Content Marketing and Lead Nurturing

Content Marketing and Lead Nurturing

Conversations about leads have dominated my world for the last few months. I’ll toss out some ideas on the buzziest of the catch-phrases here.

Inbound marketing, marketing magnets, attraction marketing. . .the goal is to attract business “organically” instead of having to go out and interrupt busy people. To catch prospects earlier in the sales cycle in order to help define the conversation later in the sales cycle.

Sounds perfect. Sign me up.

If you’re a marketer by trade, the idea of creating content that attracts prospects that you can nurture and warm up before said prospect raises their hand to talk to a sales person is powerful. If you’re in sales by trade, the idea of a prospect educating themselves and making a decision before talking to a sales professional is terrifying. As is the case with most of Sales and Marketing, the gray area in between is where most of us will live.

When I am working on business development problems, there are 3 areas I start with at the top of the funnel:

As my scribble shows, they are inbound leads, outbound leads and referral leads.

Looking at where the leads come from gives me some ideas on where the pivot should take place. I doubt there is any organization that has an equal distribution of leads coming in from all sources, but it’s something to consider. The most important part of this exercise are the questions surrounding metrics.

Does the organization know where the leads are coming from? How does it track lead sources right now? Where are we at today?

That conversation helps define the next question: Where do you want to be? 

While I’d love to spend all my time working on moving the needle, the reality is that I spend most of my time trying to figure out where we’re at today. Without that, it’s tough to figure out what’s working and if we’re getting the pivot we want.

(I’ll go off on that topic in a later post)

Where does Content Marketing fit into this? It’s heavy on the inbound lead side, but should touch on outbound leads and even referrals. The idea of helping prospects make good decisions relies on their having access to information that helps them make a good decision. Kind of like Flo giving us quotes from the other  insurance providers. With more information, you can make a better decision. “We have nothing to hide,” she seems to be saying.

A “no” answer is as valid as a “yes”. Pretty heady stuff.

That’s what Content Marketing should be doing. It should be helping all of our buyers, at all of the stages of their decision making process, and address all of their communication preferences. Videos for the visual guy, spreadsheets for the data driven gal. You know what I mean.

That same content, dripped out to prospects over time, is the nurturing of that lead. Lead Nurturing is the idea that we can help a lead that wasn’t quite ready to buy by giving them time and information to warm themselves back up into hot lead status.

All that’s needed is a system to keep track of all this, right?

On the referral side, it would be nice to have a system that facilitated a way to educate your referral network (friends/acquaintances/customers/vendors) on what problems you solve and the people you’d like to talk to.
On the outbound side, it would be nice to have a system that allowed reps to let of go of leads that aren’t ready to close so they could be “nurtured” back to hot leads worth working on.
On the inbound side, it would be nice to have a system that attracted new prospects in need of your solutions to their problems. A system that takes them from unknown visitor XYZ, to a name, email, company, phone number and into lead qualifying.

The good news is that a lot of companies have built software and communities that allow for each of these “nice to have’s” to take place. Some are all encompassing solutions and others you can piece together here and there. Exciting stuff.

The bad news is that these projects can become giant suck holes of time and energy.

So what does one do? As a wise man said, “Start anywhere, go everywhere.”

You have to get the whole system built eventually, but it doesn’t have to be all at once. New tools will come along as the work progresses and completed sections will need to be re-done. It’s the nature of the process.

Start somewhere. Pick tracking. Pick lead sources. Find out where the information is and think about where you want it to be in the future. Put a value on the difference.

Sounds simple, but it’s not easy.

Good stuff.