Digital lead generation strategies make it their primary purpose to increase the visibility of the business’s website. The goal isn’t popularity for its own sake (being number one on Google might make your SEO consultant happy, but it won’t, on its own, bring you any sales), but to attract higher numbers of website visitors.
When you reach the position of having a steady stream of people visiting your website, reading your blog posts, and spilling over into your social media accounts to share your content, you can congratulate yourself for doing a good job, but high traffic is only part of the picture. The next stage, and the most important part of the process, is to nurture these website visitors through the sales and marketing funnel into paying customers. Before this, website traffic numbers are just statistics – they make no difference to your bottom line.
Here are four reasons to implement a lead nurturing strategy alongside your lead generation efforts, and how doing so can help increase your conversion rate.
1) Establish A Relationship Quickly
When someone makes contact through your website, blog, or social media platform, you have a very narrow window to establish contact. The faster you do so, the more likely it is you will clinch a sale. Using a marketing automation platform, like HubSpot, ensures you never miss a lead by automatically sending welcome and thank you emails to new prospects, and implementing a personalised series of email communications to keep in touch with your new lead.
2) Keep In Touch
If leads don’t respond to your first communication, be persistent. If communication suddenly drops off, the lead may quickly forget about you, or presume you’re not interested. So long as a prospect has opted into your newsletter list, it’s okay to send them several ‘touches’, including relevant content, incentives, and special offers, to tempt them to engage.
3) Understand Your Prospects
To nurture your leads into customers, you have to understand the ways in which your product or service addresses their day-to-day problems. Get into the mindset of your ideal buyers by creating one or more buyer personas, with particular attention paid to the challenges they face and the solutions you offer. Use this information to provide targeted and relevant content to your prospects through email. This increases the chance of engagement and gives you further avenues with which to promote your services as the answer to their problems.
4) Save Time And Money Through Automation
The main reason many businesses fail to nurture their leads is the time it takes. By implementing a marketing automation solution, you can save a lot of time and money. For example, HubSpot lets you set up drip feed email campaigns in advance, with specific pieces of content sent to prospects automatically if they visit a certain webpage or click a link. Special triggers can alert you to particularly noteworthy behaviours, such as a prospect visiting your prices page several times within the same week.
What Next?
To find out more about lead generation and lead nurturing, and how working with an agency like JDR can help increase your new customer acquisitions and total sales revenue, please get in touch today for an initial assessment of your needs.
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