5 Things to consider when crafting your nurture program

Ok, so “nurturing” leads becoming part of our marketing vocabulary. While it is becoming overused many people either misunderstand what it really means or have a hard time translating “nurturing” into a marketing activity. Here are 5 things you need to consider when crafting a nurturing program.

1. Make sure your organization understands what lead nurturing is and why marketing needs to do it. “Companies do not buy, people do”, thus branding, PR, and tradeshows that are highly though after are not responsible alone for the qualified leads your sales people are looking for. Since “people” are the ones who buy and make decisions, it is the “relationship” you create with the lead after acquiring them, that will count. Lead nurturing is the new era of marketing because prospects are more experienced given that now-a-days they can do their own research online, they understand that they can solve their problems many different ways and through various companies, and they are no longer respond well to “car salesman” type selling. Therefore, today you need a new approach that will set you a part from your competition. However, you better do it now, because a decade from now lead nurturing and marketing automation will no longer be a new approach, but will become the norm. Thus, you might want to rip its benefits while you can! Today only about two thousand companies have marketing automation (the software used to create nurturing campaigns) implemented. However, it will not be long before the rest of the companies understand that the only way they can build trust and develop a relationship with their audience is by creating a dialogue with their leads, customers or partners.

2. Who will you nurture? Leads, qualified leads, opportunities, partners or customers? Each group can and should be nurtured but many companies think they only have to nurture leads and even from the leads they only nurture new leads. In order to recover the thousands of dollars you spent on your leads and get the most out of your database you should create various nurture campaigns based on segments. Not all of your leads are the same thus they should not all be communicated the same message! You can segment by industry key factors, job functions, buying authority, size of companies, by key buying criteria, or pain points and titles, whatever your company segments by. For example, you will need to highlight a different side of your solution to an executive who is held more and more accountable for compliance failures and wants better reporting on current liabilities than to an IS/IT Manager who supports a network and is worried about cost and time spent on maintenance. If you do not know what your company's segmentation is then you could do a couple of exercises to find out. Examine the opportunities you won last year, look at their history and look for the basic similarities, have a brain storming session with your sales group, and find out what attributes respond to what messages better based on their experiences.

3. Your content.. What ever you decide to use (webinars, case studies, ebooks, podcasts, etc.) need to have one thing in common, can’t describe how it does what it does, its components, what electrical gizmo makes it a jewel for your company, and what technical part you are proud of or got an award for! While your company cares about this stuff, leads couldn’t care less. What they want to know is what benefits does it offer to them as an individual, what benefits does it offer to their industry problem and how would it solve their particular issues. Thus, your content needs to emphasize business needs and the benefits. Your “solutions” can be mentioned as a lasting answer to their problems, and what they are interested in without too much technical information. NO GIVING AWAY STEAK KNIFES!!! NO 50% OFF PROMOTIONS! That is not lead nurturing, but Lead Nurturing suicide. It is not geared for relationship building but based on the old car sales man’s mentality and you will lose even the very few who started to take note of your company / solutions.

4. Clean your Database! Why? Because if you don’t than your open and click rates most likely will be below the industry standards. Most companies do not realize that when they implement a nurturing program they are sending prospect communications to their clients, partners, competitors, their own employees, and other not marketable entities. If you remove these unqualified records and duplicates, your open and click rate can double or even triple. It is not uncommon that one third of a database is not marketable. You also need to consider that some of your contact records are indeed leads. They became opportunities one time or another but did not turn into clients. Thus, you should note all customers as customers and nurture all other contact/lead records as you nurture any lead record.

5. Implement Lead Scoring and Create a Lead Process! There is absolutely no need to do lead nurturing if the leads will not have a specific path to go through and as they advance are not moved to different buckets. Sales should only have qualified leads in their buckets. All other leads should be in a centralized lead bucket to be nurtured. But based on what will they move from marketing to sales? Well most companies that are utilizing a marketing automation system are using a scoring method. Certain explicit and implicit info are more important than others as they show more interest or a more valuable lead for sales than others. Review all possible attributes and actions a lead can make and discuss their value with your sales department. Set a threshold score and anything above that score should be assigned as a qualified lead to your sales department.

There are many other things you should consider when crafting your nurture programs such as testing, number of steps and tracks in a campaign, reporting, etc., that are equally important. However, the above stated 5 points should give you a head start and can make a huge difference when crafting your program.

If you would like to receive more information on all aspects of lead nurturing than feel free to visit www.GenerationOmarketing.com