The Holy Grail of offering the “right content, to the right user, at the right time.”
August 27th, 2010 | Jeri-Lynn ImperialDemand generation. It’s not just about filling the pipeline with a volume of leads - but maintaining a relationship with those leads as they move through the buying cycle. Yes, the extremely active, sales -ready leads should be escalated to the sales team, but what about everyone else?
B2B marketers are continually faced with the challenge of fine tuning, the lead nurturing strategy of their demand generation efforts. It’s an endless pursuit of the Holy Grail of offering the “right content, to the right user, at the right time.” In this recent article, “Marketing Automation - The Importance of Lead Scoring in B2B,” the author discusses ways in which marketers have been approaching lead nurturing. He states that “the simplest example of how to implement lead scoring is to start with a multi-step (email) campaign.” TechTarget responded to this need for multi-step nurturing as a base level strategy by implementing automated email remessaging feature, for all lead generation programs.
However, our B2B marketers have found when moving beyond the simplest form, building out an organization’s lead nurturing strategy becomes much more complex. The product’s purchase cycle, available content/resources, and the unique actions taken by each user all come into play. This is where it becomes a chase for the Holy Grail.
The following are some takeaways we’ve found useful when building out lead nurturing strategy:
Key Considerations when Developing Lead Nurturing Strategy:
• Right Content: Leverage your entire content arsenal - These days B2B Marketers have endless types of content to choose from to motivate and stay engaged: blogs, microsites, video, and demos. The more content to utilize, the better results
• Right Users: Factor in your target profile users’ cumulative activities - Number of assets, what types of formats, whether they’re reviewing editorial content, blogs - As noted in Handling and identifying your sales-ready marketing leads it’s important for savvy IT marketers to look and see what additional information they may be able to obtain about their leads
• Right Time: Cover content for the entire buying cycle - According to TechTarget 2009 Media Consumption Report, IT buyers spend a majority of their time in the consideration phase. It is important to maintain an appropriate balance of user relevant content - i.e. Awareness 25%/Consideration 45%/Decision 30%
• Understand what you want to achieve before creating a lead nurturing system - Lead nurturing is most effective when the system is built with your organization’s clear objective, in mind
• Goal: Establishing repeat positive contact with relevant content, across all leads (Multi-Level)
• Goal: Movement of lead through pipeline based on customized score based on user profile & activity (Customized Activity Nurturing)
What are your thoughts on the need for implementing lead nurturing strategies? What other considerations have you had come into play when building out your strategy?
