The days of the “drip” campaign are long gone. Today in marketing, context is king.
Think about Netflix, Amazon, and Google. All three of these platforms are great at delivering content that is contextualized based on your actions and personal information.
Why should your lead nurturing campaigns be any different?
In this post you will learn the four core elements involved in crafting a highly contextualized lead nurturing workflow.
Focus on your Personas
Like every other phase of your marketing, lead nurturing begins and ends with your personas in mind. Each of your buyer personas have a different outlook on life and a different collection of things that are important to them.
Here is an example from our business, think about a CEO vs. a marketing manager. A CEO is worried about the bottom line impact of a new marketing effort. They want to know how long it is going to take them to see a ROI and what percentage of their overall growth goals they can expect from inbound marketing.
A marketing manager on the other hand is far more interested in tactics that will help improve their strategy. They want to find the strategy that will deliver the greatest number of
Segment with Forms
Forms are the life blood of your segmentation strategy. They dictate the information that gets filed into your marketing database. This is why it is so critical to get your form fields right.
Think about what information you need to share a personalized message:
- First name
- Last name
- Primary email address
- Company name
- Industry
- Position
This is a great place to start. With the information above, you can begin to deliver emails that are tailored toward specific industries, different job titles, and contextualize recommendations with their company name inside website copy.
Setup Life Cycle Stages
Any marketing software system worth its salt allows you to setup custom lists based on a lead’s activity. As you’re building your lead nurturing workflow, break it up into three or four different life cycle stages.
For each life cycle stage you can use any built in functionality or simply a segmented new list to separate your contacts based on their persona + life cycle stage.
Personalize your communication
In the individual emails that you’re sending to each list, take the opportunity to personalize the message with smart text. Add their first name, company name, and industry. Use these fields to craft a truly personalized message that prompts them to take an action.
This action should help to move them toward the next life cycle stage.
Bringing it All Together
Lead nurturing is only one element is an inbound marketing strategy. Download The B2B Marketing Checklist and follow the steps that we use to build a systematic inbound marketing strategy for our clients.