Why Lead Nurturing is Important
Companies spend a lot of time and resources generating leads for sales.
Amazingly, research shows nearly 80% of the new leads companies generates never receive a follow-up contact. This is a sad use of resources, especially when you consider that most leads require 7 to 12 touches before prospects convert to buyers.
Lead nurturing is a system using a company’s content (or content curation) to gently move prospects through the sales process until they are ready to make the buying decision.
Lead nurturing works best when companies use systems to evaluate and to nurture the sales leads.
Not all leads are created equal.
If a prospective is ready, willing and able to buy your service today, by all means move directly into sales mode.
Few prospects are ready to immediately purchase your service, but they may be ready in the future. Keeping your company “top of mind” with prospective clients is the role of lead nurturing.
You should publish and distribute great, useful content to your prospect universe. You want prospects to consider you when they need your service. Your content enables you to establish a relationship with prospects.
By consistently delivering valuable information to prospective clients, you are likely to get that request for proposal when their current provider lets them down or they have a special project need.
With the tools available today, you can automate much of process with simple or more comprehensive tools.
Successful Lead Nurturing System Requires Valuable Content
Your lead nurturing content must deliver valuable content to the prospect. Content for lead nurturing should not be self-serving. Valuable content will deliver information that is:
- useful, provides information that helps prospects solve problems
- relevant, educates prospects on aspects of the problem they face
- timely, delivers information pertinent to the prospects’ buying stage
Tools for Lead Nurturing
You can use a simple or comprehensive set of tools to deliver you content for lead nurturing.
If you have a meager budget, you can nurture leads by:
- using your LinkedIn network,
- publishing a useful, monthly and newsletter or
- providing regular and valuable blog posts
If your budget or time permits, you can also deploy a more comprehensive drip campaign that strategically moves prospects through the stages of a sales cycle. In a drip campaign, you send out a series of messages intended to help the prospect move toward a purchase.
Whatever system you use for content marketing, you must measure results. Content development can take a lot of time. You want to watch which content message help move your clients through your sales funnel.