Any best practices for lead nurturing

Lead Liaison

Here’s Why You Should Consider Text Message Marketing in Your Post-Show Follow-Up

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Thinking about how you will manage your post-show follow-up, after a trade show or other marketing event, is a critical step in finding success with event marketing.

There are several methods of communication that you’ll probably consider using in your follow-up, but have you considered text messages?

Text Message Marketing in Post-Show Follow-Up

You want an omnichannel approach before, during, and after the trade show. In addition to email marketing, you want to harness the power of social media. You should consider the often-overlooked channel of direct mail marketing. And here’s a channel you might not have thought about—text message/SMS marketing.

Used wisely as part of your well-provisioned “marketing toolbox”, before and during the event, and as part of your post-show follow-up, text message marketing can help you reap major dividends.

Before your trade show, text/SMS marketing can help you build name recognition for your brand, not to mention the kind of curiosity and anticipation that guarantees attendees will gladly go the extra mile at the show to seek you out and discover more about what you can do for them.

When you are at a trade show, you can use text messages to notify attendees of agenda items you do not want them to miss, like an after-hours party you are hosting, or an intriguing product demo that will answer many of their questions and lead them to eagerly engage with you and go further into your pipeline. You could also send a text blast to announce a drawing or fun contest you are hosting.

How About After The Trade Show?

After an event, life for them, and you, is hectic. You are back at work. You are trying to get back into a normal routine. So are the leads you met at the trade show. At this point, you are at a marketing “fork in the road”. They have a lot on their minds and their plates. They could get distracted and easily forget about you. You could get complacent and forget to follow up with them.

This scenario happens a lot. Many marketing and sales teams struggle with post-show follow-up; their lead generation and nurturing efforts fizzle out. Please don’t let that be the case for you and your team. You have put in too much time, effort and financial investment to not enjoy a substantial return.

You captured the leads. You and your staff met many of them face-to-face. It’s critical that you now build Top of Mind Awareness (TOMA) and nurture them with an omnichannel post-event follow-up campaign. Text message marketing can help you.

A Huge Benefit Of Text Message Marketing!

With almost any marketing initiative or channel, you face a big challenge: it’s difficult to grab and keep your audience’s attention. It can be a major uphill battle to get your busy, distracted leads to stop what they are feverishly doing, focus their limited attention on your message, open and read it.

Text message marketing helps you overcome this challenge. Think about it. When they receive a text, almost everyone stops what they are doing, opens it up and reads it immediately. I do this. Chances are you do too. The engagement rate with text messages is off the charts. The open rate for SMS marketing messages is huge – as much as 82%!

What other marketing channel has that kind of open rate? As effective as they are, certainly not email or direct mail.

Bottom line: your post-trade show text message is very likely to get opened. And if it gets opened, it’s likely to get read. And if it gets read, assuming you wrote it well (more on this in a moment), it’s likely to help your post-show follow-up by leading to a conversion where the reader takes the step you want them to take.

Text Message Marketing Use Cases. The Sky Is The Limit!

There are a multitude of potential use cases for text message marketing. You can notify your subscriber list of your latest blog article. You can send a Happy Birthday greeting. You sales team can send reminders of upcoming scheduled phone calls…

You are limited only by your imagination!

To show you that we “practice what we preach”, here is an example of how Lead Liaison recently harnessed the power of text message marketing as part of our post-show follow-up. 

At a recent trade show, we asked our new leads if they were comfortable sharing their mobile phone numbers with us. 90% said “Yes”.

We told them to expect a text message that would include their Lead Liaison Representative’s contact information, so they could save it in their phones, in case they thought of more questions after our in-person conversation. 

On the backend, our post-show follow-up included a text message, personalized with the lead’s first name. That text was triggered within minutes of submitting our lead capture form, meaning that we were most definitely the first to follow up with them.

Avoid “Shiny Object” Syndrome

This is true for any marketing channel or tool, including text/SMS: don’t use it just because “it’s cool”, or “it’s popular and everyone else is using it”. Plan out your marketing strategy and objectives. Then plug in the tools to help you reach those objectives. There’s a great likelihood that text message marketing should be one of those tools; after a trade show, and in general, it can be a valuable part of your lead capture and nurturing efforts. 

A Couple Of Text Message Marketing Best Practices

Although a detailed explanation is beyond the scope of this article, it’s important that you follow all relevant laws and regulations related to text message marketing. Don’t spam anyone. Only market to those who have specifically given you permission to. And make it super-easy for them to opt-out of receiving your messages.

