Building relationships with potential customers is essential for eventually earning their business. That’s why a lead nurturing strategy should always be part of your marketing efforts that are helping leads solve their problems.
Why is Lead Nurturing Important?
This is your opportunity to provide value to your leads, that will then turn into your customers!
Learn more by watching the video below:
The Buyer's Journey
Before you start engaging with your leads, understand every step of their buyer's journey, and research how you can help them reach their goals at each stage.
For example, a lead in the awareness stage should not be touched by a sales rep. This lead is probably too far away from making a purchase. A premature approach is more likely to irritate the lead instead of help him/her to solve their current issue. So how do you help a person in the awareness stage?
Educate them for free!
Depending on the lead source, a blog post, a video, or social posts can help answer this person’s question and get them ready to move on to the next stage without the pressure of actually making a purchase.
The helpful tone and the goal of educating should continue throughout the buyer’s journey until the decision stage, when you can bring your sales team in to shine.
Elements of Lead Nurturing
After understanding the buyer’s journey, you need content that speaks to each stage, and a strategy to deliver this content to the right people at the right time.
You can prepare email drip campaigns, which are a series of emails to be automated. Avoid sounding too sales-y in the emails until the decision stage. Focus on being helpful and informative. Email marketing continues to be one of the most effective ways to reach your leads at a low cost.
Ebook/Whitepaper
These are often great opportunities to help someone in the consideration stage. Ebooks and whitepapers allow you to get a little bit deeper than a blog post. Remember to keep the ebook concise and easy to read while offering value.
Timely Touches
After your first contact with a lead, you want to make this relationship warmer one step at a time. Finding the balance between being helpful, but not invasive, is the best way to nurture a relationship. Therefore, scheduling emails, and responding to your potential customer in a timely fashion, is a great way to be remembered for great service.
Personalization
Now that you have some information about your lead, you can start offering more personalized content and answer more specific questions. Leave behind the generic language and show the lead that he/she is being heard and you have the resources they need to reach their goals.
Lead Nurturing in HubSpot
HubSpot has a variety of tools to automate your lead nurturing efforts so your marketing strategy can continue operating in the background while you perform other tasks. Here are some of our favorites:
Buyer Persona
You probably have your buyer personas defined, but what you might not know is that HubSpot has property called Buyer Persona where you can enter the name and description of your ideal customer, and use this property to label your leads. That takes us to our next item: segmentation.
Segmentation
Before you start automating anything, you need to find the right people by filtering them using the data you’ve collected. Once you have your buyer personas set, and all your properties are up to date, you need to use the filters to segment the leads.
If you want to view how many people share a common characteristic, simply use the desired filter under 'Contacts.'
To get a little bit more granular with filtering (with the end purpose of performing automation such as emailing), create lists.
Click 'Contacts' > 'Lists', and start segmenting the groups of people you are going to target with different content. Lists can be used for a single email send or workflows depending on how you are segmenting.
Workflows
Here is where the magic happens!
You have your content, you have segmented who is going to receive the content, and now you need to set this up for success in a workflow.
A workflow is a tool that automates your marketing and sales processes by segmenting your contacts, and generating the desired actions when the triggers are met. In this case, we want to send emails to a specific group of people to nurture them with free valuable content, and help them move on in the buyer’s journey.
In your HubSpot account, click 'Automation' > 'Workflows'. There, create one workflow for each target. Add triggers—which are basically the same filtering tool you saw in Lists - and connect the automated emails you prepared. Add the desired delay in between touches so your leads don’t forget you, and so they see the value you are offering.
Lead scoring
Similar to the Personas, the lead scoring tool in HubSpot is a property you can customize with the values you chose to evaluate a lead readiness for closing.
In your 'Settings', click on 'Properties' on the left, and search for HubSpot Score to add your companies’ attributes. When you start associating this property to your leads, it will give another way to segment and deliver the right content to the right person.
Learn all about Lead Scoring in the video below:
Now you know how to set up lead scoring in HubSpot, but deciding the numerical value you are going to add can be a little bit more complex depending on your processes. Analyze your data and talk to your sales team to discover what the best approach is to calculate your lead scoring.
Conclusion
That wraps up our post on what you need to know about the Lead Nurturing.
If you found this article helpful, you may also enjoy:
- HubSpot Email Marketing Tips for Successful Campaigns
- Learn How Chatbots Can Improve Conversational Marketing
If you are a HubSpot user and want to master the platform, feel free to contact us with any questions and book a Free Chat with one of our HubSpot experts.
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