Nurture Your Inbound Leads!
Today we’re discussing Hubspot’s Inbound Marketing University course on Inbound Lead Nurturing. (Don’t forget to check out last week’s on Calls to Action.) Today’s course is taught by Brian Carroll. In his course Carroll discusses 8 steps to develop an inbound lead nurturing process. But of course we need to start with what is lead nurturing? According to Carroll it is a relevant and consistent dialogue with viable potential customers, regardless of their timing to buy. It’s about being a resource for them.
1. Define Your Ideal Customer Profile
Who is your ideal fit? The most common criteria include: industry code, revenue, employee size, trigger events, and sphere of influence.
2. Your Universal Lead Definition
By defining your leads, it allows them to be scored and prioritized and also defines the degree of sales readiness. But it does require a buy in from your sales and marketing team.
3. Lead Qualification
In order to qualify your lead, create an inquiry form to confirm you have the right information. Then you can generate an automated inquiry email response. The goal here is to connect people with your organization. And if you have a phone number you can have a “relevant conversation” confirming their contact information, and asking for missing information. You can also get permission to have them “opt-in” for sales nurturing.
4. Understand and Capture Your Audience
This one is pretty self explanatory. By gathering information about your audience (in step 3) you can start to put together what your audience is all about, and thus can determine what content will be to best keep them.
5. Message Development
Make sure that in your message you are being relevant to how your leads work, what their functional role is, what are their anticipated needs, and what are their priorities and challenges.
6. Build Your Lead Nurturing Library
In order to build leads to nurture you must gather and filter for relevant content such as third party articles, relevant topics, and research reports. You can also search for things like company specific white papers, success stories, and webcasts. You should try to reuse available content before creating new content.
7. Develop Lead Nurturing Tracks
In this stage, determine how you best interact with your audience and figure out how your customers buy.
8. Executing Lead Nurturing
To start out, inbound lead nurturing requires a human touch. In this case you can use tools that make it easy to continue conversation. These tools can help track all touch points and measure results such as: percentage of contacts in your sphere of influence, the percentage that “opt-in” for nurturing, and the percentage that become “sales ready” leads.
Pretty simple, right? Don’t forget to check back next week for Successful Email Marketing Practices!
