Discover The 5 Major Aspects Of A Successful Lead Nurturing Campaign

As the marketplace moves online, the majority of leads are not going to do business with you in the first instances. Lead nurturing becomes a key component of one-to-many marketing automation. The whole experience of the way leads interact with marketers and receive input from them becomes more process-based and systematic. Marketers can now collate a complete set of data based on the leads’ history of interaction to qualify them further down the marketing funnel.

This ‘input’ that marketers offer to leads is valuable content that educates, keeps them engaged and warms them up. A consistent and automated dissemination of content establishes a strong brand presence at the top of prospects’ minds even as leads and marketers do not meet, until the leads send a strong signal like filling in a telephone number in a form or agreeing to a product demonstration. When online lead nurturing can produce such revealing data, that’s how powerful and effective the marketing process can become.

Consider the following factors in setting up a proper lead nurturing campaign:

1) Set your goals.

In popular understanding, there are 3 parts to a marketing funnel:

a) ToFU (Top Of The Funnel or Awareness stage): The prospect is experiencing a problem and requires knowledge to better understand what he is going through and why.

b) MoFU (Middle Of The Funnel or Consideration stage): Having understood and defined the problem, the prospect is considering the various options to solving it.

c) BoFU (Bottom of The Funnel or Decision stage): The prospect has shortlisted possible solutions to his/her problem and will finalize his purchase decision.

The goals of each part of your funnel is to prepare your leads with the necessary information and usher them to the next part. They always have a choice to opt out, thereby disqualifying themselves out of the funnel, but you want to focus on the leads that remain in the funnel.

2) Define your market persona.

Before the marketing process begins, you must first define the type of prospects to target. Instead of spending important advertising dollars on drawing in the wrong set of prospects, construct a market persona based on the majority of your customers and concentrated around their needs and wants. By creating a buyer persona and nailing down your clients’ needs, lifestyles and even apprehensions, you will have the capacity to think of a ready answer to address your clients’ challenges. By placing ourselves in the shoes of our prospects, we can better preempt their purchasing decision. It’s so much more effective to zero in on the right leads this way because it is very difficult to measure the degree of favorable response to mass marketing.

To give you a hint, you can start by asking current customers or prospects the following questions:

Role:

  • What is your job role? Your job title?
  • How is your job measured?
  • What is a typical day?
  • What skills are required?
  • What knowledge and tools do you use?
  • Who do you report to? Who reports to you?

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Goals:

  • What are you responsible for?
  • What does it mean to be successful in your role?

Challenges:

  • What are your biggest challenges?
  • How do you overcome these challenges?

Company:

  • What industry or industries does your company work in?
  • What is the size of your company (revenue, employees)?

Watering Holes:

  • How do you learn about new information for your job?
  • What publications or blogs do you read?
  • What associations and social networks do you belong to?

Personal Background:

  • Age
  • Family (single, married, children)
  • Education

Shopping Preferences:

  • How to you prefer to interact with vendors (email, phone, in person?)
  • Do you use the Internet to research vendors or products? If yes, how do you search for information? What types of websites do you use?

As your leads answer these questions, you will find it easy to segment them in order to present to them the most appropriate content in their context. It also demonstrates your perfect understanding of their needs and challenges at any particular point in time, thereby maximizing the impact of your marketing messages.

3) Design your content

As you are already aware, the content in your emails plays a major part in lead nurturing by influencing the thinking process of your readers to be in line with your goals. The mindset behind your writing is to identify a problem and the need to solve it, impart knowledge and benefits, and emphasize action and accompanying results on the readers’ part. The regularity of messages queued and released on schedule within a workflow enables you to build ongoing relationships with your prospects/clients while keeping them engaged.

Although the content may be carried within emails, the content itself can take many forms, like a whitepaper, blog post, video, webinar, infographic etc. You could start with offering general advice that reflects the depth of expertise your company has. Instead of mentioning your products or services straight away, write some tips that your readers can easily apply themselves to solve low-level problems when they are in the ToFU or BoFU stage.