Even though your text message is likely to get opened, it won’t get the response you want unless you follow good copywriting and content marketing practices. So make your text personal. Use the word “you”. Make your message “conversational” and lively, not stiff, formal and “corporate”.

When they are reading your text, readers are wondering “What’s In It For Me?”
So tell them what’s in it for them. Tell them how they stand to gain by clicking the link in your message. Keep it brief, and build curiosity in your readers’ minds and hearts; use the text to “sell the click”, that is to persuade them to click through to a landing page or website where you can include a lot more copy and marketing content.

Do You Want To Win At Text Message Marketing? Lead Liaison Can Help You!

Are you beginning to see how text message marketing can boost your lead generation and nurturing results before, during and after your trade show? Do you want to take full advantage of this powerful marketing channel to help you gain more leads and sales from your next event?

Lead Liaison can help you. We offer text messaging automation through our drag-and-drop, cloud-based interface. So when you are looking to a text message marketing platform that is super simple to use, turn to us. We will help you create new possibilities and opportunities as you pursue success with trade show lead generation!

Lead Liaison

These Tech Tips Will Boost Event Lead Capture Success!

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Welcome to part two of our series on how you and your team can get the most out of your trade show experience, optimize lead capture and enjoy a high level of customer lifetime value from these leads.

In a previous article, we discussed some valuable ideas you can leverage to capture more leads at your next event. Today, we continue that conversation. Let’s discuss specifically how you can harness the power of technology to capture and collect as many leads as possible, engage with them right away (even while you are still at the event) and set the stage for converting them into eager prospects and buyers.

Rethinking Your Lead Capture Form

Put yourself in your booth visitor’s (your potential lead’s) shoes. Attending a big industry event can be an overwhelming experience for them! This sense of overwhelm felt by so many trade show attendees can cost your company lead capturing and nurturing opportunities.

So what can you do about this situation and turn it to your advantage?

What can you do that will make their experience more enjoyable and help you have a more meaningful engagement? What generates a massive impact that will help keep you and your brand in the forefront of their minds? Keep reading to find out…

When you are engaging in conversations with leads at your booth, don’t waste your time or theirs by asking the same dull, boring, unimaginative questions every other exhibitor is asking them. Aside from the basic information you can get from their badge scan, add targeted, relevant questions to your all-important lead capture form. Questions that will not only help you follow up more efficiently and effectively but will also help you keep your lead, the one you worked so hard to capture at the event, engaged.

Why is this important? The more engaged your lead feels during the buyer’s journey, the more of their very limited attention you will win and keep. The more likely they are to buy from you. So how can you keep them feeling engaged?

Remember what we talked about in our review of lead capture tips: every time you ask your leads and prospects to do something, they are asking themselves, “What’s in it for me?” You want to tell them what’s in it for them. So take the answers they give to the questions on your lead capture form to help you do this. Analyze the information they give you, and craft responses that show your leads how your product solves the problems they want solved.

Doesn’t it make sense that if, in response to their questions, you were equipped with answers they found to be highly relevant to their situation, that you could give powerful answers to the question, “What’s in it for me?”

Ask Better Questions. Enjoy Better Lead Capture Results!

On your lead capture form, ask questions that relate to the problem they have – the one that your product helps them solve. Include conditional questions that pop up based on their answers to the questions you previously asked.

Here’s an example of a conditional question: if you ask a lead what role they play in the company, and they say “I do the research for new technology”, you’ll select “Product Research” from your dropdown. With a little research, you’ll be able to create a list of potential job titles that you are likely to run into at the event. Selecting “Product Research” will then trigger a new, role-specific question: “What’s the first thing you look at when researching?”

Do you see how this approach can help you target your post-show marketing responses and deliver a win-win solution for both you and your leads?

As you are communicating with them post-engagement, use the answers they gave you to deliver content, in the format they prefer, that keeps them engaged and interested in what you have to say.

What’s the bottom line? You want to use your lead capture form not just to capture the lead’s contact information. You want to use it to help you make your post-show marketing process more personalized, persuasive and, ultimately, much more effective

Embrace Audio Notes

Like we discussed a moment ago, a trade show or industry event can be overwhelming. And given your primary goal of lead capture, you don’t want to ask your team to spend their vitally important booth time typing notes into their phone or writing them down on a notepad.

