What is a Lead Nurturing Campaign 101: Top Tactics, Tools, and Best Practices
Do you want to sell more products and services and improve brand awareness at a lower cost? You need to focus on lead nurturing, a powerful sales and marketing strategy.
Here, you’ll learn more about what is a lead nurturing campaign and how it can make profitable customers out of prospects.
What is Lead Nurturing?
Nurturing leads is a process that allows you to build relationships throughout the sales funnel.
It’s all about engaging and educating your audience, providing value, and creating awareness. In essence, your nurturing efforts should get the customer to think of you as the brand top of mind over the others!
What is a Lead Nurturing Campaign?
Lead nurturing campaigns include email or marketing messages sent to prospects in a specific timeframe.
You can nurture leads easily through marketing automation. However, you can also do one drip campaign manually or through partial automation.
7 Lead Nurturing Campaign Tools, Tactics, and Best Practices
Study your Target Audience
Studying your customers should be the first step of the nurturing process. This information can help you identify ideal prospects and determine a good way to contact them.
By knowing what your customer needs, you can guide them better through the buying process.
To accomplish this lead nurturing strategy, you need to create a new buyer persona template. This way, you craft a comprehensive customer description to help your marketing team.
Outline the Buyer’s Journey
Apart from knowing the customer, you also need to familiarize yourself with the new buyer’s journey. This is the path they take whenever they transact with your business.
Lead nurturing can be made more effective by mapping every stage, which goes from Awareness > Engagement > Evaluation > Purchase > Post-Purchase.
In essence, mapping gives important information — specifically how customers think, ask, and do as they interact with your business.
With this content, you can find sales-ready leads.
Create a Database of Customers
Knowing your audience is essential, which is why you should use a customer relationship management (CRM) system before you get started.
Not only will this assist you in gathering information, but it can also aid you in tracking activities and brand interactions.
With CRM, you can gather lead nurturing info, such as:
- How the customer joined your campaign
- The pages visited
- Form of sales communication received from the brand
- Form of communication that leads to engagement with the campaigns
- How often they engage with the business
Do Lead Scoring
Lead scoring is the act of qualifying each lead according to interest. You can use these numbers to know which prospects are more likely to buy.
Make sure to score leads based on the following:
- Demographics. Are your leads aligned with buyers’ characteristics personally and professionally?
- Budget. Can your leads afford your products and services?
- Interest. Are your prospects interested in your brand?
- Buying Stage. What is the stage of the client in the buyer’s journey?
Create Relevant Content According to Each Stage of the Buying Process
Now that you have gathered all the essential information, you are ready to make a lead nurturing strategy. And when you do so, it should address each stage of the buying process.
Guided by the customer’s journey map, your content marketing campaigns should focus on the following:
Top of Funnel
This pertains to the stages of awareness and discovery.
To nurture prospects in this stage, your campaign should be geared towards engaging and informative content. That means creating posts that answer questions and solve problems.
Great examples of top of funnel content include blogs, infographics, videos, and social media campaigns.
Middle of Funnel
Clients in the middle of the funnel are evaluating and considering your products.
As such, you need to tell them more about your offers through webinars, white papers, e-books, datasheets, buying guides, or new marketing studies.
Bottom of Funnel
Buyers at the bottom of the funnel are more than ready to buy your product.
To capture these leads, lead them to free trial pages, sales pages, coupons, demos, testimonials, and FAQs.
Launch Automated Lead Nurturing Campaigns
Whether you plan on doing content or email marketing, a marketing automation software can help you do so with relative ease.
With this software, you can deliver content according to the prospect’s score, activity, and position in the funnel. So whenever a successful lead clicks a link or fills out a form, this triggers the program to send related content through email.
With an automated marketing campaign, you have the choice to send a one-time email. You can also continue nurturing lead potential through a drip series of emails.
Continually Engage Your Prospects
Engaging your audience is useful for your sales team, especially if they are working hard on lead nurturing drip campaigns.
When you share social media posts, publish high-quality articles, or send interesting emails, you nurture clients back to your brand.
Knowing what is a lead nurturing campaign and how to do it is a great way to serve your customers better and give more value that translates to revenue.