Use These 5 Steps To Plan for Better Lead Nurturing

Modern Marketers know that not every prospect is ready to buy now. In fact, according to SiriusDecisions, even the 20% of leads that sales reps follow up on, 70% are not qualified. But it's a mistake to ignore those leads. It turns out that 80% of unqualified prospects today will go on to buy from someone within the next 24 months.

Lead nurturing is a way to help keep your brand front and center when that purchase happens. Marketing automation will also help you learn more about each prospect, so you can qualify them as a real potential customer.

1. Understand Your Buyer

Prospects go through stages. You need to understand those stages and know what content best applies to each. Interview your customers-as well as those that did not buy from you-to define your ideal customer profile and develop buyer personas. What are your customer pain points? What purchase process do they follow? Why should they be interested in your product? Define what messages are most appropriate at each stage of the buying cycle and who is responsible for delivering each communication. Good alignment between marketing and sales will keep branding, voice, messaging, and experience consistent.

2. Pinpoint What Motivates Your Buyers

Analyze your past marketing campaigns and determine how they contributed to revenue. Look at the percentage of responses to campaigns and determine how many leads moved through all stages, and the messages and content offered at each stage.

3. Whiteboard the Ideal User Experience

Come up with a lead nurturing structure that best reflects your buying process, and then look to see where it might be difficult to put into practice. Consider personalizing the experience based on what you know about the prospective buyer. Then modify the flow of communication based on that person's behavior and engagement with your content. Start out with the final goal in mind and create a blueprint. Develop a structure that makes the most sense for your business and try to anticipate any roadblocks to implementing and make revisions. Once your plan is locked down, document it so that you can share it and so you'll remember why you made certain decisions.

4. Plan Your Lead Nurturing Process

Determine the campaign goal, message flow, content offers, communication channels (for example, perhaps email works better than the phone in one stage), and overall cadence based on previous interactions. All of this planning helps define the timing in your automated program. Be sure to think through all possible scenarios. If the objective is to send six emails and make three phone calls over eight weeks, what happens if you don't get the intended response? What happens once someone expires from a nurture program? How do you keep that prospect engaged, and who owns the relationship?

5. Automate Communications

An automated welcome campaign is a great place to get started. Set up automated communications to greet those who enter your database and start delivering educational information. What are the three most important things you want them to know? And what more do you want to know about them?

This is only the beginning to get you started in lead nurturing. Download the Lead Nurturing Guide for Modern Marketers to ensure your success.