How To Build A Lead Nurturing Campaign For Your Content Marketing Strategy

Create lead nurturing campaigns that attain your marketing & sales objectives; engage your ideal customers; and keep them coming back to your website.

If you get nothing else from this website, please remember this:

It's the words that build the relationship
It's the words that make the sale

And before Sales Departments across North America rise up in universal protest, remember guys: the secret is in getting the lead.

Yup, every Sales Department is dependant upon the business website to generate an increasing proportion of leads - because that cold calling thing is dead. I'm not saying outbound is dead, just cold calling strangers and begging for 30 seconds to tell them what you can do.

Where This Fits In The Pipeline

busywriter lead nurturing content campaign diagram

Remember:
* It's the words that make the sale.

Your website content had better be thorough and up to date, because your leads are researching you right now. If you don't believe me, check in with any vendor of marketing automation software and they'll explain.

You're wondering what this has to do with lead nurturing, I hope.

Your lead nurturing campaigns require the same attention to detail as traffic and lead generation campaigns do, though with a twist. Kill the boredom. End the "so what" response, because if your idea of a nurturing campaign is to regurgitate the same things your competition is saying, you're not building a relationship.

And without a relationship, even one as tenuous as we're sharing right now, without that relationship there's no brand experience.

We think lead nurturing content campaigns have a bad reputation. Not that there's all that many people in marketing that ever think of lead nurturing content campaigns. Because all you guys are thiinking about is "lead nurturing". Everyone forgets the content, the creative, the words.

I'll repeat myself:
* It's the words that build the relationship
* It's the words that make the sale

and add:
* It's the words that create the brand experience

Let's recall our business goal at this stage: it's to create a highly-qualified, sales-ready lead. Our content needs to inspire them to take action.

How do we do that? We tell them everything they want to know, when they want to know it, and we make it dead simple for them find it all. It's 'kinda' a variation of "give 'em what they want".

We believe that the quality and style of the campaigns you deliberately run during this phase of conversion is what separates great marketers from so-so marketers. Your goal should be to create an engaging, deep, helpful brand experience for your lead that generates oodles of trust. I'm not sure how much oodles is, but it has to be magnitudes above and beyond skepticism.

Please comprehend this: just because you managed to convert a visitor into a lead (congratulations) doesn't mean they're a good lead. Sales only wants to speak to highly-qualified, sales-ready leads.

Our objective is to keep the lead engaged and coming back for more so we can track that behaviour and begin assigning scores to different actions. My term for that: I've coined a term for this: adaptive pre-selling. Remember, pre-selling is not selling at all, it's informing your leads of implications and costs of inaction. Adaptive pre-selling combines the traits and personality of a top performing sales person with the techniques and persuasion of copywriting and promotion.

Top sales performers, and your copy, need to have:

empathy — understand wants as problems and envision solutions as outcomes
action — your content has to contain the drive for a powerful call-to-action
service — make your content over perform, full of details and specifics, especially helpful links
focus — remains on task and focused, responsible for filling in knowledge gaps
bounce — has the aura of success, authority and confidence to be noted as excellent and noteworthy (far beyond the merely proficient, which is the price of entry)

What Does Adaptive Pre-Selling Do?

Breakthrough nurturing campaigns are remarkable for their ability to breakthrough the clutter---and generate response and quite often work as traffic generators too. Did I tell you that there's tremendous overlap when it comes to tactics and results in content marketing?

We also need to deepen the brand relationship and creat authority, leadership, competency to build the trust we require to make a sale.

Content campaigns for lead nurturing are going to use every tactic you acn think of from webinars to telesiminars to emails and giveaways, bonus material, certifications, training and whatever else it takes to make your lead a better consumer of your stuff. I'm certain that the better you are at lead nurturing, the better you become at creating an ideal customer.

Ideal customers have the following qualities:

they're non-toxic;
require low service levels: are self-sufficient;
have fewer complaints;
are price insensitive;
buy more from you, more often;
are happy to try new products or services;
are easier to up-sell or cross-sell;
are loyal and don't defect;
become advocates
and finally, act as influencers.

Experiment with alternate campaigns, work with trigger events, remember your publishing, editorial schedule - shake up formats, look at what other industries are doing for inspiration - add lots of personality and individualism.