Customers want to feel brands care about them, but brands are stuck in a catacomb of run-of-the-mill strategies. How can they escape this stagnancy?
Relationships are managed, not marketed.
Today, savvy marketers tightly hold on to this modern philosophy. But it wasn’t the actual state of marketing in the 1950s.
The so-called traditional marketing took a more transactional approach, driven by valueless gimmicks and promotions. Marketing was perceived as an entirely separate segment.
The customer-centric philosophy branching across the organization didn’t expand to the marketing department. This means its sole purpose was to drive sales towards its goals rather than focusing on a continuous buyer-seller relationship.
The transactional purview of marketing rampant in the 1950s doesn’t offer the whole picture. When a contact is established between marketers and customers, exchange is only one of the components.
There’s so much that goes unacknowledged here. Oversimplifying customers’ decision-making under the want/need orientation is limiting. Customers are more than mere buyers, and their purchases entail nuances that traditional marketing often misses out on.
So, modern marketing has rewritten the old playbooks.
It’s focused more on customers and delivering quality than ever before. Marketing solutions aren’t about offering a quick fix anymore, but more of what the prospective buyer wants from you.
“It is not just that once you get a customer, you want to keep him. It is more a matter of what the buyer wants.”
By warranting this in your marketing strategies, the business deal becomes a promise of a valuable and mutually beneficial relationship between both parties. Among the relational dimensions of B2B deals, capturing and retaining customers are equally crucial.
Owing to this, marketing has made a 180-degree shift. It’s gradually evolving instead of remaining a static segue into closing deals.
In this landscape, lead nurturing has become imperative.
It’s an instrument for building and retaining long-term relationships, an implication of loyalty – a key fuel of business profitability and longevity. This marketing function’s significance has sneaked up on marketers to become the driver of a better bottom line for most businesses.
However, this isn’t the only reason why a more relationship-focused approach is paramount.
Nurturing relationships with leads accommodates customer diversity and tackles their skepticism. The prospective buyer only moves towards brands that deliver, not perform a charade.
The underlying practice? – Transform customers into more active recipients of marketing campaigns, rather than passive ones. And the key component here is personalized marketing functions. This way, both parties obtain value and benefits.
But this paradigm shift isn’t as straightforward as it sounds.
Marketing is no longer a subfunction of your organization. It’s a philosophy of doing business. Before diving into how lead nurturing elevates value delivery through your campaigns, let’s spotlight the lead-nurturing challenges.
Lead-nurturing challenges
Not every marketing technique works perfectly.
Across this landscape, experimentation could lead to more harm than good, resulting in a negative reputation. This is merely one obstacle marketers face.
With marketing being so dense and dynamic, each strategy doesn’t come into fruition overnight. It requires consistency and patience.
The same applies to your lead-nurturing campaigns. Its challenges are plenty. And ignoring any major ones could result in opportunities slipping through the cracks, costing your business a great deal:
1. The right time: Timing remains at the heart of marketing. It’s the one motto – sending the right message to the right audience at the right time.
Here, timing doesn’t signify a specific round figure. Time is about knowing when to communicate with a prospect in lead-nurturing and adjacent marketing functions. It’s crucially about the timeframe – give too much and you seem desperate, whereas interacting too little makes you seem uninterested. Both sides of the coin influence customer choices.
The simple idea – find a balance. There’s no rulebook or cookie-cutter approach, but you can study your customers for everything you require to build a working timeframe. Begin with the average time it takes for a lead on TOFU to become an active customer.
No marketer is all-knowing, but we all start somewhere.
2. The right frequency: Just like the right time, there’s no singular number stating the times a lead should or can be contacted. But this metric is where marketing struggles the most – it makes or breaks a sale.
Too many emails can overwhelm your buyers, and too few can make them go cold. Where exactly is the middle ground?
It’s your marketing team that decides it.
At a decent pace, leads appreciate and welcome relevant content, especially emails. But this depends on the quality, too. Email marketing has observed a significant dip in quality, even though it’s one of the most crucial marketing channels.
Three crucial but lacking components are effort, innovation, and research. Start from there.
3. The right content: Marketing has built its ship on resonance and relevance. Prospects gravitate towards solutions and content that understands them, why personalization has come to carry enormous weight.
