So you want to do lead nurturing? Well, I am here to tell you most lead nurturing campaigns fail. So if you don’t want your lead nurturing campaign to fail, read on.

What is lead nurturing?

According to Marketo, Lead nurturing is the process of engaging with your audience at various stages of the buyer’s journey so that when they are ready to buy, you will be top of mind.

Whilst lead nurturing has many benefits, it’s presented by some marketing automation platforms as an email sending exercise, eh no it’s not we will present later what a good lead nurturing process looks like.

Common Lead Nurturing Problems to avoid

Inability to attribute or measure ROI:

Many organisations use first-touch attribution to measure the effectiveness of lead nurturing, a better attribution option will be a last-touch and or linear attribution model to visualise the various touchpoints that influenced a sale.

Inadequate planning:

Oftentimes lead nurturing fails because organisations don’t plan out the process well enough. The common approach is: we are going to send some emails and that should help our customers buy from us, that isn’t going to happen as we will see later.

Lack of communication:

Organisations execute lead nurturing programs without aligning their teams on what the outcome of the lead nurturing campaign will be.

For example, a marketing team goes ahead to implement a lead nurturing campaign without informing the sales team of the expected outcome.

It goes without saying that: communicating and involving your sales team in your lead nurturing design will help prepare the sales team and more importantly, the team can make resources available for the upcoming campaign.

So now you know the problems to avoid when it comes to lead nurturing, now let’s look at how to design a great lead nurturing process.

Personas

To ensure your lead nurturing strategy is effective, you want to determine who the target persona is.

Map out your persona, why they buy, who is in the buying unit etc.

Customer journey

Next, you want to map out your customer’s buying journey.

Let’s look at two examples of a typical buyer’s journey:

B2B example:

Awareness: An SME/SMB software buyer (looking to purchase software worth say £2,200 per year) establishes that they need software to perform certain tasks.

Consideration: The buyer asks his or her network for recommendations.

The buyer searches on Google for x software and visits several websites to review the various options available.

Decision:

The buyer then signs up for a trial based on price, integrations etc uses the software for abit.

She visits some review sites to check out the company further.

Once the customer is happy, she signs up.

Example in B2C:

Awareness

A buyer is looking to buy a car, they have a trigger: the birth of a new child. A friend comments they have a terrible car, they receive a pay rise ….. you get the idea.

Then, the buyer looks online for say: a low-cost electric SUV for a family.

Consideration Stage: They start watching several videos about the best low-cost SUV’s for families.

They start researching more about charging capacity, range of electric cars and now they narrow their selection to a number of cars.

They book a test drive with local dealerships for a shortlist of cars they are interested in, during the test drive they check to make sure the car they like has must-haves they need.

Decision Stage: 

Now, the buyer selects the car they want, they may do some more research here e.g: on the reputation of the company they are buying from etc.

If we are to go by the definition of lead nurturing, then we should be engaging the audience throughout the buyer’s journey so we can present a lead nurturing strategy that provides answers to our buyer at various stages of the journey. 

Lead Nurturing Strategy:

Once the customer journey has been established, we now want to map out how and with what we are going to engage the customer at every stage of the buyer’s journey (Awareness, Consideration, Decision stages), so that when they are ready to buy, they remember our brand.

We take the Awareness stage of our buyer’s journey.

-We ask: what are we going to do?

-We ask; which channels are we going to use?

For example, you might decide: you want to retarget users who have visited your website before with a series of consideration stage offers using Facebook & a retargeting platform such as Adroll.

Or you might decide to send a series of consideration stage offers to customers who previously signed up for your product but did not purchase via email.

Once we are clear on what we will do to engage our customers at various stages of the buyer’s journey, the next step is to segment our data to ensure the right people receive the right messaging.

Marketing automation 

Once you have mapped out how you are going to engage your prospects or customers throughout their buying journey, the next stage is to use marketing automation tools such as Hubspot, Pardot or Marketo to deliver engagement at the appropriate time.

Lead Scoring

With lead scoring, you can configure your marketing automation software to prioritise certain attributes important to your business, for example, you might prefer to treat leads from certain industries and job titles differently from others.

Lead nurturing campaign

Hopefully, your marketing automation tool allows you to create a campaign for your lead nurturing program, because it will allow easy tracking and reporting later.

If your marketing automation software does not allow this, then it might be time to look for a new one.

Lead nurturing reporting

Before launching your lead nurturing campaign, determine how you will measure success. 

Let’s assume you are going to measure success by the number of sales generated from the campaign, next, you want to find out how the lead nurturing campaign influenced the sale.

Therefore, you want to select your attribution model: linear or last touch for example.

If you are thinking of implementing a lead nurturing program, please do get in touch and we will be able to help you.

We build lead nurturing programs for various clients: large and small.