8 Lead Nurturing Strategies for Marketing Teams
What Are Lead Nurturing Strategies?
The lead nurturing process is the sales tactics and marketing strategies companies use to establish a genuine connection with leads throughout the sales funnel.
A lead nurturing strategy strives to achieve this with interesting and insightful information that amplifies brand awareness and solidifies trust.
Companies often use marketing automation platforms and research tools to nurture leads successfully, such as Owler Pro. With these, you can learn more about your potential customers and build stronger relationships as leads progress through the buyer’s journey.
A genuinely effective lead nurturing strategy will positively influence your marketing campaign outcomes, customer loyalty, retention, and conversion rates. Despite these benefits, however, most marketers don’t nurture their leads.
To help you avoid this — and build a stronger connection with your potential customers — here are Owler's top strategies for lead nurturing:
8 Effective Lead Nurturing Strategies to Try Out
When it comes to nurturing leads, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach. To form meaningful relationships and motivate customers to buy, you need a diverse and well-planned strategy to inspire your leads.
Here are several strategies you and your team should consider:
Content Marketing
Customers are looking for brands that directly speak to their experiences without being overwhelmed by ads or emails.
This is where content marketing comes in.
According to a 2020 survey, buyers will engage with 3 to 5 pieces of content before speaking with a salesperson.
Content marketing offers a diverse, cost-effective way of personalizing the buyer’s journey. The kind of content you produce will depend on your potential customer’s interests, goals, and preferences.
Whatever you choose to produce, remember to focus on relevant content that elevates, educates, and engages your customer’s experiences with your brand. Use SEO best practices to increase your outreach on search engines and distribute your content where your customers are most likely to see it.
Some types of content you can produce and optimize to nurture leads include:
Blogs and articles
Webinars
Case studies
Whitepapers
Landing pages
Infographics
Newsletters
Email Marketing
Email marketing campaigns benefit the nurturing process by supplying anyone on your email list with the information they need to achieve their goals — with the help of your products or services, of course.
Not only does this help build trust, but it also re-engages people who are already interested in your business!
Personalize your email campaign with content that uniquely speaks to your customers’ wants and needs for the most effective results. This will increase your odds of conversion.
After a potential customer subscribes to your email list, you can nurture the lead by triggering emails according to a set of actions your leads take.
For example, you can send out an email whenever a potential or quality lead downloads a brochure, clicks a priority link, abandons their cart, or engages with your website for an extended period.
By combining personalization with marketing emails, you can send lukewarm leads the right message at the right time and secure a sale faster.
Solutions for Pain Points
The most effective lead nurturing strategy calls attention to a potential customer’s pain points and provides concrete information on how to solve them.
Start by building a buyer persona.
A buyer persona pinpoints the challenges of your target audience. In doing so, you can identify high-value prospects and nurture the best leads in your audience.
The solutions you present should provide clear CTAs and distinguish your business from competitors. Additionally, you can use the reception of your nurturing efforts and conversion rates to learn more about your customer’s needs and refine future tactics to address them better.
Personal Touchpoints
Building relationships through lead nurturing is all about delivering a unique experience. In doing so, you ensure that the prospect is sales-ready by the end of the sales funnel.
It’s important to remember that every buyer’s journey is different. Some will need more information than others. A prospect will go through an average of seven touchpoints before becoming a customer.
This means potential customers need a certain amount of information before they’re ready to convert.
A lead nurturing strategy supplies this information by preemptively answering any questions or concerns a prospect may have.
How this information should be delivered will depend on what your audience is most receptive to. If your emails have a high click-through rate, then that’s the way to go. Articles and blogs about your business can also be a readily-available source of information your leads can rely on.
Lead Nurturing Campaigns
Lead nurturing campaigns are a great way to connect with leads early and maintain a strong customer relationship ahead of repurchases.
Launching a campaign can track your nurturing efforts more accurately and assess which tactics bring in sales. This will help you refine your future approaches and campaigns.
Some examples of lead nurturing campaigns include:
Welcome campaigns: Appreciative, concise, and actionable welcome emails will guide leads through onboarding. This will be especially helpful if your products or services require some kind of activation process or tutorial.
Educational campaigns: This type of campaign is the perfect way to inform leads who aren’t sales-ready but still interested. Ideally, an educational campaign will shorten the number of touchpoints a lead must go through and answer everything they need to know about your business before reaching a purchasing decision.
Engagement campaigns: You can drive interaction by releasing information on special events or opportunities concerning your products or services, such as a webinar or masterclass.
Retargeting campaigns: This type of campaign aims to re-engage leads who are dead in the water in your sales cycle or abandoned a shopping cart after visiting your website. A casual reminder can reignite interest in your brand.
Lead Scoring
Lead scoring evaluates the potential of leads by attaching value to their interest in your business.
The generated lead score will help you prioritize leads who’ve shown the greatest interest and allow you to forward them to your sales team for immediate follow-ups. Lead scores will also help you identify qualified leads who are a good fit for your business but still require further nurturing.
You can measure a lead’s interests through metrics, such as their email engagement rates, their user activity on your website, and what content they’ve downloaded, filled out, shared, or clicked on that indicates where they might be in the buying cycle.
To support your lead nurturing strategy and streamline lead scoring, use a marketing automation platform to track and harness these metrics.
Marketing Automation
Key to modern-day sales processes, marketing automation, allows businesses to streamline their marketing efforts. Lead nurturing is included in these processes.
With a marketing automation platform, you can optimize your strategy with an automated workflow and ensure your messages go out to warm and lukewarm leads at the best time.
Marketing automation platforms also offer in-depth analytics and metrics. Without one, you’ll have a more challenging time harnessing and tracking data on your potential customers’ activities and the success of your lead nurturing efforts.
Sales and Marketing Strategy Alignment
Lead nurturing isn’t solely a sales or marketing effort.
Sales and marketing teams should work together to produce the conversion and customer retention rates you want to see in nurtured leads.
Narrow down the points along the buyer’s journey where you should transfer a lead to another team and vice versa. As previously mentioned, a prospect with a high lead score should be taken over by the sales team. Enrollment and conversion events are other triggers to consider.
Regardless of how you structure your lead nurturing strategy, both teams should contribute to the process.
Boost Your Lead Nurturing Strategies with Owler Max
Buyers don’t just want to be sold to — they want to be heard.
Since not all leads in your sales funnel are sales-ready, it’s essential to know what can be done to meet their needs, create a genuine connection, and improve the chances of converting.
By keeping up with the prospects you care about on Owler, you and your business can discover new opportunities to nurture leads.
Thanks to an extensive network of business professionals and in-depth data sourced from the very businesses on your radar, you’ll be able to reach out at the right time, armed with the correct information.
Sign up today to learn more and improve your lead nurturing strategy with Owler Pro.