If your salespeople at the trade show are taking too much time scrambling to finalize their notes from previous conversations, they are likely losing valuable opportunities to engage with new booth visitors.

The perfect buyer may have just passed by your booth and been snatched up by a competitor!

Rather than burdening your team members with these highly inefficient methods which could easily cause valuable information to be lost, why not find a lead capture solution that gives them the option to record an audio note which can automatically be transcribed once the event is over?

Tailor Follow-Up to the Individual

Here’s the thing: your booth visitors have talked to a lot of exhibitors at the big event, including your competitors. Will they remember you after the show, or will you be promptly forgotten?

You must do something that will really help you stand out in the eyes of your new leads. Don’t merely employ a “default”, one-size-fits-all event follow-up strategy. Ask them how they prefer to be followed up with, and with what type of content. Use a lead capture form that contains a dropdown selection which allows you to select their preferred method of follow-up (phone call, email, or text).

Then, tailor your post-show communication to that specific prospect’s wishes. It will mean a lot to them. And it will leave a positive, lasting impression. The type of impression that just might help your company win another customer!

Obviously, if you are going to successfully carry these ideas out, it helps you to have the right marketing and sales automation platform. This is how our team at Lead Liaison can really assist you.

Our innovative, robust, cloud-based software combines fully-customizable lead capture forms, real-time lead tracking, lead qualification, lead distribution, database segmentation, lead nurturing, social media engagement and ROI reporting into a single platform.

We make some bold claims, but as our happy clients can attest, we can back them up. Want to find out more about how you might become the next Lead Liaison success story? Contact us today to arrange your complimentary demo of our event lead capture solution, GoExhibit!™.

Ryan Schefke

Infographic: Post-Event Lead Nurturing Strategy

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Want the executive summary? Download the infographic here.

To access our Event Lead Management Kit, which includes this resource, click here. 

Marketing events can be a very costly effort. There’s the booth rental, the booth design/display, travel and expenses for your employees working the booth. Service costs like electricity, cleaning, or wifi can sneak up on you. Badge scanners are expensive (have you looked into other options?).

I think you get my drift: marketing events cost a lot of money. Return on investment (ROI) is paramount. Once your team has captured hot leads at an event, you should be prepared to follow up with those leads quickly and effectively. There’s no time to waste – don’t let your competitors beat you to the punch.

We are often asked for examples of how a business can (and should) nurture leads post-event. Below is an infographic that examines a tried-and-true post-event lead nurturing strategy. 

Technology to Support Lead Nurturing Strategy

The first step in determining your post-event lead nurturing strategy is to make sure you have the technology in place to automate it. Don’t count on these things being done manually – it’s just not realistic. Companies are busier than ever these days, usually with multiple people wearing multiple hats – stretched thin. There’s also tons of room for distraction at (and after) marketing events. The more administrative tasks you can automate, the better. Let your employees spend their time building relationships and making connections.

There are lots of options out there, but we recommend a wholistic approach. Look for technology that works together, so you don’t have to spend time exporting and importing. For example, our event lead management solution allows businesses to create and customize lead capture forms, prepare intelligent post-event workflows, quickly capture leads onsite, instantly sync with a CRM, and then place them into those previously mentioned workflows. No additional technology is needed.

Of course, we love our solutions. But, there are lots of options out there! Just make sure you have something in place to be able to effectively execute your plan.

Lead Management Strategy – Instant Tasks

Create a list of all the actions you want to take once you’ve captured the lead’s information, and separate them into groups based on the time of the outreach. Here are a few examples of what you might want to do instantly:

  • Tag the Prospect with the Event Name
  • Add the Prospect to the Event Leads list
  • Assign a grade or score to the Prospect based on your ideal buyer criteria
  • Distribute the lead (Prospect) – based on round-robin, geography, or product interest
  • Sync the Prospect Record with your CRM

Side Note – Lead Scoring vs. Lead Grading

Let’s talk more about lead score versus lead grade. You may want your reps to call a Prospect if their score is high and their grade is high. Or maybe just one or the other. To make that determiniation, you should know the differences. 

Lead scoring is a way to measure engagement, and it happens over time. Even before your event, a Prospect may have already been to your website, scanning a few of your webpages, which would increase their score. It will continue to increase as they continue to interact with your website or your content.

