Imagine you’re visiting a destination you always loved. Now think about how you arrived at that decision? That’s the power of Lead Nurturing!
You may have searched for the destination, viewed stunning photographs, and read first-hand accounts from travelers.
Relevant information circulated through appropriate channels piqued your curiosity. You kept consuming more content, ending up visiting the place. As a result, the seller nurtured your lead and converted you through effective content marketing.
Why should you nurture leads?
Lead nurturing refers to building relationships with your prospects by providing valuable information and support.
With this process, you can engage prospects to increase purchase probability, shorten the sales cycle, build trust, and increase ROI.
Content marketing for lead nurturing
Content marketing is one of the most popular aspects of lead nurturing. So popular that 66% of marketers expect higher content marketing budgets in 2022 over 2021.
When done effectively, it shows prospects you tend to their needs, creating a positive reception of your brand and improving “buyer enablement.”
How to deploy content marketing for nurturing leads?
Before starting with content marketing for lead nurturing, you need to have four essentials.
- First come the tools for content creation, scheduling, analytics, and email automation.
- Next, well-defined buyer personas direct your content creation efforts towards targeted information.
- It’s also vital to balance creating and curating content from your leads.
- Lastly, remember that your efforts’ end goal is to drive sales. As much as 60% of marketers use sales figures to measure their content marketing success.
Once you have these in place, start creating valuable content and deploy it to nurture leads using these strategies:
1. Identify the buying process path
Find out how a lead moves down the sales funnel and the relevant scenarios for different segments of your target audience. Talk to your marketing and sales teams for insights, seek information from existing customer surveys, and prepare a database of likely routes. Some details to look out for are – demographics, role in the purchase decision, buyer pain points, and frequent customer questions.
2. Share relevant content
Once you know how a lead has entered the funnel, ensure every touchpoint gets relevant information and value.
- If the lead is in the awareness stage, focus on delivering educational content where their problem is the priority, not your product.
- As they reach evaluation, maintain a fine balance between promotional and educational content.
- In the final purchase stage, persuade them with appealing content such as a free trial or consultation. Pro-tip: Create content that builds trust. For example, if data security is a worry for the customer, write a blog that outlines how you maintain data security.
3. Map content to buyer personas
Prospects will prioritize you if your content feels like it was written just for them.
For instance, a marketing student and an experienced marketer download the same report published by you. But the student may only need some statistics, whereas the marketer may want fresh, well-researched insights. Depending on your buyer persona, you can share relevant content with the right audience at the right time.
4. Take advantage of marketing automation:
Sharing value is excellent, but data-driven insights help reinforce your solution’s impact.
Use marketing automation to deliver quality lead scores, behavior analytics, prospect’s sales funnel stage, and more. It can also deliver customized content through emails, newsletters, social media, articles, and guides.
Wrapping it up
For successful lead nurturing, businesses need to reinforce connections with leads at every sales funnel stage. With a well-thought content marketing strategy, you can establish your authority and value to prospects and motivate them to convert.
Similarly, at Market Boats, we can help you set up content distribution systems to reach qualitative leads and increase conversations. Get in touch.