Overdeliver in this aspect of content marketing to the point when you have no choice but to propose a commercial solution to a larger or high-level problem. By then, your leads should also feel comfortable and find you trustworthy as a solutions provider. Even so, there is yet another way to qualify different types of buyers according to low-ticket, mid-ticket and high-ticket purchases. It is not very often that prospects will buy big-ticket items if they can’t perceive such a value. You can “whet their appetite” for future purchase by offering a cheap product like a more exclusive e-book, a recorded video tutorial, a 2-hour solutions-based coaching session etc. And only when they are ready that you can invite them for a free demonstration or trial use to orientate them for your flagship product.

Therefore consider how your emails are designed to deliver content that guide your leads along a well-defined buyer’s journey.

4) Set a timeline for your marketing funnel

This correlates with point 3 regarding the length of time by which you can afford to overdeliver on free content to nurture your leads. Although there is no fixed rule of thumb to how long the time could be, it is said that 75% of your leads buy within 18-24 months. It also depends on the degree of sophistication of the product or service you are selling. How you come to settle down on a definite timeline depends on how much content you have come up with and how you space them out at regular intervals. Be free to experiment with the way you sequence your content delivery, but it is of utmost importance that you must trust yourself that you did all you can to win over your prospects with your selling proposition, and thereafter you must discard the leads whom you perceive as remaining disinterested.

5) Define metrics for marketing campaign performance

Testing and tracking for results remains to be an integral business practice for all forms of marketing, therefore you must define the result metrics of your lead nurturing campaign or sales cycle, such as email open and click-through rates, social media reach (retweets, Facebook likes, fan/follower growth rates, impressions, shares etc.) and lead conversion rate. Metrics are the details that tie in with the goals mentioned in point 1.

As time goes, you will begin to discern and separate the non-performing marketing strategies from the good ones, and you want to improve or filter out the non-performers and concentrate more energy on the ones that work. Results will influence your future decisions on how to tweak the offers you send, the email subject lines, calls-to-action, content, landing page design etc. As the saying goes, “the biggest room in the world is the room for improvement.”

There you have it: the 5 major aspects of a successful lead nurturing campaign. In summary, you first determine your goals and metrics and how long you expect to reach them, know who you are targeting and identify what content to disseminate. The setup process can be time-consuming, but in the spirit of Inbound Marketing*, ultimately it will be beneficial to improving your lead quality at lower cost and your bottom line.

Are you generating enough leads for your business? Not satisfied with the quality of your leads as you hoped for? If you like us to examine your lead nurturing process, call us or write to us for a free consultation so we can give you a FREE website assessment and take your business to the next level!

Nelson Tan is an Inbound Marketing consultant at iSmart Communications, an integrated marketing communications agency serving the Asia-Pacific region.

Discover 3 Inbound Marketing Strategies For Your Business Expansion

 
 
 
 
Discover 3 Inbound Marketing Strategies For Your Business Expansion

Let’s recall the last time you were out in the street and an enormous billboard caught your attention. Did you immediately visit the advertised website? Or did you proceed on your journey without remembering?

This is a prime example of a fizzled endeavor at an outbound marketing strategy. Consider those “in your face” advertisements you see regularly like those promotions at the sides of buses or taxis or the large print ads taking up 50% of the newspaper. Does this style lure you to find out more about the offer?

Most likely not. Not only outbound marketing “pushes out” ads without a targeted audience or demographic in mind, it regularly consumes up your advertising dollars quicker than you can say, “Where are my revenues?”

What marketers today should know is that effective marketing doesn’t have to appeal to the masses in order to see a return, but instead concentrate on creating remarkable or compelling content that attracts people by piquing their interest. This type of advertising is known as Inbound Marketing. I share the following 3 Inbound marketing strategies that can develop your business and get results.

