What Is Lead Nurturing?

What Is Leading Nurturing

Marketers live by a set principle – people don’t want to be sold, they want to be heard. Lead nurturing is this philosophy in action. Consumer desires are met at every aspect of a planned marketing funnel. Customers result in trusting a business as they feel that their needs are accurately understood and can rely on said business to deliver a promising solution.

In practice, segmenting the compound problem your target audience is facing into simplified pieces helps to develop a lead nurturing strategy. Identify the comprehensive issue that the majority of an audience can identify with, then define subsets of said problem. These subsets should be advertised at each step in your campaign. 

For instance, as a marketing agency we regularly hear that a client’s website is not generating enough leads. As part of our campaign strategy to attract these clients, we have broken down this common issue into smaller segments that weigh towards the larger problem at play. Our subset issues address SEO (or lack thereof), UI/UX of a site, content marketing strategy, etc. These problems serve as the basis for our lead nurturing campaign. We write our ads and lead nurturing emails targeted towards individuals who are facing tribulation within a certain subset issue. An ad may be drafted to identify with an audience struggling with SEO, then another drafted targeted to an audience struggling with content marketing, etc. As more ads and emails are produced, audiences start to overlap. The individual who thought they only struggled with SEO may realize that their content marketing is not up to speed. Reasoning is, all of our subset issues relate directly to the more general “not enough leads” challenge. Potential clients who continuously see the Renewal Digital brand as the agency that recognizes and solves their marketing challenges are the ones that ultimately pursue work with us.

Of course our exact lead nurturing campaign can not be implemented in your own business. Instead, use your existing customer journey as a starting point to identify the general problem that patrons of your business are facing. Break this general issue down, then advertise valid and quality solutions to multiple subset problems that your business excels in. Soon enough, you’ll likely find that you’re closing on more customers and increasing the amount of leads who are entering existing funnels.

The Customer Journey

Also known as the buyer’s journey, a customer journey takes a marketing funnel and applies real world scenarios to it. Marketing funnels may differ from business to business, but most share the following five stages: awareness, consideration, conversion, loyalty, and advocacy. Matching a customer journey to such a funnel depends entirely on the individual business.

To understand the concept further, we’ll use a simple pet shop as an example. Our hypothetical pet shop may plan their customer journey as follows:

Awareness:

A customer sees the pet store’s brick and mortar location when shopping in a plaza.

Consideration:

The customer realizes they need to pick up dog food. They could either buy a bag of food at the supermarket across the street or shop with our hypothetical pet store.

Conversion:

The customer believes that the pet store is going to sell a higher quality product then the supermarket, and chooses to do business with them as a result.

Loyalty:

The customer’s dog absolutely loves the new food. The customer will likely return to buy the same food again as a result of their pet’s positive reaction.

Advocacy:

To the benefit of the pet store, our customer advertises the benefits of the product the pet store sells to their friends and family. As a result, the business reaches new customers and continues to grow.

Although oversimplified for the sake of explaining the concept, this customer journey would help guide the pet store’s lead nurturing campaign. An ad or email may be sent to a customer identified in the loyalty phase with a coupon offering in exchange for referring a friend. Since they are a loyal consumer, they’ll likely gather a referral for the business. In this manner, any phase of the customer journey can be targeted during a lead nurturing campaign.

Lead Nurturing Emails

Email is largely the most common form of lead nurturing. Although social media campaigns, blog posts, and other content forms can be used to nurture leads, email has proven as the most tried and true platform. Covered previously, emails should target an regarding a particular problem they’re likely facing and meet their current position within the customer journey. There is little sense in sending the same email ad for a product or service to two different individuals who have differing relationships with your business. An individual in the advocacy phase of a funnel is going to respond dramatically differently than one in the awareness phase.

How To Target Emails To Audiences

Targeting specific audiences has been mentioned many times thus far. To identify and then reach these potential customers, it is advisable to create an ultra-specific customer avatar that accurately reflects the audience of your business (or an audience your business wants to work with.) With a customer avatar in place, challenges, pain points, goals, values, and sources of information can be easily identified to help depict how lead nurturing emails should be positioned to best connect with that specific audience.

If your business does not have an avatar currently, digital marketing guru Neil Patel has a great worksheet to get you started.

Lead Nurturing Email Tools

To our luck, there are dozens of tools out there to assist in email lead nurturing. In fact, you may be currently using some of them already. Email marketing platforms such as MailChimp, ActiveCampaign, SendInBlue, etc. function great for emails that are targeted towards the earlier phases of the customer journey. As the funnel, and consequently customer journey narrows, a customer relationship management tool (CRM) works wonders. Businesses have likely heard of Salesforce and HubSpot among the many other great tools out there. These platforms can almost entirely automate the process for mailing campaigns. Everything from a follow up email after a customer checks out their online shopping cart to more general emails regarding product or service sales can be handled within these platforms. Email sequences can be created in both CRMs and email marketing platforms to continuously build brand awareness towards targeted audiences. 

In regard to lead nurturing tools, if your business is already using email marketing software and a CRM you may not need to switch to one of the big name pieces of software listed. Try to expand from your existing platform using tools such as Zapier to add any additional integrations that may be needed.

Found this article helpful? Feel free to comment and share. Looking for additional information? Reach out directly, we would be excited to continue guiding you towards an effective lead nurturing campaign.