Successful lead nurturing campaigns

You can’t just throw content at passers-by and hope it’ll stick. You need lead nurturing. Inbound content marketing is an ordered, regular stream of content and prompts that guides the lead down the funnel, step by step.

These ten lead-nurturing tips will have you driving up traffic, boosting conversions, closing deals and continually delighting your customers:

Engage

• Acquire your ideal target. Develop buyer personas so that you know who you’re directing your content at. You don’t want to attract just any Tom, Dick or Harry to your site; you want to attract the right people – potential customers.
• Attract. Entice your ideal customer to your website using blog posts, keywords and social media. Give them what they want, not what you want to give them. This means relevant advice, information and insight.
• Optimise for your personas. SEO optimisation alone is not enough. You have to optimise your content for both search engines and your target personas. In fact, by creating quality content that resonates with your ideal buyers, you’ll naturally improve your SEO. This means tapping into the main issues of your personas and the keywords they use in search queries.

Convert

• Tighten up your copy. Trim the fat and put a spring in its step. Visitors may only spend about 20 seconds on your website so you need to make sure your copy’s sparkling. Write less, be conversational and direct, cut the hype, avoid the passive and make it punchy and scannable.
• Create leads. You don’t want your website visitors to just read something, you want them to do something. Develop long-form valuable content such as eBooks and white papers that provide real value to your site visitors and use the magic call-to-action (CTA)–landing page–thank you page formula to offer this content in exchange for visitor details such as name, email address, company size etc.
• Track your leads. Once you’ve converted a visitor into a lead, you can track their behaviour on your website and across your various marketing channels. Which product pages have they visited most often? Which emails are they opening and clicking on? How often do they visit the blog? This information can help you nurture and qualify leads for the sales team.
• Nurture your leads. Turn leads into qualified leads with automated email lead nurturing campaigns, social media engagement and more valuable, targeted content. Use tracking data to aim specific content at different personas at different stages in the buying process to  engage them better.

Close

• Close the deal. Seal the deal with bottom of the funnel offers, such as free trials, demos and case studies. Case studies are particularly useful in providing social proof: if other people like it, it must be good. They lend credibility to your claims of excellence.
• Measure, refine, optimise. Use the data from your closed loop reporting, site visitor tracking, email analytics, etc to measure and refine your marketing efforts. Run A/B tests to increase click-through rates on calls-to-action, optimise landing pages and tweak product descriptions. Use your data to ensure you never stop improving.
• Delight your customers. Content marketing doesn’t end at the sale. Creating how-to guides and best practices, as well as interacting with customers through social media and email, helps convert customers into promoters. This helps spread the good word and attract more of the traffic you want.