Armed with your marketing automation software and conversations tools, you can develop a strategy for lead nurturing campaigns. These campaigns will help you provide the most relevant content to your leads while staying highly productive. Let’s look at an example of a lead nurturing campaign.
Before building a campaign strategy, figure out which lead nurturing tools you want to use. Lead nurturing campaigns should use automation tools that help you take specific actions, guiding your marketing efforts toward a specific goal.
Once you’ve decided on the tools to execute your lead nurturing campaign, you can move on to officially creating one.
Setting up a lead nurturing campaign is not a science, but there are four steps you’ll want to follow:
- Setting goals
- Selecting personas
- Creating content
- Identifying the timeline
Let’s consider each of the steps and define what needs done to provide the most value to your leads.
Setting Goals
First, set a goal. By identifying the goal for your lead nurturing campaign, you can answer the question, what actions are my leads taking that I need to target?
Selecting Personas
After defining your goals, you need to figure out who the leads are that will be experiencing the campaign. This is the persona selection step of creating a lead nurturing campaign.
A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer. Buyer personas are key in helping you create the most relevant content for your campaigns and understanding who will be consuming it. Your persona should be representative of the lead you’re ideally trying to reach.
Creating Content
The idea behind lead nurturing is to build relationships with leads during their journey, by offering information and education that will make them more ready to make a final decision.
Instead of pitching your product or service, you should first offer value-adds. Examples of value-adds include worksheets, videos, webinars, ebooks and blog posts. These should all be educational in nature and explain important aspects of the topic at hand.
Identifying the Timeline
Once you have your content outlined, it’s time to identify the timeline in which you are sending the content. This step is crucial as timeliness is one of the most beneficial aspects of a lead nurturing campaign.
Just as your business has a typical sales cycle, so should your lead nurturing campaign. Typically, it’s a good idea to send at least two to three emails to your prospects in a campaign.
Patience is a virtue. It’s important to remember not to push a lead into the sale. Let it take its natural course. Don’t be afraid to experiment with different content and optimal times to send communications to see what resonates. These are the four simple steps to creating a successful lead nurturing campaign. But, before you start developing your campaign, there’s one more question you need to answer: How and when do you nurture prospects versus existing clients?
You want to focus on nurturing prospects after they take a specific action. This includes things like:
- after their first conversion,
- after they’ve downloaded a content offer,
- after they’ve subscribed to a blog,
- after they request a trial or demo, or
- if they haven’t interacted in a while and you want to re-engage them.
When you nurture clients, you want to focus on two separate segments:
- New customers
- Existing customers
You can nurture a new client during on-boarding, with product or service education, new product and featured promotions, support resources, or recommending pro-services.
For existing clients, you might want to ask for referrals, recommendations, re-engagement, feedback initiatives, and renewals.
These are just some ways to nurture your prospects and clients. There are plenty more for you to explore with our Lead Nurturing Planning Guide. Download today and start using lead nurturing to help grow your book of business.
