It’s rare that a visitor approaches your site completely ready to purchase. Most people need to be nurtured, helping them see the value and benefits of your company before reaching the point of conversion. Here are 4 ways to guide your prospects towards becoming sales qualified leads (SQL).

Target Your Content

When your leads are targeted with opportunities that appeal directly to them, sales see a 20% increase for many businesses. Forrester Research reported that a third of marketers believe targeted content is one of their biggest challenges in lead nurturing.

• Get to know your buyer personas and pinpoint your audience
• Create an assortment of targeted content to meet the needs of your prospects at varying points in their buyer’s journey
• Use content that is based on personas’ interests, goals, marketing triggers, and objectives to draw in more leads and cultivate the individual’s understanding of your brand
• Automate marketing so that content is delivered in real time based on the activity of your lead
• Segment your list to deliver more relevant content to your leads based on interests, location, previous purchases, position, demographics, and more

Use Multiple Channels

Don’t just rely on email to get your message out. Most marketers (80%) say they aren’t able to get their open rates above 20% when they send out content via email. Try to publish content on various platforms and tools to increase the influence you have with leads. Use sms marketing, for example, to deliver content right to your audience’s phones with much higher open rates. You might also use social media, paid search, and other methods to find places where you can increase the traffic of your leads. Multi-channel lead nurturing will help improve the dynamic content and outreach strategies you can implement to increase engagement levels.

Respond Quickly

The majority of your leads will expect a fast response from the brands they reach out to. While the average first response time of most B2B companies was 42 hours, according to Harvard business Review, the average customer expects a response within an hour. Make sure your team responds quickly and accurately – even if the temporary answer is a polite response of needing to seek further information. Automated marketing will help free up your team to only respond to the truly individual questions, concerns, and complaints.

Align Sales and Marketing

Your teams and branding should go hand-in-hand. Your marketing team and strategies should be supporting the efforts of your sales team. Your salespeople should be able to rely on marketing materials to support their efforts, but they also need to align their work mentality with the marketing direction for the brand. Marketing should be able to sort your prospects into SQL for your sales team, allowing them to spend time on the leads most likely to have a high conversion rate.

With inbound marketing, one of the great benefits is the ability to nurture consumers without extra efforts on the part of your team. By increasing the conversion rates and lifelong loyalty purchases of your leads, you will be able to reduce your CPA (cost per acquisition), ROI (return on investment) and ROE (return on effort) for a strategy that improves your revenues and efficiency.

 

Author Biography:

Joel Lee

Joel Lee is the SEO marketing specialist at Trumpia, a mobile content delivery service that allows users to customize their one-to-one marketing efforts by interconnecting and optimizing all digital platforms.