How Achieve Greater Success With Lead Nurturing ?
Content plays a crucial role at every stage of the buying process: from the awakening of interest in your company and your products or services up to converting leads into customers. But for every phase you need different content. Therefore, you should ensure from the outset that you also have the appropriate content available. This is the concept of Lead Nurturing. Use Lead Nurturing to find the right content for the different purchasing processes.
Let’s look more closely at the four phases of a typical buying process:
- Awareness: The lead learns about your company or brand, noting that he might need your product or service
- Research: The lead now has a specific problem or need and researches possible solutions, thereby also your product or service
- Evaluation: The lead compares the options and begins to restrict his selection
- Purchase: The lead has now become a prospect who decides to buy a product or service
Lead Nurturing determines what content is to be used at what stage in the buying process.
Next, you should now review the different types of content and communication channels, and for what stage in the purchase process these are best suited:
- Awareness: Blog posts, social media updates, comments at forums and groups
- Research: E-Books, webinars, technical articles, checklists
- Evaluation: Case studies, demo versions, customer reviews
- Purchase: Industry studies, product data sheets
Your prospects will of course visit specific online channels, such as blogs on certain topics, throughout the buying process, or he may be observing how your brand is doing in social media. Marketing studies have however shown that specific content types play a special role in every stage of the purchase process. The best thing to do is to check with your leads and prospects on a regular basis what content they prefer or what type of information they think is still missing.
Lead Nurturing through relevant content
In any case, you should have relevant content available for each phase of the buying process; otherwise you run the risk of losing prospects during the buying cycle. Marketing experts nowadays talk about Lead Nurturing with the aim of supporting these contacts in their buying cycle by repeatedly feeding them with information relevant to them. Note that you should not provide promotional information.
The ultimate goal of these lead nurturing activities is obviously to turn these leads and prospects eventually into paying customers. Web 2.0 and social media today offer a variety of ways to execute Lead Nurturing programmes. However, success depends on what content is communicated through these online channels.