On the other hand, grading is a way to measure how well a Prospect matches your ideal buyer criteria. Your reps can qualify and assign a grade onsite at the event. With our event lead management solution, reps can collect lead data quickly and either grade them in the moment, or they can go back later and grade them when they have a lull in booth traffic.

Lead Management Strategy – Starting Your Nuture

Once those organizational actions have been completed (usually within seconds), what do you want to do next? Let me answer that for you…you want to follow up. Insidesales.com conducted a study that found 35-50% of sales go to the vendor that responds first. That means that the timing of your follow up matters.

If at all possible, reach out to your leads within an hour of them visiting your booth. A great example of this kind of outreach is with a text message. If you’re capturing a lead’s mobile phone number, use your marketing automation platform to send a text message saying, “Hi Jane, it’s Bob. Thanks for stopping by our booth! We’ll be in touch soon – but in the meantime, here’s my number if you have any questions…” That is sure to make your company stand out.

24 Hours Later

Send an email. Even though you already sent a text message, send an email 24 hours later. Give your Prospect time to filter through messages from other booths, but not enough time that they forget who you are. Remind them of a product feature that sets you apart from other exhibitors at the trade show.

Pivot

At this point in the game, you may want to consider customizing your lead nurturing strategy based on the previously mentioned lead score and/or grade (depending on what matter most to your business) and how the Prospect interacts with your outreach or content. Your marketing automation platform should have the capability of customizing the workflow using this kind of criteria. If the lead score is high, assign a task to a rep to make a call. If it’s low, continue to nurture via email.

Don’t disqualify leads with a lower score or grade. They may be hesitant because they are taking this decision more seriously. Offer a piece of educational content, like an infographic or a case study. Try to be their source of education in the industry, so they begin to see your company as a thought leader.

If they download the content, you may want to pivot further based on that. If they downloaded it, offer another link to an informative blog post with a powerful call-to-action (CTA). Make the decision to reach out to you easy.

If they didn’t download the content, perhaps they need the same information as the lead above, but rather they need it summarized within the email itself to reduce effort. Include your CTA within the email itself, to make it even easier.

In Summary

Continue nurturing your Prospects for several weeks until they are ready to buy, or place them into your newsletter list so that you can continue your educational content without being too pushy.

It’s all about creating a sense of authority and innovation within your industry. Those that actively attend trade shows, conferences, or other marketing events are not passive. They are engaged, and their presence at an event will make them hyper-aware of you and your competitors.

If you decide to exhibit at an event, be prepared to make it count. Here’s an infographic that you can save for when the time comes. And, good luck!  

Lead Liaison

Lead Nurturing Using Email

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Lead Nurturing is dying quickly, and marketers are to blame. People are overwhelmed by massive amounts of email; and even your biggest fans are starting to see “educational” materials as being spam.

If I want to learn, I tend to go to a podcast, blog, or specific website for information. Information has lost its value in today’s “Google world,”  in most cases with evergreen content. However, automated messaging has one very important purpose: drawing attention to timely content.

If you are not sending content that is directly tied to the point in time that you are sending it, you are wasting your time and the time of your audience. And, your lead nurturing efforts are going out the window.

Instead, send timely/relevant information to nurture your leads. Examples include:

  • Special time sensitive offers (Your $50 coupon is going to expire tomorrow!)
  • Seasonal information  (Christmas is 1 month away and if you don’t buy your tree right now, you’re going to pay twice as much and get a brown tree!)
  • Date specific information (Your check-up is coming up in 3 weeks!)
  • Contact your representative and let them know to vote a certain way for our organization
  • Your contract is up for renewal
  • You are offering a webinar or attending a trade show and would like to include them

If there isn’t a time sensitive reason to open and act upon your message, 92% of all people that read the first line in your email will delete it/push it off with the intention of reading late – or worse, unsubscribe! Of the 8% that do read your entire email, 96% of those readers will not act upon your email.

A few tips to get a higher response rate:

  • Reference why you are writing to them at this time. Do so in the first sentence.
  • Let them know a consequence of not acting in the next 48 hours.
  • If information is not time sensitive, don’t send it, or wait until that information has a time sensitive meaning.
  • If your information is “education-only” consider sending a one sentence email letting them know that based on what you knew about that person, that you thought they would find a way to immediately benefit from the information…and send it as a link to a landing page. No proThis will build some level of curiosity, and the brevity of the email isn’t as likely to get 1,000 of your contacts to roll their eyes in unison when they open your email.   Also it will give you a much more organic “content garden” which could help SEO and future marketing efforts.

