Leading the Charge with Lead Nurturing

“Batch and blast.”

I still cringe whenever I hear someone say this phrase. Maybe it’s because it brings me back to my marketing intern days when “lick it and stick it” was the story of my life. More likely, however, it’s because the phrase implies such unrealized potential. So many marketers get stuck in the land of one-time sends, event marketing, and newsletters. Although email marketing can be very effective for these campaigns, it’s a small percentage of a marketing automation platform’s capabilities. It’s like buying a Ferrari and only driving it back and forth to the grocery store. Yes, it will get you there, but think of how much more fun you’ll have driving on the autobahn.

In all seriousness, lead nurturing is easy to preach, but hard to do. Effective lead nurturing requires a deep understanding of your buyers, their journeys, and their needs. Fully mapping your customers’ journeys can be difficult and time-consuming, and it requires effort and collaboration from many facets of your organization…and that’s just the beginning. Knowing what customers need and want at each stage of their process is only half the battle. The other half is having content that satisfies those needs exactly when they arise. Again, easy to say and not so easy to do. But if you can make the effort to build these lead nurturing programs, the return will far outweigh the cost.

What typically holds people back is the “how”. Where do you start? As the Law of Inertia implies, it’s easier to keep a moving object in motion than it is to push a motionless object into action. But, like taking that first plunge into cold water, sometimes it’s best to jump right in. Here’s how you can take that first leap.

Define Your Success Metrics

Like any major project, it’s important to list your objectives up front. Start with your goals. Write down what you’d like to accomplish with lead nurturing. How would you like your demand generation engine to run in three months, six months, and a year? What kind of journey do you want your customers to experience? Be realistic, but aggressive. Envision your ideal state and put it into words. As simple as it sounds (and maybe even old-fashioned), having a concrete piece of paper with your goals and aspirations can actually be quite motivating.

It’s also important to review your metrics, keeping in mind current benchmarks. What are your current key performance indicators? How do you envision these changing after launching a lead nurturing program? How will you define success? It’s important to enlist the feedback of others in your organization, including key stakeholders such as your marketing and sales teams and your executive board. Gain a deep understanding of what they expect from marketing automation and marketing in general. If you haven’t already, begin to elaborate on how marketing can directly impact sales and the bottom line. Begin to think of sales and marketing as a unified group, working together to nurture leads through the buying cycle.

Build your Lead Nurturing Foundation

Now it’s time to really dive deep into your buyers and their journeys. The first step is developing in-depth buyer personas. There is a wealth of information online focused on building buyer personas and most marketers have taken a stab at drafting one or two. The difficulty lies in understanding all of your various buyer personas. Each company is different in their approach, but buyer personas can vary among business units, regions, product lines, etc. Some companies have 3-5 personas, while others can’t keep a working count. Get a sense of how many buyer personas exist for your organization, and then begin jotting them down. Keep things simple to start. Create a spreadsheet with each column representing a buyer persona and each row representing a different piece of criteria. It’s important to make sure your buyer personas include actionable information, including their full profile, their needs, and their role in the buying process. Work with your sales and customer service teams as you devise these personas. They will be a wealth of information.

The next step is to list the stages that your buyers experience during the sales cycle. This may be quite simple (think need awareness, interest, information gathering, justification, purchase), or it may be more complex. Again, work with your sales team to devise the appropriate stages in the buyer’s process. Once these are defined, you can begin to asses your buyer’s needs at each of these stages. Again, keep it simple. Create another spreadsheet, and this time, make each column represent a buyer persona and each row represent a stage in their buying journey. This will serve as your workbook to define buyers’ questions, needs, and expectations at each stage of their purchasing process.

This information alone will shed some serious light on how and when you communicate with your customers. To take it even further, start a content audit. Review all of your existing content, including white papers, articles, blog posts, product materials, etc., and identify which pieces of content are pertinent to each persona throughout the buying cycle. This exercise will not only help define your lead nurturing programs, but will also help you identify content gaps that need to be filled.

Map the Buyer’s Journey and Solidify the Lead Flow Process

Now you’re really ramped up and ready to take your project to the next level. Begin to research every touch point your customers have with your company. Diagram your lead flow process from beginning to end: from interest to purchase, to follow-up and support. Look for gaps in your communication, areas that need improvement, and points where additional nurturing will help lead your customers to that next stage. Keep in mind that technology can play a major role in your customers’ journey, including your web systems, CRM, and other data warehouses. Customers can be directly and indirectly impacted by your technology, not to mention that it is incredibly important in your ability to nurture effectively. Make sure you know where customer information lives and how you can access it for segmentation, personalization, and lead scoring within your marketing automation platform.

As you’re addressing your ideal lead flow process, it’s crucial that you generate a Service Level Agreement (SLA) with your sales team. This will solidify and define the various lead stages, ownership rules, and expectations. of both marketing and sales at each stage of the buyer’s journey. This should take into account your lead nurturing plans and your technology capabilities, specifically the integration between CRM and marketing automation.

Nurture Campaign Creation and Ongoing Evaluation

Armed with information on your buyers, their journeys and their needs, you can begin to diagram a lead nurturing program that makes sense for your business. This will vary depending on your business structure and needs, but should address the personas you’ve developed and their questions and needs at each stage of the purchase and post-purchase process. Using segmentation tools, engagement criteria, and CRM integration, advanced campaigns can be created to ensure leads are nurtured properly depending on their location in the buyer’s journey.

Like any technology, marketing automation platforms like Oracle Eloqua require a clear vision and strong strategy to get the most out of your investment. The science that goes along with implementing and utilizing this particular tool is what gets me excited about doing my job as a consultant. My goal is to make you, the marketer, look good by leveraging Eloqua to its full potential, including the development of nurture campaigns that rock.

What types of nurturing campaigns have you implemented to accelerate the buying process? Share your story and we’ll be glad to give you a “pat on the back.”