3 Ways to Use Content to Improve Lead Nurturing Results

Follow-up is critical after attracting potential customers. If you don’t keep in touch and build a relationship, the time, money, and effort you spent finding those contacts will be wasted.

Effective follow-up utilizes automation (think email system workflows) and includes informing and educating your contacts with relevant, personalized content and logical, frictionless calls to action.

Lead nurturing allows you to assess the prospect’s buying stage and tune their engagement with your firm so they receive maximum value.

The fortune is in the follow-up.

Here are three (3) ways to use content for follow-up and nurture.

Stay Top of Mind

Give your contacts the opportunity to know, like, and trust you.

Enterprise IT buyers have already researched, set their requirements, and selected preferred vendors before initiating contact with a vendor or supplier.

Being the top-of-mind vendor for the problem the buyer is interested in solving is critical if you want your firm to be the first to be contacted by the buyer. That’s significant because 84% of B2B buyers said the first vendor they contacted ultimately won the business (Source: 6Sense).

How do you stay top of mind?

• Publish informative, educational, and thought leadership content on your website and social media accounts.
• Send contacts your newsletter with relevant products, customer stories, community, and cultural content.
• Keep contacts informed of events, updates, customer success, and other relevant news with email touchpoints.

Help Them Move Along the Buyer’s Journey

A best practice for lead nurturing is to allow the contact to demonstrate, through their behavior, the movement from one buying journey stage to the next.

To do this, you must know their current buying journey stage and what content they need to get to the next stage. Why is this knowledge essential? 52% of buyers say they are more likely to buy from a vendor after reading its content (source: FocusFusion).

Two types of content are helpful to move from the Awareness Stage to the Consideration Stage.

• Solution-oriented content helps align and assure the contact that your product or service is their preferred choice.
• How To-oriented content signals a vision of how they will get to the solution. Business case development, budget tools, project planning, staffing, and evaluation content are examples of content that signals intent beyond awareness.

Engage and Consult

Encouraging engagement with offers that require time commitments can help turn your contacts into interested potential customers.

For instance, if someone attends a lengthy webinar or half-day workshop about how to start using a solution or plan an implementation project, it’s a positive sign they’re interested.

Time investment is an excellent indicator of moving from the Consideration to the Decision stage of the journey. 48% of B2B buyers consider webinars the most valuable content type for their decision-making. (Source: DemandGen).

Marketing teams can develop and repurpose this in-depth content in numerous ways.

Summary

Lead nurturing (follow-up) is a marketing practice that separates successful firms from firms that waste time and money on marketing. Firms that nurture leads well generate 50% more sales-ready leads at 33% lower costs.

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