Inbound Marketing Automation And Online Lead Nurturing- 5 Steps

  

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Or...Moving A 'Lead' Through The Funnel To 'Qualified Prospect' Status

Who is your ideal qualified prospect? What's their title? How big is the company they represent? What budget do they have for your solution? What's their timeline for engagement or implementation?...and the list goes on. These are all questions that you know the answers to for your company's business offering, the question is, how are you using the internet to qualify your top of the funnel leads in to a fully qualified prospect? Is it working for you? Is it cost efficient? What are you doing to improve the results? A possible solution is inbound marketing automation and specifically we're going to talk about the value of online lead nurturing in this post.

What is exactly is lead nurturing and how does inbound marketing automation help? Lead nurturing is a process and system that results in the creation of a fully qualified prospect that's ready to be handed over to your sales group for the final stages of developing a new client. It revolves around a series of emails designed to support the inquiry process of your target audience as they seek out a solution to the problem they have. By using inbound marketing automation your company can sort through the leads generated and develop highly qualified prospects and be at the top of their list as a potential solution provider.

When your company marketing efforts generate a lead, it requires follow-up in order to clarify what the problem is and to establish whether or not the solution you offer is appropriate. Of course this can be done manually. Your company can invest in having someone do research and call the lead, battle with gatekeepers, leave messages on voicemail and of course, this can and does work, the problem is it's time consuming and expensive. As the above graphic shows, "Only 25% of leads are legitimate and should go to sales." A well executed and fully automated internet lead nurturing campaign will allow your company to save money by sorting and qualifying your leads so that your sales team is spending time with qualified prospects ready to buy. All things being equal, this should result in shorter sales cycles, better closing results and improved profitability. So, what are the steps in planning an online lead nurturing campaign?

5 Basic Steps To Creating An Online Lead Nurturing Campaign

1. Establish your goals- This process will direct your entire campaign including the specific target audience, the content that's appropriate to use, and how you'll measure your success.
2. Specify the target audience and the problem your offering can help them solve- Your company may already have a clear marketing/buyer persona, if not, you may want to read this blog post for help on this subject. Be as clear as possible, this action really clarifies the content of the campaign. 
3. Select the content for the campaign- This doesn't mean that you create new content necessarily because you may already have content ready in house, what's really important is that you offer value. Don't try to make a sale, support your leads inquiry process with further information that you think will truly help them. Some examples are case studies, webinars, videos, previous blog posts, podcasts, etc. Your campaign can include special promotions and demo offers as well, but these shouldn't be your first follow-up contact.
4. Determine a timeline for sending your emails- This will vary depending on what a typical sales cycle is for your company, the shorter the cycle the more closely you can space your follow-up and the longer the cycle, you may want to space them further apart. Don't rush the sale, let it take it's course, patience is a virtue! As an example, if your cycle is 60 days, you might want to space your campaign for days 1, 15 and 25 after an initial lead conversion.
5. Measure and refine- Although it's the last step in this process it's perhaps the most important for ongoing inbound marketing automation and lead nurturing. Your analytics program shows what's working and what isn't is critical to reaching the goals you've set back in step 1. Make certain that you can track what happens with each email, so that you can continually modify your campaign for improvement.

What should you expect from your inbound marketing automation initiative? First off, it's important to realize that this is a process not an event. If you think you'll start off with a bang!...you might be disappointed. Be prepared to stay the course and work at improving each step along the way. Over time you'll see that the investment you make will pay off with:

1. More leads turning into qualified prospects
2. Lower client development cost
3. Shorter sales cycles
4. Real business growth from your web actions!

One of the most powerful aspects of using inbound marketing automation is it's long term value. Once you've developed a successful campaign it will continue working for you well into the future. Of course you may want to tweak along the way based on the data from your analytics, but basically once it's set up, your lead nurturing will continue to work for you, with no pay raise, no holiday time, no complaints, 24/7...now, who doesn't want that?

We're at the edge of the future!

Do you want to see if inbound marketing is right for your company? Contact us and let's see if we can help!