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On the mention of "lead nurturing," the very first thing that usually comes to mind is "emails." Of course, email remains one of the most efficient and effective ways to communicate and market our products to our audience. It is also one of the most economical, as it delivers the lowest cost-per-customer-acquisition rates amongst all marketing mediums out there.
However, with everything continually changing daily, the habits of our target audience are not left out. Therefore our tactics and strategies to nurture them through our sale cycle must follow suit and change as well. It is no longer possible for businesses to maintain that linear distribution path for content as they must now adapt to where their target audience “lives” on the web, taking advantage of more channels and intelligent software.
A good question you might want to ask is if multi-pronged lead nurturing approach actually works better. The answer to this is “Yes!” it does. And it also delivers a better lead to customer ratio which is a reliable indicator of success. In this write-up, we will be revealing 5 of the most effective lead nurturing tools for smart marketing to promote your business.
1. Social Media
The power of social media cannot be overlooked as it has done a lot of wonders for inbound marketing and contents. Mainly since it has the capacity to enhance something that most businesses are interested in, which is the capability of engaging in a 1 on 1 conversation with their target audience. Also, it is worthy of note to know that with the billions of messages being exchanged daily on the social media, it can easily be counter-intuitive. So how then can we take advantage of the social media for effective lead nurturing?
You can make use of what is commonly called “streams.” This involves monitoring social activity based on keywords that are related to your business with the use of powerful marketing software. A typical example of a keyword focused stream is one that is just created for sales and gets tweets on Twitter that are related to your business, like "product x & y differences" "advice on product y" etc. This will present you with an opportunity to slide in and have a conversation with the individual directly and provide a solution to their problems.
2. Timely follow-ups
According to research carried out, the odds of a lead getting qualified are about 21 times more when the users are contacted under five minutes compared to after 30 minutes that an inbound lead converts on a typical website. This is enough to show the importance of timely follow-ups. A lot of businesses are not making use of this effectively. The purpose of automated lead nurturing is still without any doubt the very best way to convert leads into a qualified sales opportunity.
3. Remarketing / Retargeting
Wouldn’t it be awesome if you can present your service or product to a contact on other online social networks just after they have signed up, or downloaded your free eBook? It will surely be great, and a lot of online companies have made this possible by spawning a new marketing strategy that is called “remarketing” or “retargeting.”
The first thing you need to know and understand about remarketing is that it costs some token. Therefore if it is not within your budget to increase your spending a bit, this might not be a good option for you. But this tool has gone a long way in proving its efficiency by increasing the conversions for a lot of B2C as well as B2B companies since more than 96% web user's first-time visitation does not convert. Remarketing can be leveraged by following the following tips.
Boosting your audience: This can be done through many ways that include ‘"look-alike" contacts,' "contact list segments," "pixel interactions" as well as "targeting marketing contents."
Selecting your medium: Carefully choosing the network that will suit your remarketing strategy best. Decide if your audience are a big Twitter or Facebook user.
Start and Optimize: Now that you are aware of who exactly you are going after, the contents they want, as well as, the medium, it’s time to set the ball rolling. It might be of advantage for you to check in on your progress weekly. You should ensure that all messages and images are well optimized to steadily improve your ROI as well as your performance.
4. Offline marketing
While inbound marketing methodology is still a very effective strategy, one cannot rule out the effect of a well-targeted and executed phone call or direct mail. This works well when your target audience communicates well to more tactile marketing initiatives. You should always ensure that all your offline activities are tied to some online component to make them measurable.
For example, if you organize a trade show, you should ensure that all the attendees fill out some landing page form making use of an iPad to gather their information instead of just having a sales rep collect their card. In fact, you should try to come up with a short workflow that immediately sends a follow-up email and also connect them with a local rep in their area.
5. Smart content
The concept of smart content can be said to be one that is relatively new in the world of digital marketing and focuses on the general idea of personalization. However, smart content does much more than the usual first name / last name thing.
Your site visitors, as well as your contacts, all have some specific characteristics as well as properties such as their job role, lifecycle stage as well as their location. There are several software out there that can leverage this information to provide them custom content, as well as images based on this information.
This further brings about trust on your website in the mind of the user, and there is a higher likelihood of further engaging with you. For instance, you go to the site of a national plumbing company and just as you get there, it brings information on their local offices that are near to you which will save a lot of digging on their website. As you can guess, it will aid your contact with them and prompt them to request for an estimate.