Let’s Get Personal: How To Tailor Your Lead Nurturing Strategy

According to MarketingSherpa, 79% of marketing leads never convert into sales. Having an ineffective lead nurturing strategy contributes to this poor performance. Developing and building a relationship with your prospects doesn’t happen overnight, and you can’t expect to get the results you want by taking a cookie-cutter approach. With segmentation and targeted content you’ll discover more favorable results.

With every nurture campaign you need to tailor the messaging and ensure the content is relevant to your audience. A successful way to segment your leads into groups is by identifying buyer personas. Using what you already know about your customer will help to identify what distinguishes them from one another. This will help guide the way you target them, and ultimately engage with them as personally as possible. Delivering meaningful and specific content, tailored for each persona will help to keep your prospects in the sales cycle.

Developing a Customized Lead Nurture Strategy

We’ve identified 6 consideratons when developing a customized lead nurture strategy:

1. Understand Your Buyers – Start with your sales team to identify ways to segment your buyers. 61% of B2B marketers send all leads directly to sales; however only 27% of those leads will be qualified (Source: MarketingSherpa). Segmenting by company size, industry, position, etc. will help to better define your groups.

2. Define Your Personas – Now that you have groups of prospects, further define your personas by making them personable. Give them a name, write their backstory, and identify their attributes. The better you understand them the more effective personalized, targeted content will be.

3. Research Your Buyers – What is keeping them up at night? An understanding of you persona’s pain points will help you to better point out how your solution will solve their problems. Appealing to the needs of the persona will help to better define your content.

4. Follow Your Buyers – Tracking where your leads have been will give you a sense of where they will head next, based on their digital footprints and their motivations. It is also helpful at this stage to look back at the data from your existing clients to see what they responded to and where they spent most of their time in your lead nurturing process. This analysis will help to further define your personas and the messages you need to deliver.

5. Align with Sales – Nurtured leads produce a 20% increase in sales opportunities, on average, versus non-nurtured leads (Source: DemandGen Report). Success here often is dependent on the alignment of the marketing and sales messaging. Keeping the sales team informed, down to the messaging language, will help to ensure a smooth transition.

6. Update and Revise – Like your customers, your lead nurturing campaigns need to evolve. You have personalized your prospects’ experience using your data, but the data is dynamic. Continual analysis of the data will help you to update your personas, create new content, and ultimately better match the two with the appropriate tone and messaging.

Developing a tailored lead nurturing campaign will not only improve the quality of your leads, but in fact, companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales ready leads at 33% lower cost (Source: Forrester Research). Listening to your sales team, existing clients, and current prospects will help you to further refine your personas and your lead nurturing tracks, as well as the content needed to support your successful campaign.