In the case of lead nurturing campaigns, less is best. Your messages should build excitement to the recipient. In doing so, you will be adding to your brand’s emotional value; and increasing response rates by 100% or more.

Want to learn how to automate time-sensitive messages as a part of your lead nurturing? Let us show you how!

Lead Liaison

Evaluate and Focus your Lead Nurturing Strategies using Lead Liaison

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Evaluate and Focus your Lead Nurturing Strategies using Lead LiaisonHaving a diverse and complete lead nurturing strategy in place is a very important part of any overall marketing automation strategy. We’re excited to share some ideas on how you can focus your lead nurturing strategies. Lead Liaison’s built in lead nurturing tools can be extremely helpful in implementing a successful lead nurturing strategy; however, you need to be sure you are implementing the most complete and effective plan for regularly contacting your leads. Take some time to evaluate your current lead nurturing system by thinking about some of these common mistakes. Make sure you’re up to speed by reading over these best lead nurturing practices.

Common Lead Nurturing Mistakes

There are some very basic mistakes that, even though they are easy to fix, can derail any lead nurturing strategy. The most basic one is ignoring your leads. Focus your lead nurturing strategies by making sure unqualified leads are entered into a lead nurturing program to ensure every potential lead is contacted and engaged. On the other side of this is the issue of spamming leads. Excessive emails and social messaging contact is sure to eventually annoy and deter a lead, driving them to a competitor. Make sure that all the content that makes up your lead nurturing program is well put together and engaging – people notice when content is sloppy or off topic.

Another common mistake is not engaging in split testing your lead nurturing programs. Obviously, you should have different lead nurturing paths for different demographics of leads, but you shouldn’t be afraid to try different things within different groups. Different approaches yield different results, and you’ll quickly be able to see which approach gives you better results.

Best Practices for Lead Nurturing

One great way to focus your lead nurturing strategies is to engage a lead with your lead nurturing program’s content is by educating the customer. Inform the customer how your product can solve their various problems, or simply deliver informative content that is relevant to your business or industry. Add a personal touch, and be careful not to skew all of the information you deliver into a pitch for your product, if content is too biased it can turn a customer off. Do your best to add a personal touch to as much of your content as possible to help your lead nurturing communication connect with a lead.

Remember to integrate all of the various data that Lead Liaison’s marketing automation tools can deliver to your marketing team, and use that data to place the lead into the most effective lead nurturing program. On a higher level, make sure your sales team and your marketing team are communicating with one another and are generally in sync – both departments will be able to interpret different things about different leads and lead behavior.

Learn more about Lead Liaison’s other great marketing automation tools by visiting our website. Check out our marketing automation resource blog to learn more about how marketing automation can streamline your business.

Lead Liaison

Do You Know Which Leads Are More Likely To Become Customers?

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Do you know which leads are more likely to become customers?Do you know which leads are more likely to become customers? There’s nothing more exciting than a fresh new group of leads, all contacted through a successful marketing strategy and ready to be turned over to an eager sales staff. But as we all know an unfortunately small percentage of those leads, no how well they were acquired, will be ready to buy when they are contacted. So how do you know which leads are likely to become customers, and how do you help your staff contact those leads at the right time? Using a combination of tools available through Lead Liaison’s software and solutions you can help your marketing and sales staff capitalize on every opportunity.

Lead Liaison is able to offer these sorts of results by employing a variety of different approaches to information collection, analysis, and automated marketing solutions to keep leads engaged and accessible for the right moment for your team to make the sale. How does this work? It begins with the analysis of data gleaned from your website and other materials, which feeds into a sophisticated algorithm of lead grading and scoring to tell you’re sales team when a lead can be converted into a customer.

Analytics

One of the basic principles of creating an automated marketing solution for your company is gathering and examining the data that customers bring to your marketing team through their activity on your website and with other materials. Actions like web form conversion, email opens and social media activity inform your marketing team of what is working with customers and helps sales better understand the interest of their leads.

Buy signals are a real-time system of alerts that will communicate with your sales team when a potential lead performs an activity that exhibits a good chance to make a sale, such as a time-sensitive email click through or web form submission.

