Lead nurturing is a critical part of a marketer’s job, especially in the B2B space. Forrester suggested that a B2B buyer’s journey could be anywhere from 65-90% complete by the time he or she contacts the vendor to move forward with a sale. This reality of a modern buyer’s behavior has added a layer of complexity to both the strategy and technology we use to guide leads through the sales funnel.
We seem to approach this challenge primarily with email marketing and marketing automation. However, the basic method of sending nurturing messages via email hasn’t changed with the growth of marketing automation.
Multi-channel lead nurturing
Multi-channel lead nurturing as a concept is pretty straightforward: It delivers a series of targeted marketing messages across multiple touch points and platforms to help move leads through their buyer’s journey. While the idea is not complex, it’s getting these pieces in sync and aligned with your buyer’s journey that’s a little more complicated.
Multi Channel Lead Nurturing by HubSpot
A robust multi-channel lead nurturing program uses a variety of tools and touch points. Here are the basic HubSpot tools you’ll need:
- Social media monitoring and publishing
- Paid retargeting
- Dynamic website content
- Sales enablement tools
Using all of these tools together, youy campaign strategy will be better able to reach and nurture more leads with more opportunities to interact with you on their terms rather than yours.
Target your content to the buyer’s journey
Leads nurtured with targeted content produce an increase in sales opportunities of more than 20%. That being said, multi-channel lead nurturing is not effective if you are simply blasting the same message to all leads across as many platforms as you possibly can. You need to understand the buyer’s journey.
In order to do multi-channel nurturing effectively, you must have a good understanding of a) where your leads are in the funnel and b) what content will help move them to the next phase of engagement.
To do this you’ll need to:
- Gain a deep understanding of your target buyer persona.
- Map out their buyer’s journey.
- Be able to track a lead’s lifecycle stage from Visitor > Lead > Marketing Qualified Lead/Sales Qualified Lead > Opportunity > Customer > Evangelist.
- Match your content to your leads’ lifecycle stage accordingly.
These activities are essential to targeting your nurturing content to reach the right lead at the right time with the right message.
Don’t be creepy!
Multi-channel nurturing can feel “spammy” or “creepy” if it’s over-done or implemented poorly. You’ll want to put the pieces together in an inbound way, which means making sure your content and messaging is helpful, adding value and hitting at the right time. The idea is to help the lead through their research process, not hit them over the head relentlessly with your campaign.
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