Blog

What Is Nurturing Leads?

Lead nurturing is one of the most important steps in any process of lead management.

Lead nurturing is a form of inbound marketing, that is, a complex process of developing and maintaining a relationship with your customers or prospective customers at every stage of the sales funnel. 

This process could be cultivating leads that are not yet ready to buy, or they could be your customers who have been with you for ten years that have a few questions that they need answered regarding your services or products. However, lead nurturing is typically the conversion of contacts that have already been found within your business, not generating new inquiries. 

Every successful plan to nurture leads includes an emphasis on communication efforts with current and prospective customers. This is taking your time to truly listen to what the customer needs and wants. Once you get an idea of what their needs are, you then listen and provide the answers they need to help them better understand and solve the problem or question at hand. 

By recognizing and listening to current or prospective customers' needs, your business builds trust with them. This can help build brand awareness, brand loyalty from current customers, and can even maintain a connection with the prospect until they are ready to purchase your product or service. 

A Strategy For Nurturing 

Although lead nurturing is a great tool for all businesses, it requires a very thorough and detailed planning process. There is not a one-size fits all approach to lead nurturing for all businesses. However, there are some strategies that can help your business.

Lead Nurturing is not just email communication. Lead nurturing is a process or series of communications. There are steps for every series of communication. Whether moving to the next stage or driving into another direction of the nurturing plan, each step in this process has a clear objection and contributes to the end goal of making a sale. 

Lead nurturing increases the chances of a customer choosing your business services or products over your competitors because you have created and maintained a solid relationship with them. 

A solid relationship is critical in today’s sales cycles. 

By nurturing leads, your business can maintain the relationship (business to consumer), and over time the communications will build brand loyalty and trust. 

Plan Of Lead Nurturing 

1. Get To Know Your Prospect - Spread Awareness
This is the top of the funnel. This is the first stage of nurturing a lead. This is often when a person comes into contact with your business in any way. 

During this stage, the prospect might just be learning about your products or services. This is when it's a great opportunity to get to know this potential customer. Collect the information needed to understand the current situation of your customer and move them in the right direction for your sale. 

Since building relationships requires knowledge of your prospects, each customer should have a different nurturing “path”. What pain are you trying to solve for your prospect?

Understand their pain and needs. 

This stage is often started by blog posts, social media posts, targeted emails, drip campaigns, prospecting calls, product demos and consultations, and in-person events. 

2. Consider Us - Understanding Your Product Or Services
This is the middle portion of the sales funnel. During this second stage of lead nurturing, things will start to get more serious. By now, you have hopefully started to get to know your potential customer. What type of business do they own, improvements that they need to make, etc. This is when the potential customer may start to have a better understanding of how your product or services work and how they can help solve their problem. They might start to consider purchasing since you are a trustworthy source for them. 

To build more credibility and trust, you can invite them to learn more about your business by sending them informative emails, blogs from your website, and inviting them to events or webinars. This will give them more knowledge about how you are the solution for their needs.

3. SOLD! You Just Made A Sale
This is the bottom of the sales funnel. This is once you have won your lead over to purchase your product or service. Resources in this stage could include product features, product comparison, testimonials, and pricing/ packaging options.  

4. Promoters For Free! 
Congratulations! You made a sale. However, just because you won them over doesn’t mean that the communication stops there. Keep your efforts with them high to create loyal customers which will bring you credibility and great reviews online to help keep the cycle of trust for future leads. You might even get some referrals from your loyal customers!

Keep Up The Communication!

Although you just made a sale to your new customer, don’t stop the communication. This is a great time to keep communicating with them! After the sale, always thank your lead. This is a great first impression! 

Make sure to always check in to make sure that they are a satisfied customer. Is everything working well? Is the product or service living up to their expectations? If you do not check in on them, and there is a problem, that will not be good credibility for your business. However, if you fix the problem that they are facing with your product or service, they will then build more trust with you, leave a positive review, and could maybe even give you referrals!

Want to know more about nurturing leads? Click here or visit https://stradigi.io/!