Lead Grading

Lead grading is a vital technique in helping your marketing team identify ideal buyers. Lead Liaison’s lead grading algorithms take a variety of factors into account, including job title, industry, geography and revenue to determine whether or not they are a good match for your product or service and thus would make a likely sale. These qualifications are fully customizable, letting your team develop the ideal customer for your company.

Using the data compiled by the lead grading algorithms, Lead Liaison’s software scores individual leads, and passes this data on to your sales team. Using the hot lead dashboard, Briefcase, your sales team will have all the information they need to know when a lead is ready to buy and have the information they need to make the sale. Information such as buy signals, overall activity and lead grade is delivered into the engine to create a complete picture of your potential customers.

Lead Liaison’s tools for helping your team know which leads are more likely to be converted to customers don’t end there. Visit our marketing automation blog to learn more about practices such as lead nurturing, which helps you turn cold leads into warm one.

 

Lead Liaison

Marketing Automation: Why Does Lead Nurturing Make Sense?

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Why does lead nurturing make sense?Lead nurturing, the marketing process of developing relationships with leads regardless of their current timing to purchase, is a straightforward concept. But many don’t realize the importance of lead nurturing or how it can help. Let’s look at lead nurturing and how it relates to marketing automation.

Why Lead Nurturing Makes Sense

One of the biggest pros for lead nurturing is the ability to market personalized messages to prospects. These messages can be generic in nature but personalized to an audience that’s only in Lead Stage 1 of marketing automation. These leads have only just entered the market and do not have a current timeline for purchasing.

It’s important if you’re looking into automation not to just send leads cold emails. Your first objective for beginning lead nurturing is to establish permission to stay in contact with the lead. If your audience loses interest in your messages, they’ll unsubscribe from your mailing list or mark emails as spam.

Target Your Leads

Make sure you’re creating content that your visitors want to see. The more you can find out about a lead who’s visited your website, the better. By creating high quality content that is relevant to your leads, you’re increasing the possibility of converting leads to customers significantly. Make sure that when sending out your messages, you’re not overdoing it. Ask yourself: when’s the best time to send messages so you can ensure your prospects will see them? Answer that and then tailor your messages to be sent out at the best possible time.

Another best practice for lead nurturing that might seem like it’s coming from the stone age, is using plain text emails instead of HTML. A few lines of content and a personalized signature go a long way toward establishing an individualized message, which is targeted to your audience. HTML based emails are fine when sending out training tips or when the emails are clearly coming from the marketing department and not the sales department.

When Lead Nurturing Works

Lead nurturing is a powerful way to use marketing automation to stay in touch with prospects. When it works, you’re able to establish purchaser preference while also gaining useful knowledge about your prospects timing. If you’re ready to take the next best step with lead nurturing and marketing automation, contact us today! Lead Liaison staff would love to chat with you about your company’s individual marketing needs.

Lead Liaison

Lead Nurturing Best Practices and Your Organization

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Lead Nurturing Best PracticesIt’s true that lead nurturing best practices are important to establishing good relationships with prospects, though many small businesses don’t really have the time or the resources to think about it. The act of adopting marketing automation into company processes is about giving your organization the ability to start nurturing leads and developing a deeper, more intensive and effective funnel over time. For many businesses, understanding the best ways to nurture leads aren’t a part of this process from the get-go.

When considering how to nurture leads for your business, it’s best to put yourself in your customer’s shoes. Here are some ideas on how you can get the type of familiarity that will help you best turn your prospects into completed conversions.

Lead Nurturing Best Practices

At minimum, nurturing leads is about developing a relationship of trust with your customers. Because many modern business relationships start and continue over the internet, the in-person, ‘human touch’ component of interaction and communication is sometimes lost.

To give you a good example, many of us would never buy a car over the internet without test driving it, feeling the steering wheel under our hands and being able to experience being in the car and seeing the exterior first-hand. With recent economic issues these past few years reducing the income of many, customers want to “feel out” your product or service and feel they’re getting the best bang for their buck before making a deeper commitment.

Take a step back and ask yourself how your website, self-presentation and various sales materials stand up to the test of time with regard to how much customers trust you. If your offering was a car, do customers get a good feel for the product and develop trust before making a big commitment?

Making it Personal

The more personality and trustworthiness you put across in your marketing materials, the more it’ll be likely that clients trust you over time. It’s important to give your marketing materials that personal touch – for example, if your business happens to be family owned, this is a great way to tell your clients more about you and establish that trust. Try writing a company blog or recording a video where you showcase members of your staff or a specific team.