Content marketing is one of the most effective channels of lead generation. It’s cost-efficient and promises to deliver value.
But not all content works. Each buyer is different, and at a different stage in the sales cycle, necessitating targeted content specific to their buying stage.
However, over 71% of marketers believe that curating targeted content is one of the most demanding aspects of lead nurturing. Informative content for developing brand awareness will never deeply engage the leads in the MOFU or BOFU.
How do they navigate this?
Start from the bottom and what is accessible: customers.
To create targeted and resonating content, understanding the prospective customer is paramount. It begins with outlining the buyer persona to accurately identify their desires.
These three components are where marketers face the most dilemma. At the nucleus of every well-designed lead-nurturing strategy, time, frequency, and content take priority.
Getting this right creates a seamless roadmap to building effective, ironclad lead-nurturing strategies. This is crucial to spotlight because customer relationships are multi-dimensional, consisting of positive and negative feelings. Just as it’s possible for customers to have a love-hate relationship with a brand.
So, conventional lead-nurturing processes might not be enough.
Its underlying strategies should be revisited regularly to fit customer requirements, especially if they want a particular relationship type with you.
Lead nurturing strategies to engage leads at every touchpoint
To begin with, nurturing leads requires not merely a strategy, but a clear vision. How can you convert leads without engaging with the same old tactics? Of course, it has to answer:
- What are you trying to achieve?
- What do these strategies mean to your department?
- Do they highlight the what, how, and when?
- How effectively can your plan be translated into actions?
If not outlined meticulously, strategies can be mistranslated, and failure to implement them could land the blame on you.
So, your lead nurturing strategies should invite cross-departmental collaborations and support necessary changes, from offering a valuable competitive edge to elevated efficiency.
1. Understand your potential customers
Personalization has become a significant tool in marketing campaigns. But how to execute it, doesn’t just come out of the top of one’s head.
It requires understanding your potential customers. And this starts with segmenting them according to their website behavior and demographics. Doing so will easily highlight their particular needs and preferences.
But segmentation has to be multi-layered. Merely segmenting leads based on their demographics wouldn’t offer jack-squat. So, move ahead – establish a three-step system:
- Demographic (larger groups)
- Customer psychology and behavior
- Customer need (underlying motive for their engagement)
This multi-step segmentation technique is crucial for your business because the more you segment your lists, the more distilled view you’ve of your customers. So, while direct communication is still further down in the funnel, you get an idea about what they’re looking for.
Knowing this will help you understand whether both of you fit each other’s requirements – instead of wasting time and resources on a prospect that doesn’t lead anywhere.
Moreover, highlighting different customer profiles that fit into your business model will offer a more comprehensive view of your marketing functions. And how it aligns with the broader organization.
2. Personalize your communications
In 2021, McKinsey & Company published a report stating that organizations building customer intimacy robustly witness faster revenue growth.
And this echoes true even in the current market-scape. For brands to demonstrate that they really understand their customers, they must offer a relationship that suits the latter’s needs.
Not every buyer is the same – their preferences gravely differ. So, brands cannot bundle the same techniques and offer them to every segment.
Segmentation is vital, and every marketer realizes that, but when it comes to actually applying it? Marketing falls flat. This begins a long road towards unfulfilled promises and customer frustration.
Personalization has not just become a necessary tool but the default standard of engagement. Customers don’t just desire but demand it. So, it’s all embodied in the experience you offer them because if your brand doesn’t, they move on to one that will.
To strengthen your lead nurturing, demonstrate that, as a brand, you value and prioritize the relationship, not the final transaction.
Some of the ways to ascertain this include:
- Offering relevant and customized service recommendations
- Tailoring marketing messages and communication
- Timely promotions or discounts tied to key moments
- Celebrating significant milestones
- Sending surveys and follow-up emails after a successful purchase
- Personally addressed emails are sent periodically to keep them engaged
When the customers feel that you know them on a personal level, the positive experiences build a positive brand reputation.
3. Develop resonating content for hyper-focused targeting
Quality content can be a tool of persuasion when done correctly.
Imagine the different kinds of books available in the world – there are hundreds of genres. But not every genre resonates with readers. Some readers are more into fiction and others into non-fiction. Even when it comes to fiction, others prefer contemporary over classics.
