Ah, lead nurturing. We meet again. There’s no shortage of good reasons to make it a core part of your marketing strategy: you’ll build better relationships with customers, you’ll have another chance to recapture cold or dead leads, you’ll stay top of mind and ensure that you’re in front of your prospects when they’re getting ready to make a purchasing decision.
No matter the unique challenges of your industry, lead nurturing is on B2B marketing strategy that’s universal. Here are three reasons lead nurturing can – and will work for you. If you’re in the life sciences industry – or curious about how to develop a consistent lead nurturing strategy for that industry, join David Chapin, CEO of Forma Life Science Marketing and author of the book: Making the Complex Compelling — Creating High Performance Marketing in the Life Sciences for his webinar presentation ‘The Secrets to Effective Lead Nurturing in Life Sciences‘ on December 7.
It frees up your sales team
Nurturing your leads is actually going to save time and resource for your sales team – and here’s how: lead nurturing should fall to your marketing team. With their insight into campaigns and content, your marketing team is best placed to create the overall nurturing strategy and set up individual nurturing programs that will apply to different types of leads. Marketing and sales should sit down (preferably in the same room) and go through what a qualified lead looks like, and what types of nurturing campaigns those leads will need as they go through the buying cycle – whether it’s top of mind nurture programs for long deal cycles, or re-engagement campaigns for cold leads. From there, your marketing team can build the necessary campaigns and populate them with content. That means that all your sales team has to do is ensure that they assign any leads who’s status changes to the appropriate campaign – and you’re done! The cycle becomes self-sustaining the longer it runs, so if your marketing team builds out the types of campaigns you’ll need early on, and works together with your sales team to ensure that leads are quickly and efficiently identified and moved into the right nurturing programs, you’ll only have to adjust to the needs of your buyers.
Marketing automation makes it easy
Nurturing sounds like it takes a lot of effort – the regular cadence and constant assessment to make sure that prospects who engage are getting moved further down the sales funnel while those who don’t are warmed up again seems like it would take more resources than not – but honestly, the reverse is true. If you’ve got a marketing automation platform, lead nurturing becomes easy.
The proof is in the pudding: marketing automation can automate the tedious process of tracking individual leads as they go through each nurture and the manual hand-off between marketing and sales for qualified leads. Using the lead scoring and grading features, you can assign your leads a score based on their activities and engagement with your emails, website and content. This makes it much easier to spot warm leads at-a-glance that can then be passed straight on to sales.
It maximizes the value of your leads
Lead Nurturing is the best way to ensure that you’re getting the most out of each lead. Whether you have a thousand leads or just a few per month, you don’t want to let any go to waste. Lead nurturing allows you to match the pace of your prospects as they move through the buying cycle. It keeps your brand in front of your prospects so that you won’t lose opportunities to re-engage cooler leads, or tip the balance in your favor in competitive deals.
