You are certainly already familiar with some Inbound Marketing techniques and know how much they can boost your sales and strengthen your brand’s authority. One of them is lead nurturing!
Leads are those people who are interested in the content you are offering to the point of providing data such as their name, email and telephone number, for example.
But what does it mean to nurture a lead? What are the benefits of this process? And how can it be implemented in practice?
I’ll show you this and much more below!
Free spreadsheet to calculate Marketing and sales goals, showing the number of leads for each stage of the funnel.
What is lead nurturing?
Lead nurturing is the process of building and maintaining a relationship with a potential customer (lead) in order to move them to the next stage of the sales funnel.
But how do you do this? By providing relevant information from valuable content that educates you, helps you make better decisions, builds trust and ultimately leads to conversion.
It’s like watering a plant: you give it the care and attention it needs to grow and flourish!
Now, let’s better understand how to guide each contact in your base through the sales funnel:
Sales funnel and nurturing
The sales funnel is a model generally separated into 4 stages, which simulates the entire purchasing journey of a lead:
- Strangers (visitors, followers, etc.);
- Contacts (leads);
- Opportunities (qualified leads);
- Customers.
In other words: the funnel is like the road that guides these potential customers from their first contact with your brand until the moment they become customers:
- Learning and discovery;
- Problem recognition;
- Consideration of the solution;
- Intention or decision to purchase .
What about lead nurturing? It acts as fuel to keep leads flowing through each stage of the process.
Therefore, there are Marketing actions to be implemented in each one, from attraction to final conversion. See in detail:
- Top of the funnel (awareness): This is the time to apply engaging content strategies, such as blog posts, videos and social media posts. Here, the focus should be on establishing an initial connection;
- Middle of the funnel (recognition and consideration): it is necessary to offer more detailed and specific content, such as rich materials (e-books, spreadsheets, infographics, etc.) and emails, not only to generate leads, but also to start nurturing each one of them, encouraging a closer and deeper relationship;
- Bottom of the funnel (purchase): as a more direct incentive for leads to make the final decision, the objective should be to offer exactly what they need or want. Here, use all the information you have collected: the channel through which the stranger became a lead, their content consumption behavior and, most importantly, their interests and preferences to personalize your offer!
Now that we understand how nutrition fits into Digital Marketing, how about we explore its importance and benefits in more depth?
The importance of lead nurturing
So far, you’ve probably already understood that it’s no wonder that lead nurturing is considered an important part of successful sales strategies!
After all, the information captured from a lead is not only important when closing a sale, but also throughout the entire process that lead goes through until they become a customer.
And since you can help this process along through nutrition, I can say that it is essential for:
- Ensure that the lead passes through the stages of the sales funnel ;
- Qualify the lead assertively;
- Generate value;
- Increase engagement;
- Get more sales opportunities;
- Enhance results.
To simplify, think of nurturing as the tracks of a train: it is essential to move leads through the sales funnel, smoothly, to their destination.
If the steps are not well established, leads may get lost along the way or even give up before reaching the final station — conversion.
So, lead nurturing helps build a connection between your brand and potential customers, building trust and mutual interest, and when each lead is finally ready to make a purchase, this connection is what will lead them to choose your brand over so many other options!
And we cannot forget that lead nurturing is an important part of the Inbound Marketing strategy.
It aligns perfectly with the concept of attracting, engaging and converting customers organically. In other words, it is a customer-centric approach that seeks to generate value in each interaction.
And with such importance, it also brings incredible advantages to your company!
Benefits of lead nurturing
Take a look at the main benefits:
- Better lead qualification: by nurturing with personalized content, you help them better understand their needs and desires, in addition to overcoming key objections, which makes them more qualified leads for conversion;
- Increased conversion rates: with more qualified and engaged leads, it is natural that your conversion will also increase. After all, when well-nurtured, they make better purchasing decisions;
- Reduced sales cycle: nurturing helps speed up the sales process and reduces the time leads spend in the funnel, leading them to conversion more quickly;
- Strengthening customer relationships: By offering interesting content over time, you build a relationship of trust with your customers, which can lead to repeat and referral sales.
Now that you know the benefits, are you ready to implement lead nurturing into your Digital Marketing strategy?
Let’s go step by step!
Lead nurturing step by step
1. Content production
Content production is where you showcase all your knowledge and expertise, offering relevant information to your audience at each stage of the sales funnel.
It’s important to remember that each stage of the funnel (top, middle, and bottom) requires a different type of content.
At the top of the funnel, your focus is on educating and raising awareness. In the middle of the funnel, you’re looking to engage and convert. And at the bottom of the funnel, it’s time to convince and close the sale.
In other words: adapting your content to each of these stages will ensure that your leads receive the right message, at the right time!
2. Segmentation and lead generation
Just as important as the previous item is what I’m going to tell you now: you need to have lead data. After all, it’s impossible to maintain contact and build a relationship with someone you don’t know who they are, right?
Therefore, for lead nurturing to happen, you will need the information provided by them, such as contact details, company, position, preferences or other data collected.
Once you have this information, it’s time to nurture it. But how do you know which content is really relevant for this?
A good idea is to identify what information you obtained and how it was obtained, since it was made available due to an interest, whether by downloading a rich material or subscribing to your newsletter through the call to action in an article, for example.
This data is already, in a way, an indication of how you can group into specific segments.
Here, it is also important to identify your personas, understand their needs, preferences and behaviors, and gather your leads based on these characteristics.
By segmenting your leads, you can offer even more targeted content and personalize your sales approach. This increases your chances of engagement and conversion!
3. Marketing Automation
With so many leads to follow up on, it’s impossible to do everything manually. That’s where automation tools come in!
From automated emails, scheduled social media campaigns, to automated interactions on your website, you can stay in constant, personalized contact with your leads without having to be in front of your computer all the time.
There are also several tool options available on the market, from the simplest to the most advanced. Find the one that best suits your company’s needs and budget, and put it to work for you!
Here at Enjoy Minder, we use RD Station Marketing a lot, which has lead tracking features (to closely monitor the behavior of each lead) and lead scoring (to assign qualification points to leads based on previously defined criteria).
In fact, these criteria can be:
- Activities on the site;
- Interactions on social networks;
- Email engagement;
- Position;
- Demographic data;
- Purchase history, etc.
4. Constant monitoring
Last but not least, comes monitoring. After all, how can you know if your lead nurturing strategies are working if you’re not closely monitoring your results?!
Focus on monitoring key metrics like email open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates.
Additionally, always pay attention to the behavior of your leads and make the necessary changes to your strategies when you identify any type of drop in interest.
And, from there, observe which are the best and worst results to improve your actions.
This is possible by observing a series of indicators, such as the best times to send emails, the offers with the highest user engagement, subjects with the highest opening rate, and so on.
The important thing is to remain consistent in monitoring and observing best practices, so that you can replicate them clearly!
Go with the flow!
If you’ve made it this far, you’ve seen how lead nurturing is an important part of any digital marketing strategy . It integrates into the sales funnel, providing the guidance and support needed to turn leads into customers.
I hope I was able to clarify all your doubts and inspire you to implement it in your company!
And to boost your sales strategy with the support of experts, count on all of Enjoy Minder’s expertise . Contact us right now!