It’s the same with the B2B audience. Your meticulously and well-crafted content wouldn’t serve much purpose if it’s not what your prospects are looking for. At the TOFU, the prospect seeks informative content, but offering them pricing charts and e-Guides might overwhelm them. Start with content that informs them who you are and what your brand does.
While content types depend on where they are in their buyer’s journey, it’s also based on the segment’s pain points and needs.
But this requires marketers to undertake a hyper-targeting approach. Generic content, just like generic techniques, doesn’t pack any punch – it sounds like your competitors’ messages recycled and packed in a different wrapper.
Or, in other words, “copy-paste” content that offers no real value, and is just an arrangement of hollow words that happen to make sense.
It won’t do the prospects any good. Each has different needs and challenges they want addressed. While marketing and sales can ensure the messages are targeted, the solutions should back these promises.
Your curated content has to resonate with this.
So, it’s paramount to ensure targeted and dynamic content takes precedence in your lead-nurturing strategies.
4. Leverage email marketing automation
Doing content marketing right isn’t merely about content. If it were, marketing teams would assemble sub-teams and bombard their prospects incessantly. Something has to stick, right?
But content marketing isn’t just about content. It’s really about the right message sent to the right person at the right time.
However, marketing takes this too casually. Most still believe that integrating any trending tech into existing infrastructure will work wonders. Strategizing has really taken a backseat in the age of advanced tech. But email blasts aren’t the craze anymore.
Because its cons outweigh the potential pros. Your messages might not even reach a majority of your audience – bad timing or spam folder.
Amidst this rings the significance of email marketing continues to play in lead nurturing. And when paired with automated campaigns, this has proved to be quite fruitful.
Marketing has found a solution to traditional email marketing challenges – drip campaigns. Through these, it’s easy to stay on top of prospects’ minds and churn out long-term benefits.
But done manually, this can be really time-consuming. So:
- Automate them with the right triggers based on the prospect’s behavior and ensure it aligns with your marketing and sales CRM.
- Set up clear campaign objectives and time frames.
- Write pre-written personalized messages for different segments present in your CRM.
- Set the actions triggered by the specific behaviors and demographic data.
These are just the core elements available in all email drip campaigns. To curate an effective one, you’ll have to step into your customer’s shoes.
Your campaign is really a journey – realizing this will help you build a drip campaign that aligns with your customers, and not just what you believe is right. You’re looking to nurture and cultivate the customer lifecycle, not just engage them.
5. Align marketing and sales
Marketing and sales alignment is an integral component from TOFU to BOFU. Without their synergy, opportunities can easily slip through the cracks.
It’s not just that. Processes such as lead nurturing require marketing and sales to collaborate on almost every aspect, even definitions of what they think MQLs and SQLs are.
Because tailoring messages and strategies depends on these definitions. An agreed-upon definition spotlights where the leads really are in the sales funnel, elevating marketers’ and SDRs’ understanding.
Any lingering misalignment can result in a lack of trust and both departments working more slowly.
However, if they are accurately aligned, it could afford the business particular benefits:
- Seamless and quick execution of changes.
- Different perspectives contribute creatively to problem-solving.
- Elevated respect and trust between departments lead to employee retention.
In simple terms, aligning marketing and sales technically means agreement, communication, and consistent feedback loops. Rather than working in isolation and as separate entities, both teams need to realize the extent to which their efforts are intertwined.
Marketing should support sales efforts and have shared objectives. Because even if their functional nuances differ, their goal is ultimately the same – ensuring consistent revenue and growth for the business.
These lead-nurturing strategies must work in unison.
Lead nurturing has many challenges, such as not getting the timing right. However, some key aspects can help marketers navigate this quagmire and start on the right foot.
At the end, handling leads and nurturing relationships isn’t as easy as it sounds. Its multi-dimensionality has demanded that marketing transcend from its traditional playbooks and innovate.
Maybe marketers have grown too comfortable and refuse to budge. But modern buyers have moved the needle.
They need to see the efforts from the get-go and not just be offered empty promises. To tackle this, marketers are moving deeply towards lead nurturing. With this, modern marketers hope they know what customers really want.
So, they have boiled down the priority from being focused on the ultimate transaction to building relationships that matter. And unearthed that at the heart of each customer’s need is the need for value.
