Nurturing leads to buy is one of the most important parts of online marketing.
Getting visitors to your website will not improve your bottom line if you cannot close sales. Whether you are a B2B or B2C marketer, lead nurturing can help you close more sales after building trust with your prospects.
You can use a lead nurturing software like HubSpot to send content to your prospects and check their engagement. The engagement levels can help you learn which content works best for the prospects and what you can do to make them take the next step.
Studies show that 96% of your first-time website visitors are not ready to buy yet. So, should you let the visitors leave? No. You can nurture the leads to move them closer to the buying stage. By using different forms of communication and providing a variety of quality content, you can educate your leads and make them want to buy.
Close More Sales By Nurturing Leads
Inside sales reps cannot entirely leave lead nurturing to the marketing team. To clear things up, lead nurturing does not refer to email marketing. Yes, email can be a great avenue for nurturing leads. However, your sales team needs to take an active role in lead maturation.
As a sales rep, every time you are following up on prospects with a call, email or voicemail, you have an opportunity to build trust with them. By demonstrating professionalism, you can nurture the prospects and move them towards the buying stage.
When interacting with leads, you want to keep your human face as well as portray your professional brand. Focus on helping the prospect identify he has a problem that you can solve. If you focus too much on pitching, you are likely to end up with more cold leads.
Showing prospects how their problem can be solved without selling to them helps to build trust. Moreover, your actions can inspire them to send more business your way.
Use Content to Close Leads
Most B2B industries have lengthy sales cycles and require multiple conversations with their targeted buyers before they can buy. The lengthy sales cycle can strain your sales team. However, you can shorten the sales cycle by providing the right piece of content to your prospects.
Lead Nurturing Content
It’s important to understand your target buyer personas to know the type of contents that will resonate well with them. Let’s look deeper at some types of content you can produce for lead nurturing.
i) How-to Videos
How-to videos are great for exposing your brand to your ideal personas. What makes how-to videos work is that they are educative rather than sales-y. People want to know how to do things. If you can provide actionable advice and show prospects how to solve their problems with video, you will win them over.
ii) Content downloads
In-depth content downloads provide more information for advanced users. These are users who are probably using one of your competitor’s solutions but may be looking for a different option.
The users already know the basics of what you offer and are looking for the unique angle that tips your product over their current solution. For these users, long guides and whitepapers are great contents for lead nurturing.
iii) Blogging
Blogging should be part of your content marketing strategy. Not only does blogging help you to reach your current readers, but can also drive new traffic that can join your sales funnel.
Posting educative, informative and entertaining articles about your products, industry and other topics that your target buyers care about helps to improve your clout in the industry. Every content you create should have a goal, for example:
- Invite the lead for a consultation or product demo
- Educate the prospect on how your solution can help them
- Position your business as an authority in your industry
- Get the lead to take action and move to the next step of buying
The content you use for lead nurturing should be aligned with your messaging.
Tracking Lead Nurturing Content
Automating your lead nurturing can free up your sales and marketing teams for other important business activities. You can set up your content to be delivered to your prospects on a pre-determined schedule through your email auto responder or customer relationship management (CRM) system.
The lead nurturing automation software you use should help you see how leads are engaging with your content. For example, it should provide important metrics like number of subscribers that open your messages, how many click on links in the content, how many take a particular action and so on.
Through the metrics, you can further segment the prospects and produce more tailored content and sales mechanisms that will resonate well with them and lead them to buy.
