We are continuing our series on marketing funnels by looking at the middle of the marketing funnel — Lead Nurturing. To read about building your marketing funnel or how to generate more leads, please follow the links. 

Lead nurturing is important to growing your business because you are taking the leads you have generated and moving them closer to making a purchase. Not everyone is ready to make a purchase when they first discover your business, 

Rather than give up on anyone who does not immediately make a purchase, you want to capitalize on any interest by collecting their contact information and nurturing the lead so that when they are ready to make a purchase you are top of mind.

Nurturing leads helps you generate a steady stream of incoming revenue by helping people who might otherwise not see value in your product or service better understand how you can help them. 

Let’s look at how you can develop a lead nurturing plan.

Create A Customer Persona

The first thing you want to do is better understand who you hope to attract and eventually nurture. You must remember that your target audience is the reason you are doing this, so they must remain at the forefront of your planning. 

You can start by creating a customer persona or avatar of your ideal customer. This avatar will help you better visualize who you are attempting to attract and engage. With this avatar in mind, you will better understand where your ideal customer is getting their information, their most pressing needs, and how you can address those needs. 

Create A Marketing Content Plan

Once you have your customer persona, you can now create a content marketing plan to engage your ideal customers. The goal with your marketing content is to provide value to your audience. If it has no value, then there is no incentive for them to pay attention. 

Your marketing content should address the pain points of your ideal customers. This is why the customer persona is so important. When you know what your ideal customers’ most pressing needs are, you can provide solutions to those needs. 

This will position you as a resource and someone they can trust. 

Develop A Plan To Engage Your Audience

Developing a marketing content plan is the first step in engaging your audience. The next, is to actually map out how you plan to spread your message. We touched on this in our lead generation blog, but the same principle applies here. 

You want to understand where your audience gets their information and put your content there where they have a chance to see it and engage with it. You have to understand where your ideal customers are most likely to come across their content. Is it via email, website, or social media. 

If it is social media, go deeper and understand which platforms and what is the best way to use those platforms. Also look into traditional methods of engagement such as print or even in-person networking. 

Look Into Automation

We understand that all of this seems like a lot of work, and it is. However once you get things planned and implemented, it can run fairly smoothly on its own. To help, look into automation tools like chatbots or drip campaigns. 

These tools help you engage with your audience without actually being there yourself. A drip campaign can send a preset number of emails in a predetermined order to any number of recipients. Chatbots can help answer questions on your website or even certain social media platforms. 

Anything that can help you better engage your audience should be looked into. 

Create A Plan For Retargeting

Last, look into developing a plan for retargeting. You can retarget previous customers or people who fell out of your marketing funnel without making a purchase. These are easier leads as they have already expressed a certain level of interest. And in the case of previous customers, they have already made a purchase. 

If you do the work to generate a good number of leads, then you owe it yourself and your business to continue the process and nurture those leads down your funnel and closer to making a purchase. The above steps will help you develop a plan that works well for your business and helps you better engage your best potential customers.