Lead Nurturing Guide Part 2: Why Lead Nurturing is Vital to Your Overall Marketing Strategy

If you’re having a hard time converting your website visitors into paying customers, then you should make use of lead nurturing. In reality, not all leads are ready to make a purchase—50% of them need additional nurturing before they make the decision to purchase.

With effective lead nurturing, you can establish and maintain a positive relationship with your potential clients, keeping your business fresh on their minds. But what happens next? If you’ve been able to communicate with your leads cross-channel throughout the sales cycle, once your prospects decide that they’re ready to make a purchase, you’ll be the first on their list.

To help marketers jumpstart a successful lead nurturing program for their businesses, marketing automation software developer Marketo (@Marketo) released an all new edition of The Definitive Guide to Lead Nurturing.

How to Properly Set Goals

A successful lead nurture program will depend on your ability to build trust and credibility with your prospects. In order to accomplish these goals, you first need to identify and understand the goals you are hoping to achieve with your program.

Here are some tips from Marketo to help you set your goals properly:

• Set the stage. As a marketer, you understand the importance of alignment and collaboration. Ask the right people the right questions. You may, for example, invite your sales department to a meeting to help you take stock of your company’s current lead management processeses.

You need to generate answers to questions like:

1. How many leads do we generate each month, and what is the source of these leads?
2. What is the range of products that we offer?
3. What are the key audience groups that comprise our inbound leads?
4. How are leads responded to, distributed, and managed? How often do we communicate with leads over time?
5. What percentage of our leads are considered sales ready when they enter our database? What is our average day to opportunity?

• Set qualitative objectives. After getting the initial information you need to develop your program, the next step to take should be setting your qualitative goals. These goals should help you produce better decisions on timing, frequency, and segmentation.

• Set quantitative objectives. Apart from setting your qualitative goals, you also need to create quantitative or measurable objectives. These goals are important as they can help you not only monitor success, but also give you an overview on how your lead nurturing efforts are faring in general.

• Integrate a phased approach in your plan. By starting small, you can launch your program more quickly and assess what tactics actually work. Yes, it may take some time to develop a full-on lead nurture program, but once you start working and everything begins to fall in place, your efforts will yield remarkable results.

Integrating Lead Nurturing into your Overall Marketing Strategy

Lead nurturing is as important as any other aspect of your marketing strategy, as it serves as the key to getting more loyal customers and growing your business. By sending out newsletters, product updates, emails, and other cross-channel communications regularly, you make it clear to prospects that you are serious in helping them get what they need. But remember: all communication you share should work in harmony, or else prospects might view you as being too assertive or pushy.

“You can’t think about lead nurturing in a vacuum. You need to take a look at your entire marketing calendar to determine what other communications your leads receive,” stated Marketo’s guide. “You want to deliver coordinated, relevant, customer experiences across all of the channels your buyers use.”

Thus, it’s critical to maintain good communication cadence, as well as a calendar that gives you a holistic view of all your communications. By taking these into account, you’ll be consistent and focused with your tactics.

To learn more about lead nurturing as part of your marketing strategy, you may download the full guide by Marketo here.

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