1. Construct A Buyer Persona

You have a business. You offer an item or service. Customers are your best supporters as they trust your brand and use it. They picked YOUR business to purchase from and not from your competitors. Instead of spending important advertising dollars on drawing in the wrong set of prospects, construct a buyer persona based on the majority of your customers and concentrated around their needs and wants. By creating a buyer persona and nailing down your clients’ needs, lifestyles and even apprehensions, you will have the capacity to think of a ready answer to address your clients’ challenges. By placing ourselves in the shoes of our prospects, we can better preempt their purchasing decision. Beyond that, you can foster a closer relationship with existing customers as they begin to adore your brand and unreservedly evangelize it. It’s so much more effective to zero in on the right leads this way because it is very difficult to measure the degree of favorable response to outbound ads.

2. Build Trust With Content Creation

Effective Inbound marketers must continually engage prospects with informative content. Offering guidance, learning tips, or answers to their inquiries encourages readers to identify closely with your brand. Content design also takes on a variety of creative approaches: blogging, vlogging, e-books, infographics, videos, webinars, social media publishing etc. As time goes, content becomes the vehicle with which marketers lead prospects through their marketing funnel, ultimately winning them over for the sale. Yes, the sales result is paramount, but I must emphasize the use of content in establishing and building trust in the minds of prospects. When a prospect completely comprehends and believes in your brand, it is natural that they become willing customers.

3. Be Active On Social Media

Consider these statistics as revealed in a HubSpot study:

  1. Internet users spend 4 times more time on Facebook than Google
  2. Number of active users on:
    • Facebook: 1.3 billion
    • Twitter: 645 million
    • LinkedIn: 300 million
    • Google+: 300 million

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  3. 74% of marketers saw an increase in traffic after spending just 6 hours per week on social media
  4. At least 35% of marketers have acquired customers on Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter

Social media publishing and engagement is therefore integral to your Inbound strategy in converting visitors to leads and acquiring and supporting customers. When you keep customers happy, they can be evangelists for your brand. Their public displays of delight will appeal to their connections and your prospects too!

The more you apply social media marketing, the sooner you will encounter more in-depth strategies, but let’s start with fulfilling basic requirements:

  1. Consider the frequency you are going to publish/post on the 4 major social networks: Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn. Plan out the regular timings for your posts so that your fans and followers can readily anticipate them.
  2. Show your personality. Don’t be afraid to show what makes you, your company and corporate culture special and enjoyable to work or associate with.
  3. Design your content presentation. As mentioned earlier, mix up the form of your content with images, videos, downloads, blog posts, quotes, polls, questions etc., but take into account the appropriateness/suitability of the content form for a particular social network, the publishing timing and the persona of your readers. 80% of your content should be interesting and helpful and 20% can be promotional.
  4. Know your buyer persona. I keep coming back to the ‘persona’ because it is important and unavoidable. In the context of social media, knowing your buyer persona thoroughly allows you to get content to them at the right place at the right time. Consider these questions:
    1. Where are they spending time on the Internet?
    2. Which networks? Is it only the big 4 or a niche site targeted at people in the same industry or interest?
    3. Why are they there? For business or pleasure?
    4. Most importantly, what sort of content do they want to read and share?

Taking everything into account, Inbound marketing is about giving and winning client steadfastness as opposed to beating a message into prospects’ heads and trusting it will stick. By applying the 3 fundamental Inbound marketing strategies as stated, brands will eventually see enormous returns for their efforts on less advertising dollar expenditure.

Nelson Tan is an Inbound Marketing consultant at iSmart Communications, an integrated marketing communications agency serving the Asia-Pacific region.

Discover 5 Powerful Methods For Designing Your Buyer Persona

One of the biggest mistakes that causes businesses to fail is the merchants ultimately failing to meet the demands and expectations of customers. In other words, the merchants do not know who their customers are. Even if they have great products or services, if they fail to align what they offer with what their customers want, they are simply barking up the wrong tree.

No customers, no business, no sales. It is as simple as that. Therefore it is important to define the type of prospects to target. Instead of spending important advertising dollars on drawing in the wrong set of prospects, construct a customer profile based on the majority of your customers and concentrated around their needs and wants. By creating a buyer persona and nailing down your customers’ needs, lifestyles and even apprehensions, you will have the capacity to think of a ready answer to address your customers’ challenges. By placing ourselves in the shoes of our prospects, we can better pre-empt their purchasing decision.

