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What is Lead Nurturing? Complete Guide
Lead nurturing is a process where you develop relationships between buyers and every stage of a sales funnel as well as every step of the buying process. This guides the company to prioritize marketing and communication to those who are in need of the company’s services/products and to offer them the information they need in the step they are receptive to.
- The majority of all companies miss 95% of their leads (source: Robertson Coaching International).
- On average, 50% of leads are not ready to buy (source: Marketo).
- About 80% of new leads never lead to sales (source: MarketingSherpa).
- Companies that succeed with lead nurturing generate 50% more sales with a 33% lower cost (source: Marketo).
- Nurtured leads make 47% more purchases than non-nurtured leads (The Annuitas Group).
It is a smart technology to keep future buyers engaged with your brand.
How do you score lead scoring?
Every company needs to develop its own strategy for scoring leads because each company has a unique buying model, unique target group etc.
4 Categories for Lead Scoring:
1. Lead Fit (within your target audience)
The first segment determines how well the lead matches your target audience and typical customer.
Examples of information and data you can use for this are, for example, demographics (men or women), geographical location, age, previous purchases and much much more.
2. Lead Interest (showing interest in you)
The next step in lead scoring is to track their behavior online to determine how interested they are with your company. If they spend a lot of time on the website, they are engaged in your social channels, etc.
3. Lead behavior (signals for buying behavior)
The third step is to identify stronger buying signals. Are they looking to buy or are they just reading your information?
Analyze how much of your site they are exploring and give a higher score if they eg download content or register via a form.
4. Buying stage & timing (when to close)
In the fourth step, you score those who are within the company’s sales funnel, such as those who click on prices, product demos, etc.
Do you think Marketing Automation is so complicated that only large companies can use it? – It’s not true!
Market automation is scalable and grows together with the company.
How Can Marketing Automation Help Lead Nurturing?
An individual entrepreneur can build credibility and maintain conversations with 15-20 people at the same time, while a small marketing department can handle up to 50 people. But you need more than 50 people in this process to create continuous growth.
Marketing Automation is a technical solution that streamlines the company’s time, resources and costs for multiple channels at the same time in order to increase the number of sales.
With an automated workflow, all your marketing efforts can be coordinated while ensuring that each lead receives relevant information at the right time so no lead fails.
Attract, nurture and deliver hot leads
Leads (potential buyers) often create a perception and make decisions even before talking to a seller. How can you create a relationship with them even before they come into contact with a seller?
It is about being exposed to the potential buyer with the right message in order to initiate a relationship.
Increase activity at the top of the sales tunnel
Your leads often want to be in control and discover the information themselves initially, but get into their situation, what do you want to see?
Attract more traffic to the start of the tunnel with the help of internal and external market measures and convert these into leads via customized landing pages and progressive forms.
Increase the quality of a lead
Score your leads depending on their behavior and communication with your brand. Through Lead Scoring, you can prioritize your resources on hot leads and get more and faster finishes.
Help the sales team
When it comes to hot leads, it is important with response time and context. Help your salespeople prioritize using “urgency ratings” and develop KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that they can follow to make the right priorities.
Track, analyze and implement
By tracking what works and doesn’t, you get clear guidelines for what activities lead to more leads and sales throughout the tunnel. Take advantage of traceability using today’s technology and increase your knowledge of your customers’ behavior to make better decisions in the next step.
Recommended software for lead nurture
Today there is a whole plethora of software for this, here we have listed some of them that we think are good and worth trying out.
