Lead Nurturing: Eight Road Signs to Guide You to More Revenue

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Getting valuable farmland for free. Striking it rich mining gold and silver. Accessing acres and acres of lumber cheaply. Spreading out and ranching hundreds of heads of cattle. These were just a few of the compelling reasons why thousands of Americans walked the 2,200-mile Oregon Trail in the mid-1800s and headed west.

Yet millions of others did not. There were no paved roads or GPS navigation back then and many saw the rugged journey as being extremely inconvenient or long.

I feel that the same thinking is keeping millions of marketers from taking sellers’ journeys with lead nurturing.

I wonder how many more Americans would have made the trek along the Oregon Trail if there had been clearly posted signs—or newspaper articles—with tips and directions from those who went before them and succeeded.

The 8 Steps to Lead Nurturing Success

I would like to start posting signs for those considering the lead nurturing trail. Here are eight road signs to follow to ensure that you have a successful seller’s journey:

  1. Lead Creation & Capture: Your journey begins by stocking up on plenty of digital (webinars, emails, social, SEO/SEM/PPC, blogs, etc.) and traditional (TV/radio, print ads, events, telesales, etc.) driving interested folks to campaign landing pages. Follow this road sign and you are beginning in the right direction with lead nurturing.
  2. Landing Content & Profiling: This road sign points out your gateway to success. Once you drive prospects to your landing pages, it will be your relevant content on these pages that will get them to engage. You want to collect some information about them on your web forms and get to know them better. Based on the data you collect you will want to assign them to a persona. It may be a multi-month journey so get to know their behavioral profile.
  3. Lead Scoring & Segmentation: Be sure you make this turn and steer your inquiries into a lead scoring pass. Implicit and explicit behavioral data is captured and scored using a predictive model. The scoring will help determine which inquiries are Sales ready and which ones need to be nurtured. The scoring will also help you with segmentation.
  4. Nurture Track(s) Design: The road sign helps you take inquiries down a few bypasses based on segmentation and persona. These paths ensure that specific inquiries are exposed to specific content. These trails can be set up to release content through a drip or trigger method. As you become more comfortable and sophisticated, you will have more and more of these well-worn paths.
  5. Digital Curation & Personalization: This road sign often gets overlooked by marketers and they end up going down a road to nowhere. Personalized content increases engagement. There is no reason not to do it. Personalization will only make your journey more successful. Digital curation ensures that you have a dependable and systematic way to select, preserve, maintain, and archive your digital assets. Digital curation is important as you go from a few campaigns in the beginning to dozens of campaigns over the course of a year. Often this is where an inquiry becomes a lead because of the amount of content consumed.
  6. Enriched Personas & Scoring: This road sign highlights the scenic route. Those who have traveled down the road of lead nurturing before are often looking for nuances to make the journey better. Enriched personas and scoring enables you to fine-tune your personas and scoring during the journey for more accurate engagement and routing.
  7. Lead Routing to Sales: This is the main exit sign off of a busy highway. By this time, your leads should be Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) and should meet all the criteria to be handed off to Sales. The lead profile and engagement history is transferred to your CRM system and the appropriate sales rep. is notified.
  8. Closed-Loop Lead Tracking & Reporting: The final road sign lets you know “speed camera ahead.” All the lead nurturing volume, conversions, etc., need to be collected in a snapshot or dynamic reporting dashboard for you to see. The dashboard will help you measure performance and make campaign adjustments as needed.

Although the lead nurturing journey, your Oregon Trail, may seem inconvenient and long, I guarantee that the rewards far outweigh any risks. In fact, I believe that lead nurturing can be one of the most effective activities a CMO or VP, Marketing can have his or her team implement. It’s your time to strike gold. You have already invested significantly in acquiring those names. Most are not Sales-ready. Don’t let them go to waste. If you could get 20%, 30%, 40%, or more of them to become sales opportunities through lead nurturing, how much gold would you have mined? The journey begins with the first step: contact us today.

If you would like to learn more about MarketBridge and our RevenueEngine approach to lead nurturing, please visit market-bridge.com or download our Lead Nurturing Solution Guide.