There are 5 ways you can research your buyer persona:

1) Online Retrieval Of Demographics Data

The process is pretty instantaneous and all you need to do is input product keywords or URLs of other people’s websites that are similar to your business (or your competitors’) into AdWords Display Planner. These are the steps:

a) Go to http://adwords.google.com
b) Click “Tools”, “Display Planner”
c) Select “Show only estimates for my targeting criteria”.
d) Enter a URL or product keyword
e) Click “Get estimates”.

You get a results display that looks like below:

planner

But as you can see, the data is very limited to age, gender and device usage.

Alexa is another website that can provide demographics intelligence but unless you upgrade, you are just as much limited to gender, education and browsing location data.

focusgroup

2) Interview Your Prospects And Customers (Pre-Sales)

This is surely one of the most effective way to get a sense of the majority demographic of your customers, but you need to ask the right questions. Here is a sample list:

How old are they?
What is their gender?
Where do they live?
What is their job?
What is their education level?
How do they prefer to stay contactable?
What is their ethnic background?
How much do they earn?
What is their marital status?
How do they spend their free time?
Which newspaper, books or magazines do they read?
What is their favorite TV channel?
What are their hopes and dreams?
What do they wear?
What are their political and religious views?
What are their biggest fears? What keeps them awake at 3am?
What makes them happy?
What frustrates them?
What do they find most relaxing?
What do they talk about with their friends?
Which appeals to them more: function or aesthetic?
What are their hobbies or interests?
What are their attitudes towards certain issues?

You can organize focus groups, walk-in sessions, on-site visits, or make phone calls to conduct interviews. You can also publish the questions in a web page through which visitors can submit their answers collated in an email sent to you.

survey

3) Surveys (Post-Sales)

Conduct surveys to get feedback from customers about their purchases. It could be an immediate, short post-sales survey about the checkout experience, ot a survey that occurs one month after purchase to gauge user experience. The answers your customers give you can reveal much about how and what they think, and could be surprisingly quite apart from pre-sales answers in terms of scope or alignment. Sometimes customers may use the occasion to inquire about other products/services. All these information can make you consider if the major customer demographic is thinking along the same line, and whether you need to tweak your marketing strategies based on the survey answers.

Popular online survey tools include Foresee, Qualaroo, SurveyMonkey and WebEngage.

pastpurchase

4) Look At Past Purchases

Supposed you have a range of products or services. Over a period of time, it becomes apparent to you that some offers sell better than others. Your sales results can tell you what the marketplace needs most, therefore you can reconsider your marketing strategies to target the most in-demand customer segment of the marketplace.

smengagement

5) Social Media Engagement

Social media puts you on the frontline of direct communication with prospects and customers. By monitoring and observing what they say about your industry and products/services, you gain first-hand insights into their expectations. It is also a great time to resolve any issues or complaints that they may have. Doing so in a prompt manner not only reflects that there is real customer support that cares, but also your pursuit towards customer satisfaction.

Also investigate online forums and Q&A sites like Quora. These sites are great resources for problem solving. By researching for solutions, you can better understand how to help your own prospects and position your products/services in a way that shows you really know your customers’ problems.

Customer research is a long-drawn process and it is never-ending because the marketplace keeps changing. However, the benefits of targeting the right customers are enormous. For one thing, repeat sales from old-time customers are easy to get. A high level of customer loyalty exists because your ability to know customers inside out will make them feel they are well attended to. They will even evangelize and refer new customers to you, thereby exponentially growing your business.

Good business does not start with a great product or service, or great know-how or a high efficiency in daily operations. It is simply knowing your customers like they are your friends, and it is a great untold secret to sales riches.

Nelson Tan is an Inbound Marketing consultant at iSmart Communications, an integrated marketing communications agency serving the Asia-Pacific region.