Lead nurturing best practices are all about getting to know the client better and putting personalization into practice. Marketing automation can help you track data, and the right marketing automation team can help you figure out what your clients want to see from you before you even start tracking, as well as how to better nurture leads. Find out more by consulting with Lead Liaison’s friendly staff today!

Lead Liaison

Create Content That Nurtures Your Leads

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Create Content That Nurtures Your LeadsUse your inbound marketing strategies beyond lead generation—learn how to create content that nurtures your leads too. Once leads have been generated and placed into the appropriate sales funnel, it’s crucial to qualify leads accordingly and determine as quickly as possible if a lead is not interested in you.

There are several things to keep in mind when determining best practices for nurturing qualified leads. Segmenting your streams of prospects into nurture tracks that meet their needs, ensuring a personal touch on all communications, maintaining a two-way communication channel, and integrating sales teams with marketing teams are all productive steps to nurture leads. Another way to help nurture your leads closer to the buying stage is to provide them with interesting and relevant content. Here are a few ways to integrate this into your lead nurturing system already in place:

Educate your leads

Help them to make a smart buying choice by thoroughly letting them know their options. Provide original market research stats (or find a reliable source) that show them how others in the industry make buying decisions. Be sure not to skew it too much in favor of your brand, though, to assure them it is legitimate data.

Use analytics from marketing automation

Determine how your leads prefer to receive information—via email, blog content, white papers, etc. Your marketing automation software allows you to accurately monitor the activity on your site, record when leads are available to communicate with you, and enable you to nurture targeted segments of leads. With all of this data, you are informed to create content that nurtures your leads and provides what they’re already looking for.

Repurpose content

Get the most out of each piece of content you publish. Create an informative white paper and split it up into sections to publish as individual blog posts. Then create a slide deck out of these different sections, and finally voice over the slide deck to create a video. This provides four separate types of content you can use to nurture your leads. You might find that leads that have been qualified into a particular stream prefer video over white paper, so this makes a more personalized attempt to reach out to them.

In order to create content that nurtures your leads in the most effective way, you need to utilize your marketing automation process to get the best understanding of what it is that your leads want to know. This will give you the best odds in turning leads into customers through nurturing your leads with content marketing. When considering your lead nurturing campaigns, be sure that no lead goes unnoticed and that you contact them when you say you will. Here are five additional tips to make sure you don’t lose your leads before have the opportunity to nurture them.

Lead Liaison

Drip Marketing 101

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Not familiar with drip marketing? Now might be the time to get acquainted. Drip marketing is exactly what you’re probably thinking – it’s a process where you create marketing materials that go out to your customers slowly over time, hopefully converting them to your offering and building a dynamic relationship of trust.

Drip Marketing 101All good drip marketing starts with a concept. Since you are slowly converting customers to your products or services, it’s important to first determine what specific item you want to sell. In most cases, you’re not doing direct marketing – throwing the product in your customers’ faces and hoping they will bite. You are presenting them with a concept that you build up as the right choice to solve their individual problems.

So now that you’ve decided to drip, how do you decide what your concept should be, and where do you start?

Drip Marketing for Newbies

Drip marketing happens via email. Before you do anything else, it’s most important to identify a way that you can collect email addresses from your clients. If you only have email addresses from existing customers, your drip campaign will have to focus on getting further sales or increasing profitability with your current customer base.

We strongly recommend considering how you can collect email addresses for potential clients as well as current ones. You may want to ensure you have a newsletter sign-up on your website. You may consider offering premium content in exchange for an email address.

Nailing Down Your Content

For example, if you are selling camping equipment, you might make your content offering something like, “10 Tips to Make it in the Wild.” You could then start an auto responder on your current email service provider that goes out to your subscribing customers for a certain period of days. Regardless of what your industry is, you should be able to think of something you can offer your customers as premium content.

Many businesses start a drip campaign or auto responder and then never think about their drip marketing again- giving old and new customers the same information over and over again. The best way to approach running a drip marketing campaign is to analyze the results you get from your first campaign, and make adjustments accordingly. Many successful business owners run multiple drip campaigns with premium content going out to segmented users.

Segmenting your users can be tricky – but with Lead Liaison’s marketing automation dashboard, segmenting your audience and setting up your drip marketing campaigns is easier than ever before. To find out more information, contact us and let us connect you with a solution that works for your business!