More than a Sale: Lead Nurturing's Role in Marketing Success

As it seems that I grow increasingly business-minded of late, I thought that I would share some information about another marketing practice that I've been reading up on: lead nurturing. This concept is a bit more abstract than those I addressed last week, but is also intriguing due to its philosophical elements. You see, lead nurturing is not just some predetermined set of statistics or programs. Instead, it involves a sophisticated mix of relationship building and persuasion. That's right, my friends, it's not just about tracking some emails or blasting out notifications to a list. To do it right, you need to cultivate the idea that I've mentioned time and again in these pages: connection.

As usual, I've gotten a bit ahead of myself. First, we should walk together through the valley of fundamentals in order to reach the peak of understanding. What is a lead? Well, it's really quite straightforward: it's you. That's somewhat of an oversimplification, but it conveys the gist of things. To elaborate, a lead is a person or group that is already interested or could potentially be interested in becoming a customer. Leads can come from many places, such as a customer signing up for an email list, downloading a trial pack of software, or accessing free learning resources, among others. For obvious reasons, marketers covet these relationships because they can, when given the right impetus, lead to further revenue and brand exposure. This, as you may have guessed, is where we get into the nurturing part.

As I've indicated above, obtaining a lead is only the first step. After initial contact, a marketer must grow, or nurture, the connection in order to persuade the lead to become a customer. Proper use of this strategy bears tremendous reward. In Marketo's Definitive Guide to Lead Nurturing, the author mentions a statistic from a DemandGen report, which asserts that nurtured leads result in an average sales opportunity increase of 20 percent when compared to non-nurtured leads. That's a definitive margin if I ever saw one.

Okay, sounds great, sign me up, but how do you do it? How do you grow a customer relationship that way? This is where we get into the abstract bits, so buckle your seat belts. Mounting an effective lead nurturing approach takes a careful combination of automation and analysis with a personal touch. The first part is concrete enough; there are some great solution providers out there like Hubspot who can set you up with an array of powerful tools to analyze your audience and craft automated alerts and responses to get the initial lead in place. However, it's the second bit - what is done with that information - where having a spark of creativity can pay huge dividends.

Folks, we've got to fire up that imagination engine again. Sure, you can know what kind of a target market you have, how many people have visited your site, who has downloaded your trial software, and a million other pieces of similar information, but that doesn't mean people are buying what you're selling. For that to happen, you must enter the surreal landscape of relationships. As the aforementioned Marketo guide says, lead nurturing is like maintaining a long-term relationship in your personal life, and that means you've got to give to get. If you don't capture people's interest and stay present in their minds, you will lose leads as fast as you get them.

With that said, I'm going to run through a fictional case study as an example of how you can imagine your way to good marketing practices. Say you've got an email list that tells you who signed up to view a product demonstration on your website. There are some valuable facts you can glean from this list. First of all, these people are probably exploring several product options if they're watching demos, which means you need to prove that your product is worth more to them than the competition's. You can hope that the awesome video your team put together does the job, or you can act to reinforce the message.

With planning, automation can help you out a bit. Using an email service provider or marketing automation software, you can author an email ahead of time that thanks people for signing up and gives a few follow-up details about the product that flesh out what they saw in the demo. In my opinion, though, the most important element to include here is a method for the audience to give feedback and reach you with other questions. Don't bank on your extra facts filling in all the gaps; you can't anticipate all the vagaries of the human thought process, and if you tried to your email would be far too long. Instead, make it clear that you value what your audience has to say. If they feel important and cared about now, they'll trust you more later.

Along with planting the seed of trust, make sure you reinforce your credibility. Respond promptly to any feedback and questions you receive, and be honest. Procrastination is a killer in this scenario. If people perceive your question line as a bottomless abyss into which queries disappear without a trace, they will no longer believe in any of your claims. Thank them for criticism, and pass on useful critiques to your team. This can be stellar method for getting in product testing while also nurturing leads. Answer questions in a succinct way, and point the questioner to further resources (make sure you have these ready to go). Above all, don't automate this if at all possible. As I said before, the personal touch will be noted.

The foundation above paves the way for more intricate lead nurturing techniques, such as offering free trials of products, requesting surveys of customer needs, and, at the latest stage, engaging the sales team to pitch a purchase plan to the prospect. Remember, you need to prove your worth first. The magic of the interwebs affords us the ability to research companies and products in-depth before buying anything, so premature sales pitches almost always scare people off. Be deliberate and unique. Think about what you can do for the leads you are following. To once again reference a past blog post, it's not about manipulation. More and more as technology improves, the old ways of suckering someone into buying something then running are invalidated. What will make you stand out is your passion and your ideas. Connect to, nurture, and help others, and then your success will be limitless.

For more information about lead nurturing, I suggest checking out Hubspot's blog posts. They've got loads of useful information that can deepen your understanding of the concepts I've sketched out here. Like Wistia, they provide both the resources and the opportunity to learn about what they sell. Also, Eloqua has some amazing best practice tool kits that lay out these ideas in very easy-to-consume ways. My words here are only a starting point; after all, I still have much to learn myself about this fascinating discipline. Continue exploring, and I'll see you next time.