3 Unconventional Tips for Building a Successful Lead Nurturing Campaign
The ultimate dream is to always find leads that are the very end of the buyer’s cycle—ready with a credit card or checkbook in hand. History, however, says otherwise. With only an average of 3% percent of all website visitors converting, the number of potential customers ready to buy dwindles down to somewhere to about half of the 3%. I know what you might be thinking; “what about the whopping 97%?” Well, content marketing initiatives that focus on nurturing leads to push them along the buyers journey, should be geared towards trying to capture the 97%.
By, now, I’m pretty sure you are familiar with reading many posts on using content marketing to nurture your leads. So rather than focusing on how to build a content marketing campaign in this post, I’ll go on to talk about 3 tips and tricks that I’ve discovered while experimenting with different lead nurturing strategies.
Forget Following The Buyers Journey Matrix.
The buyer’s journey matrix suggests that your buyer will move perfectly along the sales cycle. They will start of at the awareness stage, then move on to the comparison stage then to the decision stage. Due to this, you create content nurturing campaigns that follow this trajectory.
For instance, if I was trying to sell marketing software that helps marketers get more leads, I would start, with creating content and sending content to a targeted audience that focuses on providing let’s say an eBook on capturing more leads, then I would move on to dive into this problem further by introducing my product as the solution, compare it to other products, and then finally go in for the kill by asking the potential customer for their information. While this approach might work for some customers, it doesn’t work for all. Some customers start from the awareness stage, by pass all the steps in between, and get to the decision stage; others start in the middle and work their way to the end. So perhaps, the idea of using the buyer’s journey matrix to create a perfectly structured lead nurturing campaign might be flawed. In order to discover the path that works for your target audience, experiment with lead nurturing programs that start at different stages based on the lead’s activity. For example, a lead that downloaded material aimed towards people at the awareness stage but viewed your pricing page should have a different lead nurturing path compared to someone who just downloaded the same content but did not visit your pricing page.
Start from The Decision Stage And Work Your Way Backwards:
Buyers today a more educated than you think. As I mentioned earlier instead of waiting for the buyer to make it all the way to the decision stage which might be 5 emails down the line, why not start with what you want them to actually do first? Opponents of this type of approach argue that you might increase your unsubscribes if you don’t slowly nurture the lead who is not ready to be sold to yet. While that might be true, there is a way around it.
The key to making this strategy successful is to provide downloadable content geared towards the decision stage rather than content that that asks someone to buy something. For instance, you could send your buyers guide eBook, as the first email. Potential customers who are towards the latter end of the funnel may download the eBook and you can start engaging in a sales conversation with them right away. On the other hand, leads that do not find a buyers guide eBook interesting because they are not at that stage, might not find the content too pushy so they may not unsubscribe. Again this technique might not work for every industry and every business, but it is a great way to sell to leads today rather than 3 weeks down the line.
Use Your Blogs:
Blogs are great content initiatives for getting people to visit your website, they are also very great resources for lead nurturing campaigns. Instead of sending your leads a newsletter with accumulated blog titles, you could send emails that show that the blog titles were selected for them. For example, you could send an email that reads, “Hey Joe, I saw that you were looking at our products but didn’t fill out a form asking for more information, I thought you might enjoy this blog post on How to Choose Between Our Products.” Every time I’ve used this approach, I’ve gotten about twice the amount of clicks compared to if I just send a newsletter.
Lead nurturing strategies are never perfect, they involve the need to constantly define and refine messages based of user responses. Don’t be afraid to experiment to find your niche.
