Having visitors on your website is no longer enough, the real challenge is to have an efficient conversion tunnel. That’s why entrepreneurs and salespeople with a well-defined digital strategy put a lot of effort into lead nurturing. It should be noted that lead nurturing is a B to B oriented practice.
Lead Nurturing and Inbound Marketing: attracting to yourself
Lead Nurturing is part of a global Inbound Marketing strategy. Inbound marketing is a marketing strategy that aims to bring the customer to you. It’s a strategy that favors the creation of high value-added content for prospects to attract their attention and then bring them to the end of the conversion tunnel.
Inbound marketing is about respecting the privacy of potential customers. Traditional marketing has always tended to favour “outbound marketing”, which consists of bombarding prospects with intrusive messages, hoping to land on potential customers. The fundamental difference between Outbound Marketing and Inbound Marketing is the way the company will convey its message in order to create a positive reaction in the prospect. Indeed, strategies related to outbound marketing (advertising, billboards, direct email campaigns…) have less and less impact, as prospects are now immune to this kind of practice. Moreover, they even tend to react negatively to intrusive campaigns. Lead Nurturing is the crucial phase during which prospects must be converted into customers. Content creation is the core of a good lead nurturing strategy.
Implementing a Lead Nurturing strategy
A winning lead nurturing strategy consists of feeding your prospects with qualitative, relevant and personalized content.
“79% of leads are not converted into sales. The lack of a lead nurturing strategy is the main cause of this poor performance” according to Marketing Sherpa.
The buyer persona
Just as a company needs a target market, your lead nurturing campaigns should also be aimed at a highly targeted audience. If your campaign is about feeding everyone, you are acting in a vacuum, and that helps no one. Knowing your prospect means identifying the type of content that might interest them. Companies determine the buyer persona: the socio-demographic profile of their buyers.
Segmentation of the prospect/customer database
In addition, many companies are taking this a step further by establishing a Lead Scoring: a personalised scoring system that identifies prospects with a greater buying potential.
It is also very important to be able to locate the position of the prospects in the sales tunnel, in order to be able to deliver an adapted speech.
Relevant content and personalized approach
In order to capture the attention of prospects in the digital age, the relevance of content will make the difference between two service providers. The content must be strategically developed in order to elicit an action from the prospect. In addition, each email sent must correspond to the precise situation in which your prospect finds himself. Nowadays, the prospect expects to have a personal conversation with his service provider. Information that is too generalized does not yield a return on investment.
Workflow and Calendar
The workflow consists of creating a work flow to follow the evolution of the interactions with the prospect during the lead nurturing campaign. It is therefore consistent to have a calendar in parallel with the workflow, in order to follow the progress of the prospect in the conversion tunnel.
Lead Nurturing in Mauritius
Lead Nurturing and Inbound Marketing are still unknown to the general public in Mauritius. Companies are more inclined towards outbound marketing with traditional campaigns. Digital marketing, however, continues to grow over the years. It would not be surprising to see a craze for strategies related to Inbound Marketing thanks to the low costs of these operations and the rate of return on investment. In addition, lead nurturing can create competition between service providers on the basis of high value-added content. This kind of practice would have a positive impact on research, innovation and strategic thinking of players in the market. In addition, this would lead to the emergence of specialists in Inbound Marketing and Lead Nurturing.
