Effective Lead Nurturing Starts With Lead Intelligence
Posted by Patrick Murphy on Tue, Dec 20, 2011
The marketing campaign doesn’t stop when you’ve generated tons of leads. It’s a common misconception that once the leads have come in, the handover to the sales department can take place. Unfortunately, this just isn’t the case. Effective inbound marketing means that leads are followed and nurtured all the way through the sales cycle. Remember that only 50% of qualified leads are ready to buy immediately, and that number is even less if you’re selling a high end B2B product. Lead nurturing is all about taking someone who isn’t ready to buy all the way though the sales funnel by offering them content tailored to their interests and needs.
Our favorite kinds of lead intelligence
Now, how do we offer the most tailored and customized content to nurture our leads? It’s simple. Gather lead intelligence. Here are our favorite kinds of intelligence to gather.
- Name: Markets should be personalizing their communications with the lead’s name, and this is by far the simplest piece of advice we can give. Addressing leads by their first name is the first step towards providing a personalized lead nurturing experience.
- Demographics: gathering demographic info like age, gender, and location gives tons of insight into what they want and need. Plus, you can filter out those who don’t suit your target market.
- Industry: in a B2B marketing scenario, it helps to know the industry the lead works in to add them to the best nurture campaign. These industry specific leads should be in lead nurture campaigns that relate only to their own industry.
- Company size: what a large company needs is different to what a small company needs. So shouldn’t they be in lead nurture campaigns suited to each?
- Job title: you need to know what kind of job role your lead is in so you can tailor the most personalized experience for them. Because you would speak to a junior manager in a different tone than the company CEO, right?
Nurturing leads in this way may seem more complicated but it provides a huge return on investment. Take the time to gather this kind of intelligence and watch your lead nurturing turn from flop to success!
Check out this FREE whitepaper on '16 Tips for Lead Generation' to help you develop your online marketing knowledge further.
