Leveraging the Power of Buyer Personas

A buyer persona is an imaginary representation of your target customer. To generate a lead, first find out what they do, what they need, and what currently bugs them. To convert a lead, first, do your homework to understand the pain points of your target customer and how your product or service can add value to their personal or professional life. 

Brands can also set the likelihood of an ideal user’s conversion. With ideal customer profiles, one can use tailored lead-generating approaches to resonate with their needs and interests. For instance, using social media videos and ads for one prospect or using email marketing for another based on their online habits and preferences.

Understanding the Stages of Buyer’s Journey

Before creating content, you need to identify the steps that prospects must take before becoming a customer; hence, this is called the buyer journey. There are three stages of the buyer’s journey: 

• Awareness stage– shows that prospects are aware of their problems. 
• Consideration stage– shows that users are aware of the problems and looking at all the available solutions. 
• Decision stage– the prospects are ready to decide and research different options.

Create Content to Complement Lead Nurturing Efforts 

Once you understand the sales goals, buyer personas, and various stages of the buyer journey. The next step is to create content for different stages of the buyer journey that adds value to your nurturing campaigns. Experiment with content formats and channel marketing strategies such as SMS marketing, email, social media marketing, and paid marketing to improve the different areas of the sales funnel.

Depending on each stage, you can test and experiment with different content materials to see which content moves prospects across the buyer’s journey. The aim is to generate cold leads at the start and then create engaging and relevant content that converts them into warm leads and complements the lead nurturing efforts. 

3 Incredibly Effective Lead Nurturing Tactics

Lead nurturing is a complicated process that usually overwhelms brands to some extent. There are multiple strategies to improve the lead nurturing process. Some lead nurturing services work on segmenting leads, and some work on scoring leads to analyze their likelihood of conversion. 

However, here are three of the most convincing strategies that can help any business striving for leads.

Create Personalized content

When nurturing leads, targeted content is one of the best ways to conquer this space. It’s certain that users will no longer be moved based on generic content. Targeted and personalized content is the only way to catch prospects’ attention, nurture relations with brands and gain desired results.

Brands should use their existing buyer personas and sales cycles to identify which content strategies and formats resonate with their ideal clients. One can create targeted content by understanding the shared characteristics of their target audience that are already labeled in the buyer personas.

Create Presence Across Multiple Channels

In order to create nurturing leads, brands need to adopt a multi-channel approach. Considering the varying interests of each target group, one should activate their presence on every channel where their potential audience can possibly reside. 

A multi-channel lead nurturing approach means showcasing presence at every channel to nurture leads interests. It includes marketing automation, B2B email marketing, paid marketing, SMS marketing, and direct sales. These multi-channel marketing strategies need the utmost concentration and preparation at marketers’ accounts to handle all the operational channels and integrate them together to nurture leads effectively.

Concentrate On Lead Touchpoints

Did you know that nurtured leads have a 23% shorter sales cycle?

Marketers use multiple touchpoints to finally convert customers. Depending on lead quality, marketers have to move them through multiple lead magnets to actually earn them as customers. 

As we know, lead touchpoints are the backbone of converting leads into qualified leads and customers. One needs to create persuasive and engaging lead touchpoints that urge prospects to progress through the buyer’s journey.

What Makes Lead Generation Important?

One of the reasons for using lead generation strategies is their sole dedication to generating leads and customers. Apart from digital marketing campaigns, lead nurture campaigns are focused on generating leads and extracting conversion results instead of aiming for general brand awareness.

Some of the benefits of lead nurturing approaches are:

• It helps businesses understand the target audience. It uncovers each target group’s pain points, needs, and behaviors. It analyzes every action of target customers and works closely to understand their preferences. 
• It focuses on building relations beyond initial sales. It forges brand advocacy by creating meaningful connections with customers and keeping the relationship alive and thriving even after becoming a customer. This personalized brand experience boosts brand loyalty. 
• It helps filter valuable and interested prospects. Not every lead is ready to convert. This is why lead nurturing strategies help marketers engage with leads that possess a higher likelihood of becoming future customers. Hence, it saves brands capital and marketing efforts.

Convert Your Traffic Into Qualified Leads With Market Pro

Lead nurturing is the only strategy to generate qualified leads that help businesses convert into sales. Without the right lead nurturing strategy, companies’ marketing and sales departments are always tangled in confusion and conflicts. With nurtured leads, brands simplify complex sales cycles and boost sales opportunities.

Lead nurturing is the only engine that drives steady sales growth. At Market Pro, we specialize in generating marketing-qualified leads and removing the friction between leads and conversions.